HONG KONG — As U.S. television series produce longer and fewer episodes, a new genre from China is gaining American fans by going in the opposite direction.
Known as minidramas, micro dramas or vertical dramas, they are soap operas condensed into a minute or two per episode.
Each show, reminiscent of a telenovela, is divided into dozens of chapters, each about two minutes long and with all the soapy elements: cheesy romance, over-the-top drama and abundant cliff-hangers.
“The revenge ones, oh, my God, they’re so good,” California-based retail business owner Jacarius Murphy told NBC News in a video interview.
Murphy is a fan of the minidramas, known as duanju in Chinese, which focus heavily on romance, revenge and fantasy. The stories tend to involve wealthy characters such as a chief executive who’s secretly a vampire or a billionaire living a double life — characters often played by American actors.
“People want this fast dopamine hit, and they can snack on it while they’re waiting,” said Anina Net, an American actor based in Los Angeles who has worked on minidramas for the past four years.
The genre originated in China, where production companies have tapped into the popularity of short-form, vertical-produced, TikTok-style video content. About half of China’s 1.4 billion people consume dramas in this style, according to a report released in March by the state-owned China Netcasting Services Association.
The industry made $6.9 billion in revenue last year, more than China’s total box office sales.
The shows are “still quite limited in genre, mostly romance-focused, with sweet, domineering CEO tropes and modern settings,” said Kaidi Dai, a Shanghai-based minidrama producer.
Now, having figured out the Chinese market, the same companies are expanding into the U.S., where minidramas are finding success just a few years after the failure of Quibi, a short-lived, short-form mobile streaming service. The shows are available on platforms such as ReelShort, DramaBox and GoodShort, which offers free episodes and in-app purchases, as well as subscriptions.
Minidramas cost far less to make than standard TV shows and can make millions of dollars in revenue through a combination of user purchases and advertising. But adapting them to the U.S. market takes some tweaking, said Chinese filmmaker Gao Feng, also known as Frank Tian, who has a minidrama production company based in New York.
Rather than remaking Chinese shows, his company hired longtime U.S. residents to craft stories that would appeal to American audiences.
“I believe that scripts determine 65-70% of a project’s success,” he said in an interview. “Apart from werewolves, CEO romances and hidden identities, we should explore new genres.”
While many short dramas have been based on successful Chinese stories, “if a platform cannot innovate continuously, it will face significant challenges,” he added.
Among the most popular shows is “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” which tells the story of a woman whose husband is better off financially than he appears. All 60 episodes can be viewed in less than 70 minutes on ReelShort, the California-based, Chinese-backed minidrama platform that released it in 2023.
“Hilariously bad, oddly addictive,” reads one IMDb review of the show, which had more than 485 million views on ReelShort as of Friday.
The Chinese-backed short-video app has vied with TikTok as the most popular product in the entertainment section of Apple’s U.S. app store.
“The short videos on TikTok have laid a solid foundation for the popularity of short dramas,” Yan Min, who helped organize an industry conference in China last year, said in an interview.
Min said ReelShort and other companies were advertising on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to attract new users, catering to the “evolving viewing habits of younger generations, who have grown up with platforms like TikTok and are accustomed to short, engaging content.”
U.S. entertainment companies have taken notice of the trend. Netflix said in May that it was testing a vertical feed made up of clips from its shows and movies, while Disney said last month that it was investing in DramaBox through its accelerator program.
Though minidramas seeking U.S. audiences are increasingly using actors with American backgrounds, they often shoot in scenic Chinese locations like the coastal city of Qingdao, with its Western-style villas and architecture, for greater authenticity.
“We seek actors and screenwriters who grew up in the U.S. and naturally embody an American style. Then we incorporate some Chinese elements,” said Ann An, a Beijing-based freelance producer for several minidramas made for foreign audiences.
Turnarounds are incredibly fast in the industry as producers strive to keep costs low. An said a show can finish filming in 10 days, with a budget of under $70,000.
The biggest key to the success of minidramas, though, is the cliff-hangers, which push viewers to keep paying for the next episode.
“The scriptwriters know exactly where to place these cliff-hangers, and they execute them very well,” said Apple Yang, a minidrama director based in London.
That helps explain the appeal of minidramas even if their overall quality is sometimes “underwhelming,” said Ying Zhu, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Film.
“Make the dialogue real and less mechanic. Make it funny when possible and biting when needed,” Zhu said. “One minute can pack in a lot of info if done well.”
