The most popular dish on the menu at Bistro Huddy is the Santa Fe Chicken. Unfortunately, you can’t order it, no matter how often the restaurant’s regular customers do. That’s because the brick-walled bistro isn’t a restaurant at all. Rather, it’s a green screen set up in the Los Angeles home of Drew Talbert and his wife, Andrea Kelley.
Diverging from the stand-alone skits, the life hacks and the memes that populate so much of social media, Mr. Talbert and Ms. Kelley, both actors, are the writers of a long-running dramatic series native to the apps. The fictional reality show, which has nearly six million followers between TikTok and Instagram, is centered on Bistro Huddy’s staff and customers, with a cast of more than a dozen characters played by Mr. Talbert, including Joey, the salty head chef who is dating Amber, the hostess; Terry, the stressed-out manager; and Tim and Pam, a Southern couple who punctuate the end of their sentences with a hearty “Roll Tide!”
In a medium often associated with disposable content, Mr. Talbert and Ms. Kelley are part of a growing group of microdrama content creators who have started long-term projects that bring the audience back for each new segment. He employs wigs, costumes and sets to build an immersive world shot on an iPhone in one-minute increments. The result is a series that, in quality and viewership, outdoes many TV and streaming programs.
Another master of that subgenre is Julian Sewell, who has created a soap opera with a jazzy, saxophone-filled soundtrack set in 1984. The series, which has nearly three million followers on various platforms, revolves around Paloma Diamond, an actress whose signature look includes big hair, bright eye shadow and bold clothes. Blending fiction and reality, Mr. Sewell made headlines last January when he revealed that, in his world, Paloma Diamond had been snubbed by the Oscars 18 times.
While “Bistro Huddy” and the Paloma Diamond soap opera (whose official series name will be announced when the season finale is posted in mid-December, according to Mr. Sewell) aren’t the only serialized microdramas that are purpose-built for social media, they are among the most well developed. Other creators have story lines that take place in a variety of settings, such as preschools, corporate offices, hotels and family homes, with audiences ravenously waiting for the next installment and dreaming up plot developments of their own in comments sections, Reddit threads, the fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own and response videos.
“This is the internet at its best,” said Lauren Schnipper, a digital media executive and one of the hosts of the “Creator Upload” podcast. “What was old is new again. You know what YouTube was in the beginning? It was sketch comedy. It was supposed to be fun and funny and not just viral moments.”
She added, “These creators are letting characters live and breathe, and that’s what I think is so brilliant about this.”
Short-form storytelling is extremely popular outside English-language social media. Chinese microdramas publishing on livestreaming platforms like Douyin have high production values and can cost anywhere from $69,000 to $276,000 for a series with five to 20 episodes, according to a paper by iResearch.
TikTok is considering an investment to help bring that success to the United States, according to a report by the website The Information, potentially seeking big-studio support for well-produced microdramas. And the streaming platform Tubi, which is owned by Fox, is also experimenting with short form videos with “Scenes,” which culls clips from the service’s extensive catalog.
This may all seem like déjà vu, as Quibi, the short-form streaming app, shut down after just six months in 2020. “This is the part that Quibi got right,” said Ms. Schnipper. “From a creative standpoint, they were totally onto something. They were making great content like this. The problem with Quibi is that they didn’t market the content; they marketed the technology, and nobody cares about the technology.”
But as those corporations try to find a way in on short videos, “Bistro Huddy” and the Paloma Diamond series developed naturally on TikTok.
“I didn’t know that this was going to become a huge series,” said Mr. Sewell, from his home in New Zealand. “It wasn’t until the fourth or the fifth episode that I began to take it serious.”
He added: “I was like, ‘Let’s see where it goes.’ I don’t really know. But do I know what will happen at the end of this first series? Yeah. Which I’m not going to tell you.”
That’s the advantage of writing, filming, editing and releasing one video at a time, which Ms. Kelley says takes about six hours start to finish. “We’re getting instant feedback and we can see right away,” she said. “If people are not into this, we’re like, ‘Let’s pivot and go in a different direction.’”
While traditional production studios employ staff to stay on top of details like continuity in costumes and story lines, independent creators have to get creative. Mr. Sewell, who has a bachelor’s degree in performance studies and a master’s degree in theater, sends his video drafts to his sisters for notes. The “Bistro Huddy” team uses Patreon, an online platform where fans can provide monetary support to artists, to help workshop new ideas.
When Mr. Talbert and Ms. Kelley needed help keeping track of all the small details as “Bistro Huddy” expanded (it now is up to almost 900 videos), Iuliana Petre, a therapist in Denver, volunteered to create and maintain a spreadsheet. “We live in a world where people will support what they value, and I value the arts,” Ms. Petre said. “I’ve done improv, I’ve dabbled in painting, drawing, singing, playing instruments. I love content creators. I love good actors. So I thought, Well, this is how I can support the arts, where I put my energy into it, not just money.”
As part of the project, Ms. Petre flagged an error in an early video, where Mr. Talbert neglected to remove his wedding ring for the head-chef character, who is not married. She was quick to suggest a justification. “I was like, ‘By the way, you forgot to take off your wedding band,’” recalls Ms. Petre. “This could have been a phase in Joey’s life when he was still married.”
Mr. Talbert credits his experience with the Groundlings, an influential improvisational theater company where he taught for years, with allowing the canon to be flexible. “One of the things we teach is there’s no mistakes. You fall forward. It’s such a great metaphor for life,” he said. “If you approach improv this way, where something happens that doesn’t make sense from something that was said a minute earlier, you justify it in the scene. You say whatever you need to say to make it make sense retroactively.”
The real-time, active fan participation makes this format unique to social media, where the intimacy of the small screen makes the audience feel closer to the story. Fans often remark that they forget the characters are actually “a dude in a wig.”
The quality of such series comes from the creators’ deep experience with both acting and their dramas’ subject areas.
Mr. Sewell grew up watching soap operas, most notably “The Bold and the Beautiful,” which prepared him well for the melodrama of Paloma Diamond’s life. “I did a lot of research into these shows,” he said. “In America, it’s all about the self-made millionaire. Like, anything is possible with the American dream. Whereas in British soaps it’s all about the Commonwealth and the good of society. I find it really fascinating.”
Mr. Talbert was a server for 22 years, and his last job in the industry was at the family-owned Boneyard Bistro in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where he met Ms. Kelley. The photo backgrounds used for “Bistro Huddy” depict, in fact, the Boneyard Bistro.
In one recent “Bistro Huddy” video, Nicole, a waitress who is quick to game the system, has booked a flight to Tulum before requesting the time off during the busy holiday season, and she justifies her actions with the proclamation that “it was a buy-one-get-one flash sale!”
It turns out Nicole is based on Ms. Kelley herself. “I was fascinated by this hostess/server who actually kind of ran things,” said Mr. Talbert. “But Nicole’s way more extreme.”
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