Bite-sized shows are taking over the internet

What is the wildest premise for a microdrama that you've come across? A lot of these microdramas repeat a lot of tropes. So like a common through line for these microdramas is like there's always a character that you identify with that is just being beaten down, ridiculed, insulted. Like there's just so much injustice happening for like the first 30, 40 minutes of the show. Like everyone's throwing garbage at them 24-7. Everyone's throwing garbage at them. And like it's almost like a caricature of like being humiliated. And then at the very end, there's like an insane reversal. So it turns out, for example, like the main character is like a secret billionaire or the main character has like secret powers in this fantasy world. It's like the strongest in the verse, you know, like she's actually Thanos level strong. And she like was hiding it the whole time. There was one where somebody does rise up and punch their boss in the face. And like they beat their boss up. I mean, I once watched four episodes of a Chinese microdrama about a women's spa in a hot spring that held a steamy secret. And I really cannot. The FCC will not let me say more than that, really. You went down the romance. Oh, no, I get all. Listen, I mean, I actually first started seeing microdramas a couple of years ago on TikTok. They're like serialized bite-sized TV shows that post. And then usually you have to pay to see the full thing on another site like Real Short, Drama Box and Pine Drama. My husband, he's always pulling me in to be like, watch this story about this woman who woke up from a coma and is forced to marry her billionaire childhood friend who's secretly in love with her. And I have to admit, some of this stuff is riveting. I mean, a lot of other people think so, too. Microdramas started out as Chinese shows for Chinese audiences, which then adapted to using American actors for American audiences. It's already a multi. Billion dollar industry, and they're cheap to make only a few hundred thousand dollars per series compared to the millions or hundreds of millions that traditional TV takes. So these microdramas can be really, really lucrative. So, of course, Hollywood is getting in on it. Issa Rae's microdrama called Screen Time. It got nearly 75 million views in its first week. Now, Peacock, Fox, Disney and even the National Enquirer are producing their own. But this microdrama boom begs a few questions. For me, like, who are these stories for and what makes them so popular? Is the microdrama a new art form or is it solely a product? To get into it, I'm joined by Chang Cheh, a freelance writer who wrote about microdramas for The New Yorker. Hi, Chang. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Brittany. And Xochitl Gonzalez, author and contributor at The Atlantic, who wrote about them there. Hey, Xochitl. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Okay, so first I want to talk about what makes microdramas different from other kinds of media like TV or movies, like structurally or content-wise. What makes them distinct? Xochitl, we'll start with you. Well, first it's the episodic length, right? An episode's about a minute. And then it's also, I think, particularly this reliance on trope. Because if you're going to get people in, and as you were sort of saying, then get into a paywall where if you want to keep going with the story here, you know, pay for this next episode, you need to get people in quick and deep. And you can't do that through subtlety or nuance. It's like a full season arc in the length of life. Yeah. 45 minutes, right? Very short periods of time. Yes. The one thing that I will add is because they're serialized in one-minute episodes, you have to be able to kind of have an entire story arc in that one minute. I mean, they add up to like 45 minutes, but each of them can sort of stand on its own. And the reason for this is because microdramas are actually created on the bedrock of web novels, which is kind of the original format in China, which are these like online stories, that were actually serialized exactly this way. So the web novels in China started out in the 2000s, and they had to basically write like one page of content that their audience would read every day, and they'd basically just keep adding to it. So that's kind of the basis of why microdramas are structured this way, because the original scripts were already kind of like this. The other thing that I'd add is also just that it's coming to us in a very different distribution format, right? Like we have to go and walk to the movies in order to watch movies. Yeah. But for microdramas, it's kind of like, for microdramas, they just show up like all of a sudden unannounced on your phone. It's such a modern experience, right? Like you're just scrolling through TikTok, and then all of a sudden you get a microdrama ad, or you're on Instagram and you get a microdrama ad. I mean, people are discovering this stuff on the platforms by accident. Interesting. I mean, also one thing I want to note too, is it seems like romance really is overrepresented in sort of like the popular microdramas, at least that I've seen. It kind of feels like maybe this is like giving people something that they might be missing from Hollywood, but I mean, listen, there was that new romantic comedy about the people that can only have sex once a year or something like that. That's the sort of thing that we're getting romantic comedy wise now, like this kind of like very not so good, not very interesting, not very sexy. And so I think that like the sort of web novel format, that serialized format that this is based on, it reminds me a lot actually of like fan fiction. And what fan fiction does, of course, also leans heavily into tropes, but it's like giving you bits and chapters, of a story that has like this heightened romantic tension. And I imagine that like, if you pay money, right, to go to see a romantic comedy, and it's like two people with an antiseptic relationship, like not touching or kissing, then you get this microdrama that comes up on your phone and you're immediately feeling the heat. I imagine that's feeling compelling too. I think that because there's a low barrier to entry in terms of production costs, there's more of a willingness to take, to take risks on the kinds of things that aren't going to be blockbusters, but that are consumable. Like, if you think about it, I actually feel like the romance angle of this kind of fills the old Lifetime movie. Not the Christmas factory, but like the old steamy Lifetime movie need. And so I think that what's happened is like Hollywood sort of, as they've stopped taking risks, like, you know, there was like a piece, I can't remember where it ran, but it was like about the demise of the middle-class film. Like, it's like the rom-com was kind of a middle-class film. It was like a mid amount of money to make. And a mid amount of money that it would bring back in. And there's no interest in investing in that, but that doesn't mean there's not still a need. Just as like people are, you know, romanticy. Americans love romanticy, right? Like steamy dragon sex. Like everybody's like into it. Like there are romance bookstores popping up all over the country and they're doing great. I think that what micro dramas are able to do is bypass. It's interesting that the studios are getting into it, but like non-traditional creators can kind of come in and fill a need. A need that the marketplace has that actually I think Hollywood has gotten too snobby to produce in some ways. I think that's a really good point. I mean, also too, like the thing in my memory that kind of most closely matches with what these micro dramas are doing is Quibi. And I must say, I was once employed by Quibi. I had a Quibi show, not as, I'm gonna tell you something. It wasn't as jazzy as these little micro dramas, but I had a Quibi show that was about Black culture. Very different. I know very, very well that that platform, just failed spectacularly. But how are micro dramas different from and more successful than what Quibi was trying to do? I didn't know that you worked for Quibi, Brittany. Oh, I didn't. So the main difference I think is the sort of register or sort of quality level that Quibi was sort of going for, which was this kind of prestige, you know, A-list actors. They were really shooting for a really high quality. Whereas the initial micro dramas that did really well, that went really viral in like 2020 and proved the market, were actually not that sophisticated. Like it was pretty, as we've sort of already been saying, like a lot of these were kind of campy tropes that we were sort of familiar with. So one of the hit shows is called like The Double Life of a Secret Billionaire Husband or something like that. And I love it already. I love it already. And when you talk to the executives who were behind that, so real short, they used to have a motto that was fast paced drama for busy women. Their main target were women in their 40s and 50s who are, you know, waiting to pick up their kids. From school or that kind of demographic, they would explicitly tell me this. And that was the group that was willing to pay for these content. So what they were basically doing was they were sort of reverse engineering the content based on which demographic they realized was willing to put money into it. When TikTok became super popular is I was like, oh, Quibi kind of bet the farm on the idea that like spending tons of money on this like high touch, super fancy content, like prestige dramas that you would watch in three to five minutes a day or something like that. People really kind of only need a compelling person. It's the same sort of principle at play when someone like Risa Tisa, you know, becomes super viral off of the whole who the F did I marry, you know, plot line. People love a story time on TikTok. I think maybe Quibi kind of overshot how much money you needed to spend to get people's attention, honestly. But I'd actually like to also venture something else. Hollywood has become completely mired and ruled by people that I refer to as the comfort class. And the content being churned out of Hollywood has become increasingly unrelated to me. the lives that the everyday American lives. And I think one of the reasons why you started to see people be more amused by entertainers and content creators on TikTok and the fabulous who the F did I marry like mini drama is because that woman's life is more relatable to the average person than a Hollywood that doesn't reflect the kind of like sort of lived experiences of people. And the fact that the micro dramas that did become popular so often portray a downtrodden character. No, it's very interesting. It's funny. It really relates to a conversation that we literally just had on the show. Like I just talked to a TV critic from the New Yorker, Ingo Kang about like the fact that like now she says we're entering an era of broke TV sort of after this hard pendulum swing toward these unrelatable stories. Yes. We're gonna take a quick break. But first, if you're a longtime listener or brand new to It's Been a Minute, be sure to come back every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday for brand new episodes. And did you know you can make it even easier to get new episodes by hitting the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app? Whether you're a new friend or a loyal bestie, join the team by subscribing today. Coming up after the break, it's not inherently impossible that Christopher Nolan makes like a micro drama, right? Or like Greta Gerwig makes a micro drama. It's not statistically impossible. We can't say it's impossible. We can't say it's absolute zero. Yeah. Stick around. I want to talk a little bit more about how like highly consumable these are. I mean, Chang, you also wrote about how some of the people who make micro dramas describe them as products and not art. Like to be clear, movies and TV shows are also products. But we also do think of them, and at least some of them as art as well. Why aren't micro dramas seen by the people who make them? At least some of them. Why aren't micro dramas seen by some of the people who make them as art? Well, a really good anecdote is I think that the CEO of Realshort has a background in electrical engineering. There's not an artistic background. Again, it speaks to this kind of focus on data and data-driven analysis. Chinese will say that this is a 出海, which means to go out to sea. So it's like sort of being sent out, like shipped out to sea for American viewing. And so they really consider it their own. And so they've been applying these data techniques to sort of optimize for virality. You know, I do feel that one thing that was striking to me when I was reporting in China about this stuff was that there isn't really a lot of just dicursive space in the country for cultural criticism about this new medium. These kinds of questions that you just asked, we should be asking these questions. Like, what does it look like in a world where all of us are hooked on micro dramas? I mean, on estimate, there's about one in 10 people in the world have seen a micro drama. I mean, what does that mean? I mean, that's a lot of power, right? That's a lot of attentional space put into these highly addictive, short sort of stories that feel like it's getting at your lizard brain. So I'm not sure I want to, I want to pass it to Sochil for the cultural criticism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, it's so funny, Cheng, hearing you talk about that, because working as a screenwriter and getting notes from a studio over the last six years, it's increasingly about, well, the algorithm says that this would work. Like, the first time I got a note from an algorithm, like, and I was adapting a novel of mine. So like, I went from like, sort of having this like, pure art experience to like, then being like, the algorithm would like if this happened before the next break. Oh my gosh, exactly. So I actually think that as Hollywood has gotten more corporatized, like sometimes art squeaks through is a good way to put it. The third season of The Bear is kind of a miracle, you know, like, I think sometimes art squeaks through, but I think that we are increasingly getting product, as we've moved to streaming, because they are relying more heavily on data in terms of how to give creative notes. But I think that what we're seeing in America is that more and more Americans are living life in in between times, as they struggle with childcare and take on gig work, or only exist in gig work, right? And so the idea of going to the movies isn't just three hours and the $25 ticket. It's also three hours of not working, or do I even have three hours in between these things? Because I don't have a nanny, I've got to pick up a door dash shift, or whatever that might be. And also, it's like, well, I want to relax. And I don't find having to sit for three hours relaxing. Like, so I worry that we are seeing an attention span divine and like, you know, like economic strain affects your ability to actually hold long term attention. And so what I just worry about is that attention span becomes something that those in salaried positions with disposable resources are able to maintain and cultivate. I started my piece sort of talking about that ham-fisted Tillamathy Chalamet thing where he's like, I don't want movies to become like ballet and opera. And I'm like, well, perhaps, sheerly for their length, and what is going on with people's ability to hold information or not, it may become that. You argued that what we consider art, you know, movies, opera, longer form, artistic experiences, you believe they'll be for the people who have the time and attention spans it for them. And then you feel like everyone else is going to get these products. Yes, that's what I worry about. That also sometimes include literal product placement, by the way. How do you see that shift happening? You are already seeing it with our education system, right? Like, you are starting to see us stop teaching young people that are part of public school systems anyway, like not to absorb novels, right? We're teaching reading through excerpts, like I had done a piece on this maybe two summers ago. If you go to the tiniest, private school in New York, they're still reading novels to those kids. Like those kids are still reading, being forced to read books, they may not want to, but they're still being forced to engage with it. And I just worry that we are sort of creating another marker by which we then can stratify people. Unfortunately, there's many forms of capital. And one of them is cultural fluency. I worry that these are all markers of class and sophistication that we then sort of use as silent barometers of who fits in and who doesn't when across a variety of spectrums, as kids move from young people to adults trying to enter workplaces, right? Like, what I worry about is that you're creating a cultural product that then also becomes a marker of lower status. And I just, these are the things that keep me up at night, which is probably reading too deep into something that I understand is really good business. I share the worries to give like a maybe a more optimistic perspective. When I talked to the producers of micro dramas, they fully acknowledged that this was a product, but they also acknowledged that they didn't get into film because they wanted to make products. They got into film because they wanted to make art. And what they would tell me is that, you know, like everything, there's always these constraints that we have to work under, but we always try and, you know, sneak in our sense of art into them. And I think that, you know, as the industry has grown, you're seeing, you know, very talented artists enter this arena of micro dramas. I mean, it's a medium like anything else, and it may not always be tethered to this kind of busy women cohort. I know for certain that a lot of these companies are trying to expand their range and try and target, you know, maybe a more highbrow audience. And it's not inherently impossible that Christopher Nolan makes like a micro drama, right? It's possible. And I would love- It's not statistically impossible. It's not, it's not absolute zero. I would love to see that, right? It's like, theoretically, there's a possibility in any kind of medium for some kind of inspiration and art. The other thing that I would say is that I think that sometimes mediums surprise you. So, for example, I thought that our attention spans were going to basically like condemn us to short video. But then long form podcasts came out and I was like, whoa, you know, like sometimes these things can kind of swing the other way. And you can get into, you know, people, you know, consumers get fatigued by short video content. And all of a sudden, they swing all the way to like three hour, four hour, you know, podcasts. So, I don't know. Sometimes it'll surprise you. I want to, can I add one other point of a positive? Sure, go for it. Okay. Which is that I do think you are watching a lot of groups and constituents and creators that were boxed out of traditional Hollywood because a studio exec is nervous that this black cast drama and romance isn't going to work. And, or that like, you know, this performer with this size body or, you know, I've seen there are more like disabled characters in micro dramas than there are in mainstream television. And I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. And so I do think what it's doing is giving an opportunity for narratives that traditional Hollywood wouldn't give like resources to, to tell. And for creators that are underrepresented and like kind of boxed out of the traditional system to not only make, but also own, right? Like there's a really interesting creator who comments a lot about the business of Hollywood. His name's Chad Sanders. And he, he is talking about how like you could theoretically raise or budget fund your own micro drama. And if it does well, like, and you get it up on a platform, now you own that, right? Whereas like, you're just paid as a script writer, like through the Hollywood system. So I do think that there's some opportunity for people that don't have the same kind of pipeline to actual like green light in the Hollywood system to find some agency and take up space in the micro drama space that I think could be really exciting. So I don't want to like writ large, write it off. You know, it's like, I see other benefit. What I'll say, though, is that like, perhaps these micro dramas are giving like, marginalize creators the opportunity to make stories that like otherwise hollywood would not produce or in their own words take a gamble on exactly but i think marginalized people want to they want to see like a like something with some polish you know what i mean like but that's actually what got me concerned actually britney was like i'm really glad isa ray had such a success with this microdrama but hbo gave her a great deal and then didn't really make a lot of what she wanted to make yeah so when i look at it in contrast to that that makes me frustrated because this is the same woman that gave us insecure like right like how do you still see it as taking a chance like it's like yeah i see both the benefit of but i do i worry that it's like a second tier system where these stories are getting relegated to right so i wonder like even as we're talking now microdramas are changing right like a lot of the chinese companies are replacing human actors with ai which is making me sad because the chinese microdramas have been those have been the creme de la creme those have been like the best ones but you know a lot of chinese companies uh are replacing human actors with ai americans seem more resistant to that and chang you wrote that some of the american actors that you spoke to were really grateful for finally being able to make something of a living by doing microdramas how do you think microdramas are going to affect the way entertainment gets made especially as hollywood looks to cut costs chang let's start with you on this one to just look at what has happened in the past uh few months with ai i mean it has detonated in the microdrama industry like a nuclear bomb i mean in china i think it was like 95 of microdramas are now made with ai and already at the time that i was writing about i think it was around february or april it was like all the companies were saying that they were planning to replace most of their actors obviously this is how this is coming from a purely business perspective i mean the companies are looking at their competition i mean they're not just looking at their competition they're looking at their the difference between hiring an entire crew and creating an ai generated drama is night and day i mean it's like a tenth of the cost so you know if the company can find a way to get audiences to absorb it then they're going to choose this and but i think in china it seems to be more accepted than in the west like i've noticed that there's been more of a backlash there was that backlash with um tilly norwood the ai actress but i think that right now we're still in the phase where it's making right companies are making a bet on ai and hoping that audiences are going to be okay with it if there's a backlash which very well you know it could happen right in both societies in china and the u.s um companies may be forced to sort of backtrack and start hiring more human actors i will say what i wish would happen is that hollywood would say well now we have this kind of cheap easy to produce easily consumable product that we put out that satisfies some people and let's presume that if they're coming to traditional tv shows or film that they are looking for something else and they're looking for real actors and great set design and or production value i suspect what's really going to happen is like we're getting a billion views on this and they only have three sets why do you need to be in 10 locations all across new york for one episode like i think what's gonna happen is that it's going to like put more pragmatic constraints that um reduce cost onto the creative process what do each of you think this means for the future of storytelling it actually made me really optimistic about storytelling because really yes and i want to say why because even with diminishing attention span the desire for fulfilling story is there and that we're still interested in like a journey and the sense of like completion and following a person's like i actually felt like if anything it's made me feel i don't know if it's the perfect form but that the desire for narrative and engaging with human narrative is still there and that made me feel good so i'll add a uh cultural angle to the optimistic future which is that i think one feature of micro dramas that's become apparent from my interviews is that these companies are very much planning to translate their micro dramas into other languages so there's an ease of cross-cultural communication through these stories and what's is your i think what we're going to see as we saw with micro dramas which is from china and the story forms are from china is that we're going to see story forms from you know the latin american community the european community the asian community all sorts of different cultures are going to be able to put like you know there's going to be maybe like a filipino story that goes viral in the u.s because it's translated and people are going to be able to see it and so there's this kind of interlinking of sort of stories that may be culturally specific but also universal that we saw with something like k dramas as well right which is happening right now so there's kind of there may be a new boom like that i really enjoyed this conversation oh my gosh chang so chill thank you so much oh what a pleasure thank you and thank you chang i learned so much thanks all appreciate it that was chang che a freelance writer and so chill gonzalez author and contributor at the atlantic this episode of it's been a minute was produced by liam mcvane this episode was edited by nina potter engineering support came from carly strange our supervising producer is share vincent our executive producer is barton girdwood our vp of programming is yolanda sanguini all right that's all for this episode of it's been a minute from npr i'm britney loose talk soon