Every two hours, an app on my phone called ReelShort alerts me to the existence of shows I might be interested in, all with efficient but diabolical titles: “Mated to the Alpha and His Beta,” “I Accidentally Sexted My Enemy,” “Ms. CEO’s Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death” and “Oops! I Carried the Cursed Billionaire’s Quadruplets.” They each have millions of views.
I’ve spent the last week watching vertical dramas, which are bite-size soap operas filmed to fit on your phone screen that indulge in cliches and spicy moments like R-rated Hallmark films. This year, microdramas crossed a remarkable threshold: in the U.S., people now spend more time watching vertical dramas on their phones than traditional streaming services. I wanted to understand why.
Each series is cumulatively around the length of a feature film, split into dozens of tiny 45-to-90-second episodes that cut off mid-cliffhanger, while a mafioso is in the air about to punch his dad, for instance, or when the farm hand is about to tell the CEO cowboy that she’s pregnant with his brother’s baby. To see what happens, you have to cash in the coins you’ve earned from repeatedly opening the app, watching ads or purchasing virtual diamonds with real American dollars; or you just straight up have to pay $17 per week to unlock all the episodes as I did with ReelShort.
I’m among the app’s target demographic of women between the ages of 25 and 44, and I got here the way so many other fans did: I saw a saucy TikTok clip from one of the verticals, probably about a werewolf, wondered how the heck this content, teetering on the verge of softcore porn, was not against the terms of service, then downloaded the app to investigate further. Just to satiate my curiosity, not to actually indulge, of course. Until the indulgence becomes irresistible.
The format is powerfully addictive, playing into your most primal cravings for drama and romance, then delivering it in bursts meant to be consumed alone, like a cigarette in bed.
It wasn’t ultimately hard for me to grasp why vertical dramas are the new frontier of entertainment, even as they’ve been heralded as “the death of Hollywood” and “the street drug of the content economy.” The format is powerfully addictive, playing into your most primal cravings for drama and romance, then delivering it in bursts meant to be consumed alone, like a cigarette in bed.
Why are so many people hooked on vertical dramas?
“I got baited into it, I guess,” Adele, a 23-year-old New Yorker, tells me of her affinity for vertical dramas. She saw a clip of “Claimed By My Ex’s Alpha Brother” on TikTok and downloaded an app to get the rest of the story. She likes how you can get the whole story faster than binge-watching a show, which could take a hefty investment of both time and attention. Granted, if you’re not willing to pay for access, it can take so long to stock up coins to watch more episodes that the app has basically recreated the 22-episode network television experience.
Before we go any further, let me state what might not be obvious: Adele and I, as well as all the other actors, fans and crew members interviewed for this story, know these stories are absurd, over-the-top and a mess. That’s part of the fun, and part of the reason they’re filmed vertically for one person to watch alone on their phones. They’re a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure regardless.
“They’re campy and really dramatic. Before I got into them, I was really into K-Drama,” Adele explains. “They have the same story structure, where it’s often an underdog story with a rich guy and a poor girl … I can kind of see myself as that — I’m not calling myself poor! — but it’s nice to see people stumbling into these situations.”
Unlike me, Adele isn’t getting content recommendations from her app’s internal algorithm. She’s following her favorite vertical actors on social media and checking out their new releases — sometimes they’re sequels, and she admits that they’ve “remade the same story like three times with the same couple.” But who cares, it’s escapism!
The business of spicy short-form content
It’s also lucrative for people on the other side of the screen.
Stephen Law, who has directed several vertical dramas including “Assemble My Billionaire Avengers” and “Reborn as Three Cowboys’ Ranch Princess,” is not shy about why he got into the vertical drama business. “The honest answer is money,” he says, laughing. This isn’t his dream job, but he’s not mad about it — directing verticals has taught him to be scrappy, fast and come in under budget.
Law, who’s in his mid-20s, knows the scripts are ridiculous and largely aimed at women older than him. Steamy romance isn’t really his thing, but to make it in the entertainment industry, you’ve gotta start somewhere. “At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to tell stories in a way that engages the audience best,” he says.
It’s hard out there for actors too — always, but especially now. Getting your big break is a near-impossible task, and there are bills to be paid. When Luke Dodge got the call for a mysterious gig paying $300 per day for five days, he said yes. Thus began his career as a vertical drama actor.
His IMDb page is loaded with titles like “My Boss Is My Secret Sperm Donor,” “Oops! Nerdy Girl Is My Kitten,” and “Their Brother Lost in Space.” He says he’s been typecast as “the bad boy sports guy who ends up being the love interest.”
“They’re all pretty much the same character, if you look into it,” he says, laughing. “There have been a couple of occasions I’ve gotten to play different variants and toy around with character development … although sometimes they do just want you to play the same guy you played last time.”
Dodge isn’t afraid to laugh at himself, but he won’t discredit any of the projects he’s worked on, as goofy as the scripts and titles can be. He often finds himself working 12-hour days, shooting 12 pages worth of scenes.
“You get into a rhythm with it, and it sets you up for bigger SAG productions, which shoot two scenes a day,” he says. “It sets you up by traumatizing you. If you can do that, you can do anything.”
Many of the actors in the vertical drama space know each other well. Dodge says it’s “almost like a college experience … we’re communally networked together in a big conglomerate friend group.” There are vertical drama parties, where all the actors go to the same bar or to each other’s houses for game nights.
“Even though it’s really brutal, you have a lot of fun. Some of my best memories come from vertical sets,” Dodge says. “Everyone’s, you know, doing the same chaos and in close quarters for, like, 12 hours a day for however many days straight. And it brings people together.”
They know exactly how soapy and tropey their work is, and they don’t mind.
Could a vertical drama ever be … good?
Any time a hot new medium enters the entertainment landscape, there’s a bit of moral panic over whether it will make us all dumber. It happened with TV, the internet, streaming services, social media algorithms and so on, with good reason. Now, experts are concerned that the slop-like quality of the standard vertical drama is frying our brains.
Jamie Huysman, a media psychologist, sees the addictive nature of vertical dramas as their most sinister quality, telling me that “we need to regulate these like slot machines are regulated in Vegas.” They tap into intermittent reinforcement by heightening your feelings, then taking away access to those good feelings, he explains.
To me, it’s like a mini toxic relationship in your pocket.”
“The episodes don’t end in resolution, which results in activation [of your nervous system],” Huysman says. “To me, it’s like a mini toxic relationship in your pocket.”
The good news is that high-quality vertical entertainment is possible and already out there. Issa Rae’s 57-part TikTok drama series “Screen Time” is critically acclaimed — and has a whopping 266 million views. But that’s an outlier. The people love garbage.
Adele, a fan of the medium, isn’t that interested in the concept of prestige vertical dramas.
“I wouldn’t want to see Brad Pitt on my phone. If you want something higher level, go to the cinema,” she says. “I guess they will have awards and stuff eventually, but that’s not the point. They’re more casual.”
She is unequivocally uninterested in AI-produced vertical dramas, though.
“Those are a complete turnoff. I don’t find that interesting at all. I want to see people — that’s the only way I can get into the story,” she says.
What I didn’t expect when I started reporting this story was how quickly the conversation would turn from the dangers of human-produced slop to the dangers of AI-produced slop. Law, the director, estimates that around April this year, a lot of platforms like DramaBox and GoodShort started pivoting to AI.
“I don’t know who watches these, but it’s justifying the economics. It’s like one-eighth of the live-action cost,” he says.
He admits that his production company has begun producing AI-generated verticals, freeing up time for him to work on other projects, like his feature-length script. “It sucks for creatives and crew and actors — especially actors,” Law says. “I feel lucky I’m not an actor. They’re really f***** right now.”
Dodge, as a vertical drama actor, can confirm that the AI pivot sucks.
“AI is devastating … we’re all living in this niche, and now the niche is going away. Everyone is displaced again,” he says. “It happened so fast, too. It was like overnight. Everyone put a lot of eggs in this basket, and to have it taken away so fast.”
He’s given some studios permission to recreate his likeness in AI to add a few scenes that they missed to a production, but it’s a slippery slope. He’s concerned that they’ll increasingly utilize that technology to pay actors less. Given how everything else in the world is going, he’s probably right.
I tried watching some AI-produced vertical dramas, like “A Farm Girl’s Reckoning” and “The New CEO Turns Out to Be My Gynecologist.” They’re all so visually smooth and uncanny, missing the quirky chaos that pulled me into the app in the first place. There’s no charm. It’s like eating a bowl of artificial sugar with a spoon.
I expected to defend live-action vertical dramas as escapism, like dessert in a well-balanced media diet. I didn’t expect to defend them as an art form facing extinction so soon after their birth, but after spending the week consuming content about secret twins and werewolf stepdads, I know you should always expect a plot twist.
