Chinese programs the size of a bite earning us fans

Hong Kong – While American television series produce longer and less episodes, a new kind of China wins American fans by going in the opposite direction.

Known as Minidramas, micro dramas or vertical dramas, they are condensed soap operas in one minute or two per episode.

Each spectacle, recalling a telenovela, is divided into dozens of chapters, each about two minutes and with all the soap elements: old-fashioned romance, exaggerated and abundant drama-cliffs of cliffs.

“Revenge, Oh, my God, they are so good,” said the owner of the retail company based in California, Jacarius Murphy, in NBC News in a video interview.

Murphy is a fan of minidramas, known as duanju In Chinese, which focuses strongly on romance, revenge and fantasy. Stories tend to involve rich characters such as a director general who is secretly a vampire or a billionaire living a double life – characters often played by American actors.

“People want this rapid dopamine stroke, and they can nibble there while they are waiting,” Anina Net, an American actress based in Los Angeles who worked on Minidramas, said in the past four years.

The genre is from China, where production companies have exploited the popularity of Tiktok style video content with abbreviated drilling. About half of the 1.4 billion Chinese people consume dramas in this style, according to a report published in March by China Netcasting Services Public Association.

The industry carried out $ 6.9 billion in revenues last year, more than total sales of the China box office.

The shows are “still quite limited in the genre, mainly focused on romance, with sweet and dominant CEOs and modern parameters,” said Kaidi Dai, producer of Minidrama based in Shanghai.

Now, after understanding the Chinese market, the same companies develop in the United States, where Minidramas find success only a few years after Quibi failureA short and short mobile streaming service. The shows are available on platforms such as Reelshort, Dramabox and Goodshort, which offers free episodes and integrated purchases as well as subscriptions.

Minidramas cost much less to do than standard television emissions and can earn millions of dollars in income thanks to a combination of user purchases and advertising. But adapting them to the American market requires adjustments, said Chinese filmmaker Gao Feng, also known as Frank Tian, who has a Minidama production company in New York.

Rather than redoing Chinese shows, his business has hired longtime American residents to create stories that would appeal to the American public.

“I believe that the scripts determine 65 to 70% of the success of a project,” he said in an interview. “Apart from werewolves, CEO novels and hidden identities, we have to explore new genres.”

Although many short dramas have been based on successful Chinese stories, “if a platform cannot constantly innovate, it will be confronted with significant challenges,” he added.

Among the most popular programs is “the double life of my billionaire husband”, which tells the story of a woman whose husband is better financially than it seems. The 60 episodes can be consulted in less than 70 minutes on Reelshort, the Chinese back-based minidrama platform based in California which published it in 2023.

“Hilariously bad, strangely addictive”, reads an IMDB review of the show, which had more than 485 million views on Reelshort on Friday.

The short -line application supported in China made it possible to compete with Tiktok as the most popular product in the entertainment section of the Apple App Store.

“The short videos on Tiktok threw a solid base for the popularity of short dramatic,” said Yan Min, who helped organize an industry conference in China last year, in an interview.

Min, said that Reelshort and other companies advertise on platforms such as YouTube and Tiktok to attract new users, addressing “habits of visioning younger generations, who grew up with platforms like Tiktok and are used to short and engaging content”.

American entertainment companies have taken note of the trend. Netflix said in May that it was Test a vertical flow Composed of clips of his shows and films, while Disney said last month that he was Invest in Dramabox through its accelerator program.

Although Minidramas looking for American audiences are increasingly using actors with American history, they often shoot in picturesque Chinese places like the coastal city of Qingdao, with its Western villas and architecture, for greater authenticity.

“We are looking for actors and writers who grew up in the United States and naturally embody an American style. Then we incorporate certain Chinese elements,” said Ann An, an independent producer based in Beijing for several minidramas made for the foreign public.

The reversals are incredibly rapid in the industry, because producers are trying to maintain low costs. One said that a show can finish filming in 10 days, with a budget of less than $ 70,000.

The greatest key to the success of Minidramas, however, is the cliff-hangers, who push viewers to continue paying for the next episode.

“The writers know exactly where to place these cliffs, and they execute them very well,” said Apple Yang, a director of Minidrama based in London.

This helps to explain the attraction of Minidramas even if their overall quality is sometimes “disappointing”, said Ying Zhu, professor at the Baptist University Academy in Hong Kong.

“Make the real and less mechanical dialogue. Make it funny when possible if necessary,” said Zhu. “A minute can pack in a lot of information if it is well done.”