In 2020, the entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg brought to life an idea that must have seemed — in the flash of its conception — foolproof: Netflix, but for people addicted to their phones. This would be a short-form entertainment app for a new kind of viewer, one for whom watching an entire episode of “The Office” or “Criminal Minds” represented an intolerable mental strain. He called it Quibi: short for “quick bites.” It collapsed after eight months in a total void of public interest. People laughed about this, but their laughter was tinged with pride. A billionaire had insulted our intelligence and — this time, at least — had been rebuked.
And yet, the joke may very well be on us. Or on us and on Katzenberg at the same time. Because, just six years later, short-form, mobile-first narrative entertainment is the fastest-growing form of streaming worldwide, per Bloomberg. Maybe you’ve seen something called the “microdrama.” Maybe you are reading this very article clause by clause between episodes of “My Gorgeous Wife Is an Ex-Convict” or “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas” or “Deadly Affair With My Brother-in-Law.”
If they haven’t hit your feed yet, here are the basics: Microdramas, sometimes called “verticals,” are TV shows for your phone. They are typically described as soap operas for Gen Z: hypersexual, over the top and — most important — short, with episodes rarely exceeding two minutes in length. The format was born around 2018 in China, where its revenue now exceeds that of the conventional film industry. America is lagging behind, but it is putting in the work. As I write this, the form is on track to take in $1.5 billion in revenue in the United States by the end of the year.
People used to compare the experience of watching prestige TV shows like “The Sopranos” to reading a great Victorian novel. By the same token, we can say that watching a microdrama is like being electrocuted onstage at the circus. If I sound hyperbolic, it is because there is no way to rationally respond to a medium designed to short-circuit rational thought. Factually, we can say that these microdramas are rooted in the character and plot tropes of romantasy: Secret Admirer, say, or Enemies-to-Lovers. Each short episode opens with a hook and ends with a twist, dragging viewers, like recalcitrant pets, through entire seasons roughly the length of a feature film. Production values vary, but on the whole they suggest a highly capable regional-commercial crew press-ganged into shooting a network drama at top speed. And the dialogue! To call it bad would be to lend too much intentionality to a process whereby scripts are often A.I.-translated from Chinese, and then lightly, sometimes barely, localized to fit the conventions of American culture.
In the first years of this decade, a number of Chinese companies began to export the form abroad, creating countless U.S. microdrama apps and coordinating U.S.-based microdrama shoots in order to supply those apps with content. These companies still retain a near monopoly on U.S. production, but that is quickly changing. Hollywood executives — noticing these apps outranking their own streamers on the charts — have started to spin up microdrama platforms of their own. Just last month saw the launch of aTwist, the highest-profile American venture yet, founded in part by former executives at Showtime and NBCUniversal. Many others are on the way. Speaking to The Guardian last year, Anthony Zuiker, the creator of “C.S.I.,” suggested — not implausibly — that the form would soon supplant streaming at the “forefront of consumption,” as streaming once supplanted cable. In the space of a few weeks last year, The Hollywood Reporter declared a “gold rush,” while Variety heralded the “vertical revolution.”
Already, the medium is minting stars, albeit of a modern stripe — total unknowns, in other words, but popular enough within the bounds of their online niche to feel adored. They have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. They moderate vibrant fan-chat groups. They also attend packed microdrama conventions, where fans openly cry, or bid on rags they might have fleetingly worn. It would seem that phone-based consumption breeds a special kind of psychic bond. These are one-to-one shows; they are made to be watched alone.
To date, the Chinese platforms have mainly targeted straight women. Accordingly, the breakout stars have mostly been men. And let me tell you: These men are huge. And handsome. And for the most part nonthreatening, but capable when required of persuasively performing mild acts of erotic sadism. But fundamentally: They’re huge. As in: tall, ripped. “I’m 6-5, about 235 pounds. I’m a big guy!” This is nearly the first thing that the microdrama A-lister Cayman Cardiff says in a fan interview I came across on YouTube. The interviewer hadn’t asked: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Cardiff simply knew this information was expected. This is a meat market. Acting skills are optional, a nice bonus, although Cardiff happens to have them.
I first encountered Cardiff in “Fated to My Homeless Billionaire Alpha,” in which he plays a billionaire pretending to be a homeless guy. When I next saw him — this time as a regular billionaire, in a different show — it felt like encountering a friend in a distant land. Specifically, the kind of distant land you might read about in a gnomic parable, with strange customs obscurely mirroring our own and borders no resident has ever seen firsthand. The vastness of this space, with its thousands of productions, was getting to me. Cardiff in this context was a comfort. Retracing his path through the industry, I developed a sense of the terrain, and a rooting interest in his career. So believe me when I say that the gay microdrama boom has really allowed him to shine: “My Mafia Pilot Boyfriend,” “Seducing My Hockey Rival,” “Altarboy.” The man is on a hot streak.
If these shows really are brain-rot soap operas, you can in theory imagine a familiar trajectory for Cardiff, or for someone like him: The star ascends to the world of conventional film and television, and the microdrama career is relegated to an embarrassing footnote, a subject for toothless razzing on what remains of late-night television. Except the energy in Hollywood today would seem to be flowing in the opposite direction: the studios descending to the level of the soaps, in the hopes of reaching an audience that would, in the main, prefer to be looking at their phones. Was this Quibi 2.0, I wondered, or the future of entertainment? Either outcome would be, in its own way, catastrophic — the former for those involved, the latter for the rest of us. Both, regardless, seemed worth investigating up close. I booked a flight to Los Angeles.
People used to compare the experience of watching prestige TV shows like ‘The Sopranos’ to reading a great Victorian novel. By the same token, we can say that watching a microdrama is like being electrocuted onstage at the circus.
I’d managed to wrangle three days of set visits on a show called “Bound by Love,” a production of ReelShort. Culturally, ReelShort is an interesting case: the flagship brand of an American company originally financed — and still partly owned — by a Chinese digital content group. Their P.R. representative, Rachel Bencosme, had set up my visit. If Bencosme were creative-directing the rest of this paragraph, it might read something like this: Few microdrama platforms have been as influential in the United States as ReelShort. The tropes that have proliferated across the platforms — amorous werewolves, forced marriages, those secretly-a-billionaire homeless guys — were popularized by them. But even ReelShort was surprised by the intensity of the response to “Bound by Honor,” the Mafia-romance microdrama that quickly became one of the most-watched shows in ReelShort history, at the time of writing racking up 434.3 million views. “Bound by Love” — the fast-turnaround sequel to “Bound by Honor” — represents one of ReelShort’s first attempts at a durable franchise. Accordingly — and I’ll just let Rachel take over from here — it “signals that microdramas are booming not only in scale, but also in creativity and long-term potential.”
None of the above is strictly false. But neither does it begin to convey the genuinely startling peculiarity of the media property in question. Perhaps it’s best to begin with what “Bound by Honor” is about. Aria Scuderi, played by an actress named Savannah Coffee, is the daughter of the head of the Chicago Mafia. She wakes on her 18th birthday in a state of dreamy anticipation. “I’ll finally have a taste of freedom from my strict dad and his Mafia,” she thinks in voice-over, as the camera holds on her face. It’s not to be: Her father interrupts her reverie to inform her that she will be marrying Luca Vitiello (Rhett Wellington), head of the New York Mafia, that very afternoon. (We know it is Aria’s dad saying this because text appears onscreen that says “Rocco Scuderi: Aria’s dad” — a bedrock convention of the form.) Aria is devastated — “I wanted to wait for love, not marry someone who beds women roughly for pleasure,” she thinks to herself, again in voice-over — but she complies.
What follows will feel familiar to you if you half-watched “The Godfather” on TV one afternoon, and then — while trapped in a coma — spent compressed infinities of psychic time wandering the darkest, most rankly erotic corridors of your subconscious. But there can be only so much pleasure in ridiculing a form with no pretense to quality. Instead, I will simply, even solemnly, describe what happens after the wedding ceremony: Luca carries a terrified Aria into a bedroom, outside of which — per famiglia tradition — the Vitiello clan raucously awaits the sounds of Aria’s deflowering. When they are done, the famiglia will verify the deed by inspecting the sheets for blood. But Luca spares Aria; he slices his hand with a knife and drizzles his own blood on the sheets, telling Aria: “Women beg me to take them, and you will, too.” Thus the enemies-to-lovers plot of “Bound by Honor” is set into motion.
On my first day shadowing the “Bound by Love” shoot, the crew was filming in a mansion in La Verne, 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Instantly upon walking onto the set, I remembered, with a measure of pain, that I am not physically beautiful. It was something like realizing I’d left my wallet in the Uber. I’m not saying I’m hideous, but beauty — that’s something else. And these people had it.
In the flesh, the microdrama star Rhett Wellington is proof, if any was needed, that JD Vance’s weird natural-eyeliner thing could conceivably look wonderful on a different kind of head. Nate Flores, here playing Wellington’s brother, looks like the prettiest, most rosy-cheeked boy at his uptown prep school. It’s an odd look, perhaps, for a character meant to be a vicious member of the New York Mafia, but there can be no question that Flores has worked hard to achieve it. On his TikTok, he’s posted videos documenting his looksmaxxing journey. (For jawline enhancement, he recommends chewing the ultra-tough Turkish gum brand Falim.)
The gender politics of ReelShort are so comically regressive that I’m almost tempted to go full ’90s-male-reporter and objectify the women too — Coffee and Christine Schlehuber, playing Aria’s sister — but I’ll refrain. Enough to say that they are attractive and, one guesses, possessed of rich interior lives (certainly richer than those of their characters, whose thoughts revolve entirely around escaping and/or pleasing their mobster husbands).
‘Bound by Love’ will feel familiar to you if you half-watched ‘The Godfather’ on TV one afternoon, and then — while trapped in a coma — spent compressed infinities of psychic time wandering the darkest, most rankly erotic corridors of your subconscious.
I watched the director, Tara Motamedi, work out the blocking for the first scene of the day, in which Luca and Aria have just arrived home from their honeymoon and are instantly ambushed by a gunman. The women were in hair and makeup, so Motamedi and her bearish B-cam operator were standing in for them, running through the action with the men. They were navigating a comically narrow zone of space; the 9:16 format that fills a vertical phone screen leaves little room to maneuver, requiring actors to stand unnaturally close together. (Wellington later told me that the note he received most often on his first microdrama was “Stop moving left to right.”)
The camera crew that day was small — eight people, by my count, all of them men — and for the most part unsmilingly competent. Their presence on set had the air of being somehow involuntary, court-ordered. Eventually I got to talking to one of them, a key grip, in the house’s kitchen. There he explained to me that microdrama platforms typically look for the cheapest locations they can find, with little thought to actual shooting conditions. He drew my attention to the skylight directly above the actors, who were still running through the ambush blocking. If this were a real production, he explained, they’d do something about the awkward light it shined on the scene — get up on the roof and drape a sheet over it, whatever. Here they didn’t even bother.
One thing confused me: “Bound by Love,” which in its finished form would run more than two and a half hours, was to be shot at a variety of locations over the course of just 11 days. And yet, in the three hours I’d spent on set, the crew had worked through what seemed like barely two minutes of screen time. The key grip had an explanation for this: The scenes they were shooting that day were for an early episode, one that would appear before the viewer hit the paywall. As at least a dozen people would subsequently inform me, the platforms are not overly invested in the quality of the episodes that come after — i.e., the episodes a viewer has actually paid to see. If we were to apply this logic to “Bound by Love,” that would mean that some measure of care would be lavished on precisely 15 of its 118 episodes.
The rented mansion, the disaffected crew, the sense of an insular community printing money at the far margins of respectable Hollywood: Here were all the familiar trappings of the pre-internet pornography scene. But what I was witnessing was decidedly post-internet, and thus stranger. It represented a node in an evolving relationship between niche kink and corporate entertainment. You could say this relationship began with “50 Shades of Grey,” which itself began as “Twilight” fan fiction and ended up as a best-selling media property. Ten years later, the fan-fiction community shapes the entertainment industry. To wit: ReelShort has built its brand on hits set in an alternate world of tropes known to romantasy fans as the Omegaverse, based on wolf-influenced biological hierarchies. The word “Omegaverse” originated in gay fan fiction about the real-life actors in the CW show “Supernatural”; ReelShort has adapted it so successfully that the people behind such network shows are now making microdramas of their own.
The sex scenes in most microdramas, while manifold, are fairly tame. Your average porn-watcher would probably look at them as a species of ballet. But they are clearly serving their purpose. As one former microdrama executive explained the prevailing logic: “When certain things happen onscreen, the views go up or down.” The goal is to keep them up, which is distinct from telling a good or even coherent story. On set that day, for instance, I watched Motamedi direct a scene in which Flores’s character greets Coffee’s by kissing her hand. Motamedi eventually emphasized that Flores should make this kiss “really creepy,” because ReelShort’s higher-ups wanted “a fake love triangle — they want the audience to think, Oh, there’s something between them.”
Nothing close to a love triangle ever materializes among the principals in “Bound by Love.” The misleading hand-kiss was a way to entice a certain type of viewer — one perhaps specifically interested in “Love Triangles,” which is its own dedicated category on ReelShort’s website — to stick with the series past the paywall.
A few days later I found myself in a sun-flooded condo just outside Beverly Hills, the home of Cayman Cardiff’s manager, Irv Gelb. We’d developed something of a rapport in the months before my trip. On the phone, he relayed each item of microdrama news as if he personally stood to profit from it. Had I heard that Taye Diggs was doing a microdrama? That Procter & Gamble was producing one? “Also, what’s his name,” Gelb had said, “a guy who was blacklisted for potential sexual harassment? Big actor. He has a brother. He was seen on one of the sets last week.” (“James Franco Resurfaces in New Role Years After Sexual Misconduct Allegations,” one headline read, when this microdrama, called “Love, Lies & Frank,” eventually appeared in late August.)
Gelb, discussing his background, told me he “brought ‘The Simpsons’ to Japan” while working for Mitsubishi in the ’90s. He also told me that, in his later career as a muscleman photographer, he “discovered” John Cena. He struck me — and I say this with sincere admiration — as a vintage breed of Hollywood hustler. Already, I’d been in an Old Hollywood frame of mind. The film and television industry had long been a fortress, tightening its locks in the face of internal collapse, such that today young actors may count having only one A-list movie star parent as a significant handicap. Whereas the microdrama space brought to mind the socially mobile, up-from-the-mailroom atmosphere of a less credentialed era. A back door had been opened, and thousands were pouring through, with Gelb among those leading the charge.
To call the dialogue bad would be to lend too much intentionality to a process whereby scripts are A.I.-translated from Chinese, and then lightly, sometimes barely, localized to fit the conventions of American culture.
I went to visit him soon after I landed in the city. About his age he was circumspect. “I’ll give you Hollywood years: between 50 and 60,” he said. “I might be lying a little. Everyone in Hollywood does!” He was tall, gray-haired, sort of audibly congested, and looked — to my mind — to be about 65. He gave me the tour. (I was particularly intrigued by the cases of Red Bull lining his kitchen — apparently part of some kind of microdrama product placement scheme.) Then he told me about his early days with Cayman Cardiff.
Cardiff had never contemplated an acting career. When Gelb found him on Instagram, he was living in Utah and running a massage/personal training/nutrition business. Gelb said, essentially: I’m going to make you a star. Of course, by the time Cardiff arrived in Los Angeles, in early 2024, Hollywood was falling apart. Lavish tax breaks offered by places like Budapest and Albuquerque had drained production work from the city. Covid, the actors’ strike and the writers’ strike had further diminished the pool of available jobs. Then microdramas began cropping up by the hundreds on the casting sites.
“I ignored them because I didn’t want my actors to be in a cellphone movie,” Gelb said. “I thought it was stupid. Vertical? It’s garbage!”
Eventually, Cardiff booked a microdrama called “Stealing Seeds From Her Alpha King” (later retitled “Alpha’s Fated Surrogate”). On set in Toronto, he prevailed on Gelb to investigate the form, and Gelb began to see the possibilities.
“The businessman,” he said, referring to himself, “saw everything.”
We were seated at Gelb’s living-room computer station. Gripping his ergonomic joystick-mouse, he showed me the day’s listings on the casting website Breakdown Express. “Dominant Don’s Disobedient Girl,” he read from his screen. “Doesn’t sound too good. Let’s see — here’s a synopsis — you want to read it on your own?” I leaned in to take a look. “On her 18th birthday,” it began, “Olivia Cohen’s world collapses when her Mafia-boss father is arrested and she is chased through the streets by hit men intent on selling her at a slave auction.”
Gelb was right — it didn’t sound very good. In fact it sounded a lot like “Bound by Love,” just as “Bound by Love” sounded like hundreds of other microdramas I’d scrolled past. Once again my thoughts turned back to Quibi. Viewed in the light of the Dominant Don and his many counterparts, the platform could start to seem almost like a philanthropic enterprise. Steven Spielberg was supposed to make a show for it. Eric Andre. Idris Elba. Which inevitably prompts you to wonder: Was Quibi in fact overestimating us? Alternately: Have we really deteriorated so drastically in just six years?
It’s tempting to say, Absolutely, of course, we’re screwed. Which we probably are. Nonetheless, Quibi’s quick demise seems to me only adjacently related to our broader decline. What is clear with hindsight is that Quibi failed primarily because it was TV — regular old TV — that happened to be on your phone. Worse yet, it was prestige TV! It had no feel for the formal properties of the medium. The intervening years have taught us that what tends to succeed on phones is phone stuff. A video of a panda being fed at the zoo. A deepfake of Jeffrey Epstein, Diddy and Charlie Kirk smoking huge cigars in a hot tub. The proliferating genre of monumentally upsetting A.I.-generated videos in which anthropomorphic strawberry women cheat on their hapless strawberry husbands with callous, hypermasculine bananas or heads of broccoli.
It is the rare person who, in the truest sense, “chooses” to watch this stuff — who looks forward to a long night in bed with Instagram Reels. It would be more accurate to say that, through a series of by-now-unconscious reflexes engineered by large technology companies, this content just sort of happens to people, like a food-borne illness. This is the terrain that ReelShort and its peers have precision-engineered their content to compete on.
Crucially, phone stuff — at least up to this point in history — has been a complement to, as opposed to a replacement for, so-called horizontal content. There is nothing to suggest that a large audience for baseline-watchable film or television has ceased to exist, nor that it will anytime soon. The question is whether Hollywood will feel compelled to cater to that audience.
Put yourself in a Hollywood executive’s shoes: You come home after a long day of greenlighting “Spider-Man” sequels and DMing 12-year-old horror auteurs on YouTube. In the living room, you find your teenage daughter hypnotized by influencer slop on TikTok. In your very bones you know that, in a right-side-up world, she and her peers would instead be engaging with the premium scripted films and TV shows pumped out at great expense by your industry. But they’re not interested. Now here come the Chinese platforms. They’re earning billions via narrative entertainment. They’re spending, on a Hollywood-budget scale, almost nothing to make it. Better yet, people seem to actually want what they’re selling — no small thing, given your industry’s increasing uncertainty vis-à-vis the tastes of a fractured U.S. public. What choice do you have? You’d be doing a disservice to your daughter, to your shareholders, by not getting onboard.
The process I am describing here is well underway. Fox Entertainment has made an equity investment in the microdrama platform Holywater. Disney+ has begun to produce microdramas of its own, and Paramount+ has a slate scheduled for the fall. Peacock is now actually licensing ReelShort classics like “Fated to My Forbidden Alpha” and displaying them prominently on their mobile app’s homepage. And who can blame them? The numbers really are insane. When Bencosme, the P.R. rep, called me to talk logistics a few days before I was due back on set, she informed me that “Breathe” — the company’s latest romantasy adaptation — had just racked up 34 million views in its first 24 hours on the platform. Numbers like these could, in theory, help a person overcome any number of sensible reservations. Hence the news, this past spring, that Katzenberg himself was back in the game — contributing to a $5.5 million seed round for a Latin American microdrama company.
Over lunch later that day, Gelb advised a measure of caution. He’d been an executive on the front lines of the ’80s VHS boom. Back then, countless fly-by-night studios formed to supply the metastasizing home video market. Most eventually consolidated or went bust. Similarly, the average microdrama consumer may find it difficult to distinguish among such platforms as NetShort, GoodShort and ShortMax, particularly when their offerings are virtually identical. But that is a problem for those platforms’ future accountants to worry about. For the time being, we are living through the boom.
The sex scenes in most microdramas, while manifold, are fairly tame. Your average porn-watcher would probably look at them as a species of ballet.
On the ground among Los Angeles’s film workers, the results of this explosion are plain to see. Today microdramas are — as more than one person put it to me — the only game in town.
For a sense of what this shift looked like, I made my way to Zak Barnett Studios, an acting school off Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile. Barnett himself is large, muscled, sleeve-tattooed. Had I not read an online interview with him directly before arriving, I’d have taken him for a man who found salvation through acting after being horrifically traumatized in Iraq. (More of a Bay Area experimental-theater-type background, it turns out.) Right at the top of the class I joined that day — a dozen or so students in their 20s and 30s in a circle of metal chairs — Barnett outlined the situation on the ground, sounding somewhat like a man coming to terms with an invading regime. Microdramas, he said, had taken over “everything.” Artistry would always matter, but these microdramas were the future. And it was incumbent on them, as artists, to find their way into them with integrity. “I’m not being cynical,” he told the class. “I am not being cynical. Because I’m part of this, and I want to be part of this. But it’s strange that the ultimate director is an algorithm, right?”
One young woman in Barnett’s class had performed in three and sworn off them. She said something I’d hear repeatedly in the coming days: The platforms were increasingly fixated on women being beaten and raped, on the logic that this lured in viewers.
That is bad, Barnett suggested in response, but also an opportunity: The algorithm is giving us “transparency” about what people want, and now we can decide what to do with that knowledge.
Attitudes were equally mixed at the microdrama mixer I attended one evening in Sherman Oaks. I’d been milling around for barely five minutes when I got to talking to a woman named Chantal Massuh. “This is the future,” she said. “I was fighting it for a long time, but Old Hollywood is dead.” Microdramas, she went on, are commercialized, rule-bound, utterly devoid of artistry. But she had given up everything to be a filmmaker. “And this can’t be the end of it for me, so I’m joining the bandwagon.” We had been talking for less than 90 seconds. Not much more time passed before a shy sound mixer wearing a kind of newsboy cap requested a private audience on the patio. There, with the wistfulness of an obsolesced dockworker, he reflected on the “good old days,” when Lifetime shot all of its features right there in Los Angeles. He would, he said, “drop everything” if he got the call for a traditional feature, and claimed that all of his microdrama colleagues would do the same.
After a week of this I began to feel almost indecent. Wow, that sounds awful — tell me more! But I plunged ahead. At a bar in Echo Park, at an outdoor table among a half-dozen microdrama crew members, I gained a better sense of the total lack of clarity they are forced to labor under. Often, the platforms’ producers track the action remotely from China and — through on-set intermediaries — request baffling adjustments, in line with data that only they have access to. Occasionally, these film workers will be told that a show they’d worked on had become a gigantic hit seen by tens of millions of people, but from their perspective, it had made no imprint on the wider culture. I pictured a windowless kitchen, a row of bewildered cooks. A face on a mounted screen says: Toss some rusty nails in that soup! Sprinkle tiny shards of glass on that Caesar salad! People will love it, trust us, the data never lies! Over and over again the faces on the screen are proved correct; the people do love it. Even so, the cooks might start to wonder: Who exactly is eating this stuff?
The group struggled to buy into even the standard line about the shows’ being watched primarily by middle-aged Midwestern women, which I heard from agents, executives, actors, directors. When I began to ask what they really thought was happening with these platforms, I could barely finish my question before two of them said, simultaneously and only half-jokingly, “Money laundering.”
Of course, these particular microdrama workers were talking from the bottom of the totem pole. The view is generally better at the top. The male leads I spoke to, specifically, seemed uniformly thrilled by this professional windfall. I could see it clearly on my second day on the “Bound by Love” set, this time at a church in South Central Los Angeles. There, Wellington and Flores tussled up and down the center aisle, grappling and head-butting under the watchful eye of the set’s stunt coordinator. They were preparing for the day’s big scene, the show’s climactic wedding/blood bath, while the day’s extras — dressed in regulation hit-man suits — looked on pleasantly from the pews. (“Another Mafia-bride wedding bash-in,” one of them, Maxwell Waldorf, said. “I can’t tell you how many of those I’ve done.”)
Before his microdrama career took off, Wellington auditioned in Los Angeles for a decade, without much more to show for it than a bit part on an episode of the network sitcom “2 Broke Girls.” Same story with a lot of these guys: Kasey Esser, for instance — up there with Cayman Cardiff on the A-list — was dropped by his management before he started putting himself up for microdrama auditions. Now these guys had swelling social followings, dedicated fan pages. There was a lot to like.
It’s different for the women. Much like the men in straight porn, they function as audience surrogates and are thus, by the platforms’ logic, semi-faceless, disposable. Accordingly, many are paid less, despite being the targets of a disproportionate amount of the choreographed violence; in “Bound by Love” alone, Coffee’s character is dropped from a balcony, injured in a car wreck and nonfatally shot in the back while pregnant. On set, I spent a little while in the church’s parking lot watching her be tortured inside a black Mercedes. Her torturer that day was Dante, yet another boy-toy Mafioso, played by Nick Milone, whose almost completely expressionless line readings actually did render him kind of an effective villain, from what I could tell from 15 feet away. Coffee — yanked repeatedly around the inside of a hot car — looked about as miserable between takes as she did while the camera was rolling. “Can we turn the A.C. on for them or something?” Motamedi asked. “They are cooking in there.” A moment later, a ReelShort producer asked if it would be possible to get the knife closer to Coffee’s neck.
During lunch, I approached Motamedi. We got to talking about microdramas and what she had learned from them.
“Before verticals,” she said, “you were so invested in every shot, in every plan. You were dedicated to making it the best. But here you learn to let go and ensure that you’re capturing what the client needs.”
For one instance of what the client needs, we can look to “Slimming Revolution,” a 2025 ReelShort production and an instance of what is commonly known as the Fat-Wife Counterattack subgenre. In “Slimming Revolution,” an overweight woman labors to exact revenge on her husband through intensive diet and exercise. ReelShort doesn’t go the fat-suit route. Instead, to showcase the protagonist’s transformation, they simply swap out the larger actress with a smaller one for the second half of the show. And the second one, for the record, only barely looks like the first one.
You can understand, in this light, the excitement within the industry around Gammatime’s “The Summer I Turned My Sexiest.” Everyone was talking about it during my time in Los Angeles. In this show, an overweight woman is cast aside by her callous husband, and then finds a partner who loves her just the way she is. In a microdrama context, this was a representational breakthrough on the order of “Brokeback Mountain” or “Roots.” The show’s creator, Isabel Dréan, was in understandably high spirits when I ran into her after the shoot at the church, at an outdoor microdrama mixer in North Hollywood. She told me, without resentment, that Gammatime had changed her original title (“The Summer I Turned Milfy”) after casting a younger actress for the lead. She was also kind enough to give me a copy of her new book, “How to Write a Vertical Series in 10 Days.” Ultimately I was more compelled by how you shouldn’t write a vertical series — the microdrama scriptwriting don’ts, as listed by Dréan, included “dialogue-heavy scenes,” “complex world-building” and “anything requiring deep concentration.”
I was still absorbing the implications of these rules a few days later when I received an email from Gelb. “I saw some stats from China yesterday that scared me,” he wrote, “and after doing some research I decided that I must write a new article.” (Gelb tends to call his social media posts “articles.”) “You’re the first to see it. Attached is a preview.” He could have told me this in person: I was finally set to meet Cardiff in a few hours, at a Mexican brunch place, and Gelb planned on joining. But apparently the message was urgent.
The title of this article was: “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! The Micro-Drama Industry Just Hit Its First AI Earthquake (Warning: This Article may cause distress).” It began: “March 25, 2026, may go down as the day the microdrama business model experienced a tectonic shift. Not gradually, but overnight.” Apparently, China’s short-form video platforms had recently seen a milestone: more than $12 million spent in one day on advertisements for A.I.-generated microdramas. The country’s microdrama production hubs, meanwhile — sites of industrial-scale production only months earlier — were emptying out. Actors who were in demand last year, stars of the form, were doing food delivery just to survive. Gelb was seeing the writing on the wall: “Experience shows that, in the microdrama world, what happens in China does not stay in China. It’s a preview for what’s to come for the rest of the world.”
I won’t say the thought hadn’t occurred to me. In fact, from the moment I encountered my first microdrama, I wondered why these platforms were bothering with the expense of human production in the first place. It’s true that the big studios might want to foist human-free productions on filmgoers, but they can’t. The audience would reject it, and the technology isn’t there yet anyway. Microdramas, on the other hand, already look A.I.-generated. Many look substantially worse than that. It is clear that these platforms’ sole priority is finding tropes that work for a fleeting period and repeating them at scale for as little money as possible. A microdrama director told me that films of his that “worked” were often reshot word for word with different character names, or perhaps a few new backdrops. A search for the word “Alpha” on the ReelShort platform turns up more than 150 barely differentiated productions.
Cardiff and I wound up meeting alone; Gelb’s dog fell ill at the last minute. Instantly, I could see why so many women had lost so many thousands of dollars to scammers pretending to be him on Instagram. His blue eyes were large and liquid. His shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, as it often is on his shows, exposing the barest hint of his bulging left pectoral. Head to toe he was a compelling study in evolving global conceptions of American masculine identity. (Have I mentioned that the Chinese microdrama platforms, when catering to Western audiences, have an all-but-formal “whites only” policy regarding their male leads? They do. Earlier, at a Q&A, I witnessed an Asian actor bring this up to a microdrama talent agent; she didn’t bother to dispute it, although she did point to “The Summer I Turned My Sexiest” as a definite sign of progress.) The now faintly archaic word hunk, with its Clinton-era musk, seems a fair description of what these microdrama platforms are casting for. Cardiff amply fits the bill.
Cardiff, it turned out, is a pro, unpretentious and self-aware. “This industry was founded on hot models,” he told me, “because actors wouldn’t touch these.” He also conceded the poor quality of the scripts, although he credits them with turning him into a writer, by forcing him to generate off-the-cuff localizations. “They’ll say, like, ‘You dirty beggar-peasant!’ and it’s like — can we find something else that’s not that?”
And his stories were genuinely funny — like the time, for instance, ReelShort sent him the script for “Fated to My Homeless Billionaire Alpha,” and he quickly realized they’d simply gone through the script for “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas” and strategically added some wolves. Not that Cardiff was complaining, exactly. His motto, in life and regarding microdramas specifically, is “Elevate and Integrate,” a phrase he keeps in large type on his phone’s lock screen. He appreciates what microdramas have given him, and he wants them to be better.
Amazing, the way the technological devaluation of all human striving can soften a person. Here I had to feel — or more precisely, here I actually felt — sincere sympathy for a gorgeous entertainer. I hadn’t yet broached the A.I. question, but it was all I could think about. I knew what it meant to be made redundant; I lost my job as a freelance copywriter to A.I. and still haven’t recovered financially. I’m aware that “A.I.” is merely the sum of decisions made by people, and obscenely rich ones at that. But when my feelings on this matter flare, as they did at the restaurant, I am helpless not to conceive of this technology, in the same manner as many of its creators, as a kind of god — an implacable force built in some infinitesimal measure from my words and Cardiff’s facial expressions, intent on destroying us both.
I didn’t put it quite this way to Cardiff, but I gestured at the notion. He insisted that audiences don’t respond to A.I., but conceded that much of what would happen is out of his control.
Eventually Gelb barreled in, trailed by his ailing dog. Perhaps to put a positive face on things for his client, he projected significantly more confidence than he had in his email. A.I. was coming, but Cardiff would diversify. “He’s writing,” Gelb said. “He’s going to produce. He’s going to direct.” (He very well might, although Gelb won’t be there to guide him: The two amicably parted ways a few months later.) By now my mood was totalizing, I felt compelled to push — what if they don’t need directors? To which Gelb responded with a statement increasingly doubtful at every level.
“There are always going to be humans,” he said.
The developments Gelb had described only accelerated in the weeks after my trip to Los Angeles. Soon after I returned, it emerged that an average of 470 A.I.-generated microdramas were released on Chinese platforms each day this past January. In the same period, COL Group — a part-owner of ReelShort’s parent company — said that it planned to replace 75 percent of its actors with A.I. for titles released in China. I spoke to an executive at COL, a man named Timothy Oh. He seemed amused, if puzzled, by the continued American resistance to A.I.-generated content. I sensed an unspoken accusation of preciousness, a refusal to grow up. Maybe I was projecting. In any case, Oh seemed sanguine about the A.I. microdrama’s eventual prospects here. “The reality is, content is content,” he told me. “People are already watching A.I. slop on Instagram.”
I like to think I’m a cynical sort of person, but in fact, as I now know, I’m a puppy dog. I might as well live in a gigantic birthday cake, lovingly primping my gumdrop hair. What I mean to say is I sincerely didn’t see it coming. Looking back, this is all the crazier, because I was specifically told it was on the way. This was toward the end of my last day on set, or more precisely my last day in the set’s vicinity; for some reason Bencosme had scheduled me for a three-hour window during which shooting was closed to outside observers. She was talking about ReelShort’s expansion plans, how the company intended to release upward of 400 new shows this year. Still rattled from my lunch with Cardiff, I asked the inevitable question: What about A.I.-generated content? She didn’t hesitate.
“I think that’s the next step,” she said. “For everyone in Hollywood.”
I took this for studied vagueness, the sort of smudged nonanswer concerned humanists were hearing all over Hollywood. But no, it was the simple truth. To open the ReelShort app today is to sense, on some deep level, the terrors the A.I. century has in store. As I write this, A.I. microdramas are all over the ReelShort homepage, and make up a large percentage of their most-watched charts. (The company says its scripts are still human-made.) I will give ReelShort this: In an emergent landscape of undifferentiated slop, a production like “The Proctologist’s Brother” still has the power to shock. In this tale of a recent college grad who gets hemorrhoids from eating too much spicy food, and who subsequently is treated for those hemorrhoids by his remote, domineering and, above all, sexually enticing older stepbrother — a narrative enacted by poreless figures bearing, in their DNA, traces of thousands of working actors, people with dreams, memories, utility bills — you can glimpse a kind of real-time rewriting of the rules, a reconsideration of what a human being will accept as entertainment.
An early sequence in “Bound by Love” comes to mind. Luca is threatening Aria with a knife. With the camera trained on Aria’s point of view, Luca rears back and plunges in her direction, and Aria grimaces in close-up. Then the paywall hits. Has he stabbed her? For the price of a $39.99/month subscription, you can learn that he has not — that he has vented his rage by stabbing the wall instead. The knife sticks right out of it. It’s a forgettable moment, another pointless feint, but making it work on set had been a challenge for the husband-and-wife prop team, who had to figure out how to accomplish the stunt without actually damaging the wall. They had managed, under tight time constraints, and seemed proud of this fact, although they wouldn’t tell me how they did it. “Those are kind of our trade secrets,” the wife said.
It seems to me that, everywhere around us, there’s a rush to render such secrets worthless. It’s a driving force of this period, well beyond the realm of microdramas. You can, after all, simply generate a knife, and a wall, and a brooding Italian American to slam one into the other. It would be inaccurate to say that “Bound by Love” is good just because it accomplishes this the old-fashioned way; we are not yet so badly off that the simple involvement of humans can be enough to commend a production. What you can say about it — not insignificant, the way things are trending — is that people were paid to make it. I hope they land on their feet.
Daniel Kolitz is a writer living in Brooklyn.
Screen recordings from “Alpha Mate Unchained,” “Altarboy,” “Bound by Love,” “Breathe,” “Brothers in Arms,” “Campus Saga: Superpower Teen,” “Do Me Over,” “Feast of Power,” “Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas,” “In Love With a Single Farmer Daddy,” “Married the Mafioso I Saved,” “My Husband Killed Me Then I Won the Megaball!,” “My X-Ray Vision Sees Right Through You,” “Regret Is the Punishment,” “Salt Kiss,” “The Boss Affair,” “You Fired a Genius Surgeon”: from ReelShort. Posters: from ReelShort.
Promo image source photographs: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock; LightField Studios/Shutterstock, Volodymyr TVERDOKHLIB/Shutterstock
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