The Vertical Bloom: 06/11/26
Your guide on the happenings of the vertical storytelling landscape.
Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.
This week, Netflix makes vertical moves, Us vs Pizza Guys vs Vampires, and we go on a deep dive into why digitally native scripted formats are finally taking off.
But first–
I’ve been thinking a lot about Disneyland lately.
As our team continues to work across YouTube, vertical storytelling, and more traditional corners of entertainment, I’ve found myself paying closer attention to the way audiences move between platforms.
Whether we’re helping a vertical app expand its YouTube presence (more on this soon), creating original scripted content for the various platforms (Horizontal and Vertical), or sitting in meetings with both legacy media and digitally native creators, I keep hearing conversations framed around funnels.
How do we get people in? How do we move them through? How do we maximize value? Working at the intersection of art and commerce, I understand the impulse.
But I wonder if a better metaphor is a theme park.
When I think about the revolution happening around vertical content, I’ve never seen it as a revolution around a single format. I’ve always seen it as part of the much larger digital scripted boom that has been building for years.
Every format represents a different storytelling experience. What if microseries are one attraction in the park? What if YouTube longform is another? What if serialized formats like Brooklyn Coffee Shop and The Ick are another?
And what about the formats that haven’t been invented yet? The ones quietly finding audiences in corners of the internet right now. The storytellers getting excited because something no one has ever seen before just crossed 10,000 views for the first time.
The most exciting part of this moment isn’t any individual format. It’s the ecosystem. Because the best theme parks don’t just create attractions.
They create communities.
Communities that gather in Discord servers and Reddit threads. Communities that share stories with friends and eagerly await what’s coming next.
As storytellers operating at the intersection of art and commerce, I hope we spend a little less time thinking about funnels and a little more time thinking about theme parks.
Not just how we attract audiences.
But how we create places they love, and look forward to revisiting time and time again.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Netflix Orders Minimum Wage From American High Shorts Team
Netflix has ordered Minimum Wage, a 28-episode workplace comedy based on the viral American High Shorts universe. Netflix is pulling from an existing digital audience and folding that rhythm into its own ecosystem. This feels like a clear sign that major streamers are starting to absorb digital’s pacing, audience behavior, and talent pipelines.
Idilio Raises $5.5M Seed Round with Katzenberg’s help
Katzenberg has repeatedly put capital behind new storytelling formats, from Quibi’s $1B NewTV raise in 2018 to more recent WndrCo bets in AI video and entertainment technology. Idilio suggests he is still circling the same question: what does mobile-first entertainment become when the market is finally ready for it?
The Kansas City Chiefs Launch a Microdrama
The Kansas City Chiefs are launching El Offseason, a nine-episode Spanish-language scripted comedy that blends sketch comedy with telenovela storytelling. The series follows fictional team employees whose offseason spirals into romance, rivalry, and chaos once football stops. The Chiefs are targeting fans across Mexico, Spain, and the U.S., with Mexico and Spain sitting inside the team’s NFL Global Markets Program rights. By blending sketch comedy with telenovela storytelling, the team is giving Spanish-speaking audiences an easy entertainment-first entry point into Chiefs fandom.
VertiCast Launches For Vertical Casting
VertiCast, a casting app built specifically for vertical microseries, has launched on iPhone, with Android expected to follow. The app lets actors create profiles with vertical clips while producers and casting teams swipe, shortlist, and message talent directly. Casting is so important, curious how this effects the process…
Pizza Guys vs Vampires
Platform: inverted.film
Logline: On their first night delivering pizzas, two coworkers stumble into a vampire conspiracy and have to fight their way through one very strange shift.
Genre: Action-Comedy / Horror-Comedy / Buddy Comedy
Pizza Guys vs Vampires is a refreshing watch because it feels built for vertical without feeling trapped by vertical. The series gets into the action quickly, using punchy edits, quick pushes, and strong visual rhythm to keep the pace of a traditional microseries, while still bringing an indie genre sensibility that feels specific and intentional.
The writing is also a major strength. It feels human, current, and clearly written in the language it was filmed in, with a self-referential sense of humor that gives the show a little Scott Pilgrim-style camp without breaking the story. What stands out most is how much thought went into the form itself: split screens are used to fill the 9:16 frame, the comedy keeps moving, and the costumes, makeup, and SFX all support the action-horror tone instead of feeling ornamental.
That balance may come from Dominic Russo’s role as director, producer, and story credit on the series. As a co-creator and executive producer of Workaholics, which grew out of online comedy before becoming a Comedy Central series, Russo clearly understands both traditional filmmaking and the keys of digital.
The takeaway is simple: vertical can handle real genre experimentation when the creative team knows how to honor the format without lowering the creative ceiling.
Why Is Scripted Digital Working Now?
Editor’s note: We’ve been cooking on this coverage for a while, and Franziska Harms went deep. Sometimes I think to trim things at this length, but honestly it’s so thorough I think it’s worth the read. Still, TLDR;
For years, scripted digital had a reputation problem.
It was either treated like a silly guilty pleasure hobby, a marketing add-on, or a place where traditional talent went when the “real” thing did not work out. Quibi is the obvious cautionary tale: big money, big names, mobile-first ambition, and a shutdown only months after launch. But Quibi’s failure did not prove audiences did not want short-form scripted. It proved that Hollywood could not simply shrink television, put it on a phone, and assume the audience would follow.
Part of what changed was the audience. Audiences are more fluent in digital storytelling than they used to be. The habits that once felt specific to very online viewers have spread across a much wider population, as phones, social platforms, and short-form video have become part of everyday media consumption. For younger audiences especially, that language is not an adjustment. It is often the storytelling environment they already know best.
The pace of digital storytelling no longer feels overwhelming to most viewers. It feels normal. The same retention language that once seemed native only to YouTube, TikTok, and creator content is now part of the broader viewing grammar. Quick pushes, rapid setup, compressed conflict, clear hooks, and emotional payoff are not tricks anymore. They are expectations. The appetite for content that moves at digital speed has caught up to the platforms it lives on.
Technology has also become more universal. More people have now grown up inside internet culture, then those simply adjacent to it. In the U.S., Pew found that 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 96% use the internet daily, while nearly half say they are online almost constantly. TU estimated that 5.5 billion people were online in 2024, representing 68% of the world’s population, while its 2025 edition says almost three-quarters of the world is now online. Compare that to about 10 years ago: global internet use went from nearly 3B people in 2014, about 40% of the world, to 74% today.
The rhythms, references, editing patterns, and emotional shorthand of digital are no longer niche. They are mainstream. That changes what scripted work can feel like on a phone. A microseries does not have to apologize for being fast for example. It just has to be good at being fast.
The bigger shift is cultural. Digital is now mature enough to be taken seriously as both a business and a creative ecosystem. The numbers became impossible to ignore first. The creator economy is now projected to approach half a trillion dollars by 2027, and YouTube alone says its creative ecosystem contributed more than $55 billion to U.S. GDP in 2024 while supporting the equivalent of 490,000 full-time jobs. At a certain point, what looked like a side door became a real industry.
But money is only part of the story.
Digital has also earned status with the next generation. In 2019, a LEGO/Harris Poll survey found that children in the U.S. and U.K. were three times more likely to say they wanted to be YouTubers than astronauts. More recent Gen Alpha reporting points in the same direction, with YouTuber and TikTok creator sitting near the top of dream-job lists. That matters. For a long time, digital was framed as the place you went if you could not break into film or television. For younger audiences and younger creators,and therefore modern culture, it is increasingly the cooler place to start.
That does not mean the path is easy. Most creators still do not make a full-time living online, and acting remains a brutally unstable profession. But the internet has changed the odds of being seen. The barrier to entry is low, which means the range of quality is enormous. Anyone can upload. Anyone can try. That can make the space noisy, but it also makes it democratic. In the largest sea of fish, standing out becomes the skill. For filmmakers, performers, writers, editors, and producers, that has opened a more realistic early-career path than waiting for permission from the traditional gatekeepers.
It has also changed what a “break” can look like. Issa Rae built from Awkward Black Girl into Insecure. Quinta Brunson went from self-produced internet comedy and BuzzFeed videos to Abbott Elementary. Rachel Sennott used online comedy as part of her path into Shiva Baby and Bottoms. Workaholics grew out of a web-comedy ecosystem before becoming a Comedy Central series. These are not exceptions that disprove the system. They are signals that the system itself has changed.
This may be why scripted digital is starting to work in a way it did not before. Audiences seem more fluent in the pace and structure of digital storytelling. The tools to enter the space are more accessible than they have ever been. The business has become large enough to take seriously. And culturally, digital may be reaching a point where it no longer has to borrow all of its legitimacy from film and television.
Television went through a version of this. For years, film was treated as the serious medium, while television was seen as smaller, faster, and less artistic. That hierarchy did not collapse overnight. It changed because the work got better, the audience grew, and the industry slowly learned how to judge television on its own terms.
Digital may now be moving through a similar transition. Microseries seem to be working when audiences experience digital pace not as a downgrade, but as its own storytelling language. And the creators who understand that language are not simply getting lucky. At their best, they are using craft, instinct, performance, editing, and audience understanding in ways the traditional industry is beginning to recognize more seriously.
That should be exciting, not threatening. Legacy film and television still bring extraordinary discipline, taste, talent, and infrastructure to the table. Digital brings speed, feedback, access, and a deep understanding of how audiences behave now. The opportunity may not be choosing one over the other. It may be finding out what happens when both sides take each other seriously.
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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.
We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.
We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.
See you then.
Editor: Scott Brown
Writer: Franziska Harms