Microdramas are the death rattle of Hollywood

The tendency in the west to assume that China is the “future” can be a little unhelpful. The rise and fall of TikTok in the west over the last eight years has proved that the Chinese market is not really ahead of ours, but parallel. Sure, Americans loved the original TikTok, but they’ve had harder time embracing other big Chinese tech trends. Social shopping really hasn’t taken off here the same way. We have a vastly different relationship with consumer-grade generative AI. Free-to-play gacha games like Genshin Impact have broken through here, but are far from the norm. Electric vehicles, drone delivery, all-in-one social passport apps, the list goes on and on and the result is almost always the same. Some of this stuff catches on, but rarely the same way.

All that said lol, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from watching what’s happening on the other side of the Great Firewall. Especially when America’s capitalists are both desperate to compete with China and, also, clearly very jealous of them. The second Trump administration and post-COVID Silicon Valley are both trying to brute force the American sociopolitical landscape into what they think China has. This is why the same right-wing reactionaries that spent the 2010s moaning about “social credit scores” are racing to build AI-powered Flock panopticons across the country right now. And they have no issue burning everything down in the short term if it gets them closer to where they think they need to be to compete with China in the long term. If you want a really good example of how this works, look no further than microdramas.

Microdramas are vertically-shot serialized scripted TV shows made for social platforms. In China they are callled “Duanju” and they’re a big market, making nearly $15 billion last year. If you’re wondering how they make so much money, basically imagine soap opera-style cliffhangers driving users to episodes that live behind a paywall. Incidentally, this format is already pretty common in the US, but for unscripted entertainment (and porn). But the eye-popping revenue the Chinese microdrama industry has been raking in — and Hollywood’s borderline necrotic state right now — has made a lot of Americans desperate enough to hop on the bandwagon.

But microdramas are not really a replacement for TV shows. I’ve gotten a handful of tips from readers over the last few years about what it’s like to work with western microdrama studios and I would describe the experience as “profoundly depressing.” A lot of the American microdramas I’ve watched are like sub-CW-level productions about teenagers with werewolf boyfriends. In other words, they’re like everything else you see on social media right now: Worthless, but addicting audiovisual goonslop.

The dire state of the microdrama industry is not mentioned in all the trend pieces coming out at the moment featuring excited industry professionals talking about how much business they’re suddenly getting. “It has ​completely changed my circumstances financially,” actor Robert Palmer Watkins recently told Reuters. “I am so grateful.”

I’m sure there are a lot of folks that are happy to have a paycheck after a brutal half-decade for Hollywood, but microdramas are not going to save the entertainment industry. In fact, they might be actively contributing to its downfall. As Chinese culture publication Sixth Tone reported this week, Chinese microdramas are already experiencing an upheaval of their own. A handful of AI-driven studios have popped up across the country that have fully automated the entire microdrama production pipeline. It turns out the “fans” of this content don’t particularly care if humans are involved or not. “I have my own mortgage and I’m responsible for my parents’ retirement. Given the current market of microdramas… it’s simply not enough to cover my daily expenses,” one Chinese microdrama actor told CNN recently.

I’ve written about America’s current culture-wide race to the bottom from a few different angles this year. You can see it everywhere, a borderline apocalyptic feeling that these are the final days of one era of capitalism and that every boat must be burned before the next era comes over the horizon. At some point over the last 10 years, every industry and institution connected themselves to corporate social platforms and basically just gave themselves over totally to the incentives those platforms demanded of them. They’ve been promised that by doing so they’ll be able to compete with the Chinese industries, but none of them are actually looking at what’s happening over there. The world of TV, film, and music are just where that transformation has been most visible. Netflix is buying up YouTube channels, while YouTube is paying creators not to work with Netflix. Disney hired creator Dhar Mann to make scripted microdramas for them and added their own vertical TikTok slop feed.

Big establishment studios like Disney and, even Netflix, apparently, either don’t see what’s happening or think they’re immune to it, so I’m going to lay it out very simply. This is true for microdramas, but it’s also true for every other form of slop being pushed on us by big institutions right now, whether we’re talking about fast food, airlines, banks, insurance, movie studios, or the White House. Big Tech wants you to commit suicide so they don’t have to spend the money to kill you. They want you to forget everything you know about making a product, building an audience, and governing a state and trust that their metrics can help you do it better than them. And they want you to blindly follow those metrics until you become so “popular” on the platforms they own and irrelevant in real life that when you finally get replaced with their AI no one even notices.