Teig Sadhana used to walk dogs— now, he earns $1500 a day making microdramas

With minute-long episodes and multiple cliffhangers, soapy mini-serials draw millions of viewers in China. Now they’re are taking off worldwide.

Australian-British actor Teig Sadhana, making it big in microdramas.

Five years ago, British-Australian actor Teig Sadhana was walking dogs for a living in Melbourne. Now the 29-year-old is working on shoots where he is paid $US1000 ($1530) a day – enough to live comfortably in New York. “Casting directors are reaching out to me from all across the film and television industry,” he says. His golden ticket? Roles in microdramas, also known as vertical dramas, or “verticals” – cliffhanger-heavy one-minute episodes that originated in China, are designed to be watched on smartphones and are taking off worldwide.

Filmed in a vertical format, microdramas draw viewers in by ­letting them watch a few episodes before charging them about £20 ($40) a week to see the rest. In China revenue surpassed the cinema box office last year, reaching $US6.9bn. Outside China it was $US1.2bn, with 60 per cent coming from the US, especially the Silicon Valley-based app ReelShort.

In the UK production companies are popping up to take advantage of the increasing demand from China. It is a welcome source of income during a time of budget squeezes after pandemic shutdowns and actors’ strikes. In the UK there was a 22 per cent drop in domestic high-end TV commissions in 2024 and there was a 50 per cent drop in international ­co-productions.

The ReelShort version of Pride and Prejudice.

Popular themes on ReelShort and a Chinese app, DramaBox, include forbidden love, billionaires and the mafia (Secret Surrogate to the Mafia King). Earlier this month the top trending drama on ReelShort was Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas, while on DramaBox it was Divorced at the Wedding Day.

Adaptations of the classics are starting to appear: a remake of Pride and Prejudice is on ReelShort, produced by 34-year-old Londoner Ben Pengilly, who has made 15 verticals for Chinese apps with his company, Onset Octopus, including Mafia Lover and Virgin’s Addiction. He is interested in the idea of creating his own app for them.

Pengilly used to specialise in music videos for rappers such as Stormzy and Headie One but then saw “the budgets getting worse and worse”, going from £30,000 to as low as £6000.

It’s speedy work, with shoots taking about eight to 10 days. On a standard feature film it’s normal to shoot five pages a day on average. Verticals often triple that, and Pengilly once shot 19 pages in a day.

That time pressure could sound alarm bells about how the cast are treated. One American editor tells me he wasn’t paid for his work on a shoot in New York, while an insider working in the UK said a ­verticals production company there refused to pay its crew. However, Pengilly and another producer, Tramy Han from Feuer Media, say they stick to UK union hours.

Some agents refuse to submit their talent for roles in verticals, according to casting director Liyanne Marie. But she says it gives actors who might never have had a lead role a chance to try it out. “It’s providing a lot of work,” she says.

Quality remains an issue. Some microdramas are like bad bite-sized telenovelas, and many have soft-porn titles such as Captured and Bound by My CEO. Budgets are low – about $US150,000 – and the scripts are usually by Chinese writers; production companies then “localise” them by hiring someone bilingual to make the lines sound more idiomatic. There are exceptions: My Very Royal Romance, a vertical directed by Zhizi Hao, a UK-based Chinese director and the founder of First Tone productions, was scripted by a British screenwriter. Every person I ask is confident the scripts are not, and will not be, written by AI.

Feedback from fans is shaping the output. One of the biggest UK fan pages, Vertical Drama Love, has 4700 subscribers on Instagram and is run by romance fan Jen Cooper, 44-year-old business services entrepreneur from Tunbridge Wells in Kent. She became “very bored by Hallmark” and stumbled across verticals on TikTok just over a year ago. “I haven’t really stopped watching them since,” she says. She set up awards this year and attracted 16,000 votes from international fans supporting their favourite actors. “People want to escape,” Cooper says. “I have no desire to watch (bleak hit TV series) Adolescence because that is my daily life. If I’m relaxing, I want to switch off.”

She tries to steer people away from the more problematic verticals. “There is a divide at the moment between people who are trying to write really good storylines and the apps that are following the data and doubling down on the more sexual, toxic, violent storylines.” One industry insider said it is rumoured that most US viewers claim to be tired of “woke” content on mainstream platforms such as Netflix.

Cooper says there is not one viewer type. “They think the people watching these are Midwestern American women doing really menial jobs, and that’s not true,” she says. “I went to Cambridge University so I confuse them: I’ve got a brain and I watch these.”

If teenagers wanted to watch them, it would be pretty easy because there isn’t much by way of parental control – just an alert saying the content may be unsuitable.

What of mainstream platforms and national broadcasters? Netflix is rumoured to be exploring microdramas, and Sacha Khari, head of digital commissioning at Britain’s Channel 4, has said they are watching the space closely.

THE TIMES