The Vertical Drama is Upon Us
Our cheat sheet will tell you everything you need to know about this medium and its major players
Hello again!
If you’re on Tiktok, maybe you’re familiar with The Group Chat series. “Season one” debuted in April of this year, and features a cast of characters all played by the same actress, Sydney Jo. Across seven or so short videos, the women she plays are laboriously planning a night out - with all the common pitfalls and comedies of error to be found when a large group of people tries to do anything. But the normal back and forth is supercharged when the characters sniff out that one of their friends is trying to orchestrate something other than a dinner.
The Group Chat quickly skyrocketed to millions views, and even made fans of big celebrities like Charlie Puth (who was even featured as an off-screen voice). “Season Two” debuted last month with an even juicier plot, and it was just announced last week that Hilton Hotels is flying Robinson out to film “Season Three” in a location mentioned in the story.
Now I’m about the same age as Sydney Jo’s characters so it’s no surprise that this series ended up on my feed - but I was surprised to hear that my parents and their friends have been watching these videos too. Apparently for them it’s got an extra layer - it’s a sort of horror story about how modern technology and social conventions can make already difficult young-people tasks even more fraught.
This isn’t the first social media drama to achieve such a wide audience. I think we all remember the “Who The F*ck Did I Marry” Tiktok series from last year - which Natasha Rothwell optioned for TV in September 2024. And of course there’s ZOLA, (I’m fully capitalizing titles if they’re already a movie/TV show/book but not if they’re from the general internet - is that right?) which dominated Twitter when the series of tweets was posted in 2015, and then became a movie in 2020.
Okay so with these examples, I think we can officially say that social media is very capable of generating interesting, innovative IP, right? Well, yes - and we’re actually a little behind the times here in the West.
Vertical Dramas have been popular in China for decades at this point. The art form stems from a type of serialized short fiction called Duanju, which became popular online in the early 2000s. Government censors were slow to catch onto this phenomena, so writers were free to explore whatever topics they wished. And since readers paid per chapter, Duanju became a very lucrative business and was eventually accepted into the mainstream. Today the Vertical Drama (or Micro Drama) industry has become a well-oiled machine operating across East and Southeast Asia. Last year it even outpaced China’s movie industry. Now, enterprises in this space have started expanding into the English-speaking market.