Television in Tales: The Rise of the Billion-Dollar Small Drama Industry | television

IIf you’ve been anywhere near the social media blast radius of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Amazon Prime’s emerging YA series about a twisty teen love triangle, you may be familiar with Henley and Luka’s plight. A series of short video clips called Loving My Brother’s Best Friend — a plot that’s pretty self-explanatory — has made waves on TikTok with longing stares and “I/I can’t do this” drama that mirror many fan adaptations of beloved TV couple Belly and Conrad. But while “The Summer I Turned into a Beauty” explores its central tension during 40-minute episodes via streaming, “Loving My Brother’s Best Friend,” produced by a short-form company called CandyJar, boils its appeal down to its simple essence: the sexual tension hook, the rising plotline, and the action-adventure, all in two-minute “episodes” on your phone. Without even meaning to or wanting to, I watched the first 10 seasons (out of 44) in one 15-minute gulp – and I’m not the only one.

Hollywood hopes you, too, are hooked. Although “Loving My Brother’s Best Friend” may not look like a typical Hollywood production – in fact, it resembles a mix of teen shows, soap operas and amateur films – the industry is investing heavily in the future of series like it: low-budget, mobile-only “micro-dramas” with 60- to 90-second episodes. These displays, also known as “verticals” due to their mobile orientation, have already become popular in China, where mobile phone screens dominate entertainment even more than in the United States. In just three years, revenues for serialized mini-dramas in China have risen from $500 million in 2021 to $7 billion in 2024, and are expected to reach $16.2 billion by 2030. The global mini-drama market for 2025 is estimated at $7 billion to $15 billion — and it’s booming, with revenues for mini-drama companies outside China growing nearly three-fold in the past year.

Until recently, Hollywood’s big players sat on the sidelines, content to let such companies, which make money via advertising or “micro-payments” akin to user gaming apps, release ridiculous shows, including Fake Married to My Billionaire CEO or Fated to My Forbidden Vampire. But the boom in business—combined with continued industry consolidation and the shift of production away from California—made the small, affordable drama impossible to ignore. “It’s the first round,” said Bill Block, the former CEO of Miramax, whose new mini-drama venture GammaTime has raised more than $14 million from investors like Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. “This market is now well established, initially, with a lot to explore in terms of taste.”

If ReelShort and DramaBox, as Block said, “set and win the first round,” Hollywood is looking to win the second. In just a few months, a wave of deals has brought industry buzz to the still-nascent space, signaling a potential revolution in serialized entertainment. In August, several prominent studio veterans — former WME and ABC entertainment chief Lloyd Brown, former Showtime chief Jana Winograd, and former NBC Universal television chief Susan Rovner — founded MicroCo, with backing from tech-driven entertainment company Cineverse. In October, Fox Entertainment announced an equity investment in Ukrainian company Holywater, which owns the My Drama app, with a commitment to bring more than 200 new shows to the platform within two years. Disney has placed DramaBox in its selective accelerator program, betting that the company will expand beyond werewolves and billionaire romances. Spanish-language TelevisaUnivision is on track to release 40 telenovela shorts this year on its ViX app, with another 100 for 2026. Paramount Skydance promoted its studio film Regretting You via ReelShort and is working with the company to cross-pollinate the material. Lionsgate and Hallmark are reportedly doing the same.

This isn’t Hollywood’s first foray into short-form content. Companies from Netflix to Sundance TV have been experimenting with premium shorts — often glossy 15-minute episodes — for the better part of a decade. You may remember the amazing Quibi, the “fast-food” platform founded by DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, which launched in the spring of 2020 with a high-budget series, A-list talent and $1.75 billion in funding — only to fold within six months. (Its content was sold to Roku for just $100 million.)

But industry experts are betting that things are different this time. For example, TikTok viewing habits are more ingrained now than they were in 2020. Hollywood, as a place and an industry, is “going through a real transitional moment,” said Natalie Garvey, an entertainment journalist at The Ankler, who has closely followed the rise of small-scale drama productions in Los Angeles. From executives to directors, from writers to crew, “there are a lot of people who have been fired from their jobs,” she said. “Everyone is looking for the silver bullet — what will save Hollywood? What will bring back jobs?”

The answer could be a $75,000 short film shot over two days and released within weeks. “A lot of people who have worked for a long time in films and TV start thinking, ‘Well, maybe I could go and work on a little drama or I could make one myself,’” Garvey said. “It offers a glimmer of hope for a lot of people in this city right now.”

The barren working landscape of Los Angeles was one of the main considerations for Anthony Zwicker, creator of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, to begin writing the mini-drama for Block’s GammaTime. “I have a lot of people I love who can’t find work,” he said. Small-drama production is completely non-union, fast and cheap — most shows have a budget of about $100,000 total — but it is work and can be lucrative, with some actors making six-figure jobs overnight. (Last month, the lead actors’ union, Sage AFTRA, proposed a contract to allow small drama companies to hire union actors for minimum wages — $250 a day for lead actors, $164 for everyone else — plus overtime provisions, retirement and health contributions, and standard protections for stunts and sex scenes. The deal has not been finalized.)

Zwicker is betting that microdrama can circumvent some of the long-standing structural problems in traditional entertainment. For example, the lengthy film and television production schedules, which often extend for years even when things are running smoothly. With microdrama, “you can write an hour-long film in two days, shoot it in five days, and get it on stage in 10 days.” Zwicker has already written four blockbuster films for GammaTime, which launches this fall with 20 titles spanning true crime, thrillers and romantic melodramas.

As traditional movies and TV continue to lose young viewers to YouTube and TikTok, smaller dramas can attract new audiences through a “freemium” model — a bunch of episodes for free, then additional episodes unlocked for a few cents to a few dollars via in-app “coins” like money in a slot machine. “As a writer, I have to understand where this is going, not just ignore it,” Zwicker says. “I see the failed streaming model. I know the challenges of broadcast and cable. This is becoming something that’s getting some traction. Why wouldn’t I want to be in this space?”

This space comes with a host of pitfalls, not the least of which is basic budgeting. Although Zwicker has embraced the challenge of taking “high-end scripts and finding a way with paltry budgets, limited access to A-list talent, and access to A-list directors, and making it all work until someone says, ‘This is worth paying for,'” he still works on the question: “How do we make a movie that stands out so it’s not terrible?” The writer has less than two minutes to establish the characters and the stakes and the reason to keep watching. “Organically, I’m trying to figure out the rhythm of the writing, because I’m “I think this is the only way this can continue.” “The more we use TikTok, the more we want to watch movies like this on TikTok. But there must be constructive narratives.”

There is also the challenge of the audience, which is at once vast, fractured, and isolated. Although mobile-friendliness suggests a younger customer base, the U.S. microdrama audience currently skews heavily female and over 45. Thus, it’s still an open question whether micro-dramas in the US will expand beyond, as Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw put it on industry insider podcast The Town, “soft porn” for young women, or whether higher-budget shorts, Quibi-style, can compete with fast, cheap and free films. “Everyone who makes small dramas is looking to raise the bar,” Garvey said. “The question is how to balance increasing the production value a little bit, bringing in some of the more popular talent while not losing what makes it a small drama. Because if you suddenly increase the budget too much, it starts to look like Quibi.”

As in Hollywood generally, some are betting on generative AI, which GammaTime uses to suggest stories based on viewers’ habits, but not to actually write the material — “interesting writing, we respect and value it.” Interesting writing is also human-driven, but “decision-making concepts can be AI-driven, demand-driven,” Block said. (The company counts Slava Modrich, the former head of Google Gaming, as a co-founder, along with Alex Montalvo, the company’s president. Quibi, as chief content officer.) Others, like Zwicker, are more hesitant — “I think when that data drives creativity, that can be a problem,” he said.

Block expects the mini-dramas to serve as entertainment for themselves, with their own stellar ecosystems. (Fair or not, Cosmo has already declared Loving My Brother’s Best Friend’s Nick Sconeberg the first “star” of the “cinema vertical.” He likened his efforts with GammaTime to those of Samuel Z. Arkoff, the 1960s pioneer of low-budget, youth-focused independent films — Beach Blanket Bingo, I Was A Teenage Werewolf and the like — as the old Hollywood studio system collapsed.

Hollywood once again finds itself in a moment of great upheaval – changing viewer tastes and habits, increasingly mobile audiences, and rapidly consolidating corporate power. In these shifting sands, micro-dramas can radically change how Western audiences consume serialized storytelling. Within years, small-scale dramas will be “at the forefront of consumption as streaming once was, and cable and streaming once were,” Zwicker predicted. In the short term, it will be “bad acting, vulgar nicknames, pettiness, and a billionaire’s mistress,” but “in the long term, it will be premium content written for the device, where the perfect facial experience is so tempting you can’t put it down.”

Garvey was more measured. “I think it’s like a soap opera to appreciate entertainment,” she said. “I don’t think anyone who works in small dramas would say they’re trying to compete with HBO’s Sunday night dramas.” (Actually, Block doesn’t.) “But they try to find that portion of time in your day when maybe you want something a little quicker to consume, or something that will grab you and keep you moving.”

What smaller dramas are still missing is real success and goodwill — something that escapes social media containment and reaches the majority of audiences in the United States who may not have yet heard of the format. Something that attracts and keeps the attention of skeptics. A show like Loving My Brother’s Best Friend that actually became a viral hit like The Summer I Turned Pretty. But those in the field stress that it is still too early to judge whether mini-dramas represent a sea change, or, like many short-form initiatives before them, merely a passing fad promoted by technology. “If you want to come in with a critical eye and rip these vertical shorts off at this point, you’ll have a field day. And it’s easy to do,” Zwicker warned me. It will not be successful, he said, without more research and development, money, and perhaps institutional support. “This is something new – we need to support and create this so we can employ more people, tell better stories, and build an industry.”

“We learn a lot in every film,” he added. “It’s all TBD.”