Attention deficit television

Speaker 1 Hollywood is struggling, and I want to give Sidney Sweeney an opportunity to talk about that specifically.

Speaker 2 I think that when I

Speaker 3 have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.

Speaker 1 Movies are bombing.

Speaker 1 Christy Springsteen, Die My Love, LOL Dead, last month has been called Hollywood's worst box office run in decades, and these were prestige films.

Speaker 1 Tinseltown sees the writing on the wall and is pivoting, making a bet on microdramas.

Speaker 1 Today on Today Explained, we'll explain what they are, but the bold-faced names of it all: Disney, Fox, Alexis O'Hanian, Kim Kardashian, Chris Jenner, pouring millions of dollars into the teeny tiny next big thing coming up.

Speaker 4 I might be a low-born wolf,

Speaker 6 but I am still Alpha Ash's mate.

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Speaker 7 I'm C.T. Jones.
I am a staff writer at Rolling Stone, where I cover entertainment, culture, and the internet.

Speaker 1 What exactly is a microdrama?

Speaker 7 What a fantastic question. Microdramas are these short episodic films and they're filmed portrait mode and they're meant to be watched and shared primarily on your cell phone.

Speaker 7 So as you're scrolling, clicking on apps, that's where microdramas appear. Okay, great.

Speaker 1 And now I have so many more questions. Microdrama, micro, I mean, microdrama is like me texting my sister about my brother.
What, why is it called a microdrama?

Speaker 7 Yeah, the whole point of them is that they're short, right?

Speaker 7 So they're in between films and TV seasons, but there are 60 to 90 episodes and these episodes can range anywhere from four minutes to 10 to 7.

Speaker 7 It depends on entirely on the project that you're watching. So that's why they call them micro, but it also refers to kind of the speed and the production.

Speaker 7 So we're talking about projects that have very, very, very tiny budgets and they have a very, very, very tiny shoot time. So all together, microdrama.

Speaker 1 What is the appeal?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think one of the really interesting things we've seen about the internet in the past couple of years is that the way people scroll are changing the ways your attention span works.

Speaker 7 So we've already seen in cases like Mad Men, not great Bob, and Ugly Betty. Hi, that's me.

Speaker 7 People are watching things on their phone now and that there is a link between how long people are willing to watch TV show, even if it's cut up into 100, 200 parts, if it means that they don't have to get off of their phone, go onto their laptop, and log onto the streaming service where they know that that show exists.

Speaker 7 And it's also created for these kind of attention spans. So like you don't have time to probably watch four episodes of Ugly Betty between your commute and the office.

Speaker 7 But if you're on the subway and you have access to data, you're like, I could watch two 45-second clips of Ugly Betty.

Speaker 9 You are an attractive, intelligent, confident businesswoman.

Speaker 1 All right, so what's an example of a microdrama that's super popular? Like what is the young and the restless microdrama or the breaking bad microdrama?

Speaker 7 So the best thing about microdramas is that they're not really dependent on these type of audiences that will give them the role. So basically

Speaker 7 there are a bunch of titles that I could like name. For instance,

Speaker 7 Loving My Brother's Best Friend.

Speaker 10 Girl, you have got to get over this crush.

Speaker 9 He's your brother's best friend.

Speaker 7 Or I kissed a CEO and he liked it.

Speaker 4 Well, boss, who was that?

Speaker 10 I haven't seen you kiss anyone like that in ages.

Speaker 7 The titles themselves aren't very inventive, but they don't need to be to capture audiences.

Speaker 10 And tell Nate I'm not gonna kill his sister.

Speaker 8 I'm gonna marry her. Blaine, I can't be with you.
I'm just a man with a prosthetic.

Speaker 9 Aiden Gold is a werewolf, an alpha,

Speaker 3 and I refuse to be his mate.

Speaker 1 How is anyone, everyone, how is money being made here and for whom?

Speaker 7 Yeah, so basically what happens, it's kind of a freebie situation where you will either get an ad, served an ad for these microdramas, usually usually a very poignant part of the show.

Speaker 8 I have a proposition for you.

Speaker 10 Kind of a proposition.

Speaker 8 I know your situation. You're working three jobs, you got a

Speaker 8 pile of medical bills, and

Speaker 8 you're behind in everything else.

Speaker 10 How do you know all of that?

Speaker 7 That is exciting, is narrative-driven.

Speaker 8 I will take care of all of that. I will take care of you.

Speaker 8 All you have to do is one thing for me.

Speaker 7 And then it cuts right before you find out what happens next. What's the catch? And then the ad pops up and it's like, please go to the app to continue more.

Speaker 8 You have to marry my daughter.

Speaker 7 But for people who are active microdrama watchers, what usually happens is you have a free subscription and you can watch up to a certain amount of episodes of a particular show.

Speaker 7 And then it costs anywhere between four to fifteen dollars to upload more credits so that you can finish the rest of the show.

Speaker 7 And a lot of these microdramas, because they are kind of reliant on these instant transactions, it's instant feedback, right?

Speaker 7 It's people who want to scroll, who want to keep scrolling and keep following this. They're willing to be like, okay, here's $2.

Speaker 7 Here's $3.

Speaker 7 Here's $2 to finish the show.

Speaker 7 When in reality, if you look at it, most of these microdrama apps in a yearly format cost far more than a Netflix subscription or a Hulu subscription or a Max subscription, as it were.

Speaker 1 Where do microdramas come from?

Speaker 7 Microdramas are actually an import. The very first place where they really took off in popularity was actually in China.

Speaker 7 Between 2018 and 2020, we saw this huge, huge rise in interest in microdramas.

Speaker 11 Look, there are over a billion internet users in China. Half of them have watched these mini-drama series before, and a third of them are scrolling through them every day.

Speaker 11 So it's a huge industry, 35%.

Speaker 7 But what China really set apart from this was that you could make microdramas fast and cheap. And a lot of other countries saw the success of that and decided we can do this as well.

Speaker 7 So when the United States kind of took on all of the things that made Chinese microdramas so successful, they ran into this huge wall, which was we can make things fast and we can make things cheap.

Speaker 7 I don't know if the actors are going to like it very much.

Speaker 1 What is it like to be an actor or an actress in a microdrama?

Speaker 7 it all depends on who hires you

Speaker 7 a lot of microdramas in la have tried to set themselves apart especially these newer companies as places where you can get great pay you can kind of learn on the fly you're getting a bunch of things and a lot of training that you might not get say if you were straight out of nyu's tish but Other experiences on other sets could mean that if you sign with a microdrama company who is just in it to make the content as fast as possible, a lot of actors allege these grueling hours, poor pay, racial disparity in leading roles, and lack of stun safety.

Speaker 7 I talked to one vertical actress, 24-year-old Molly Anderson, who told me about kind of how much harder it is for women who are acting in these microdramas than men.

Speaker 7 Men have these beautiful, a lot of times handsome roles where they're the sex symbols and microdramas have mainly female audiences.

Speaker 7 Molly told me the male actor is going to be dressed up in a very nice suit, and maybe he's got to shed a single tear once or twice, but for the most part, he's going to stand in the back, brood, and then sweep you off your feet.

Speaker 7 For actresses, you scream, cry, throw up on command, and then you run off to go get waterboarded.

Speaker 4 You are not gonna crack. You're just gonna cry.
You're gonna cry like you've never cried before, but your spirit, your spirit will remain solid.

Speaker 7 That's the typical day.

Speaker 6 Yikes.

Speaker 1 Are you getting paid for 70 episodes?

Speaker 7 One of the interesting things about microdramas is that the contracts also vary wildly depending on what company you're working with.

Speaker 7 So as a writer, you could be looking at $2,000 to just hand in a script. As an author who has a book idea that they want to kind of take and use, $1,000.
$5,000?

Speaker 7 It really, really depends on who you're working with and how much they want it.

Speaker 7 For an actor, you're probably looking at $500 a day, which is super, super, super affordable and really great rate for people who are non-union.

Speaker 7 And from a Hollywood perspective, you can say yes to projects because you're not committing the world. And if anything, you're committing $100,000 here, another $100,000 there.

Speaker 7 costs and money that would frankly disappear or round up to small percentages for giant projects. I've talked to a bunch of vertical actors who are kind of caught in the middle of this.

Speaker 7 They see the way that the industry is changing and they love the idea of Hollywood executives being more willing to say yes to stories.

Speaker 7 What they're concerned about is that verticals and particularly the way that they are made will leave these actors behind in the process.

Speaker 1 Hollywood is obviously having a lot of problems right now. I think October was one of the worst months for movies, like really, really like well-reviewed movies, movies people were excited about.

Speaker 1 And then no one went to see the Springsteen thing. No one went to see the Jennifer Lawrence thing.

Speaker 1 So if you're a Hollywood and you're seeing, hey, there's a way to do 70 episodes and pay an actor, you know, $500 a day and still make a little bit of money with every single person who views them, do you think that this is going to change Hollywood?

Speaker 7 I actually don't. I think microdramas are incredibly interesting, but I think the problem Hollywood sees right now is, frankly, a cowardice.

Speaker 7 Hollywood is drowning right now under this exhaustion with with IP because for the past five years, executives have been afraid to make creative content.

Speaker 7 Microdramas, on the other hand, succeed by creating serialized content with storylines that are virtually public domain.

Speaker 7 So it's IP, just so many IPs crammed together that you're like, yeah, I guess I'll watch it. Sure, I'll watch this werewolf billionaire CEO.
Do you see what I mean?

Speaker 7 All of those buzzwords smashed together. I don't think this will change Hollywood, but I think it's because microdramas aren't intending to change Hollywood.

Speaker 7 Microdramas aren't about, you know, taking over the Emmys, taking over the Oscars.

Speaker 7 I doubt that you could find a microdrama CEO who says, yes, I think kissing my brother's best friend is going to sweep this year at the Oscars. That's fine.

Speaker 6 I'm not afraid of some competition.

Speaker 7 But what they want to do is target viewers during their in-between time.

Speaker 7 These kind of passive scrolls that you know can kind of give your attention to an ad or a three-minute clip about a cheerleader or a hockey player or a kind of sexy werewolf.

Speaker 7 This is where microdramas thrive and this is why I think they won't ever actually take over Hollywood because they don't want your attention.

Speaker 7 Microdramas work the best when you're not really watching them.

Speaker 7 Because if you were going to watch a microdrama like you might watch the new Spring State movie in a dark room with your closest friends, you've got nothing but time to look at the screen.

Speaker 7 I bet if you watched a microdrama like that, you would go, wait a minute,

Speaker 7 I don't think this makes sense.

Speaker 7 This might not even be good.

Speaker 1 How could rules were never her thing not be good? Just me? C.T. Jones writes for Rolling Stone, coming up, is TV getting dumber? Yes, of course it it is.
You don't need me to explain that.

Speaker 1 But did studio executives order it to get dumber? We're going to ask.

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Speaker 1 Today Explained is Soback with Julia Alexander. Julia is a media correspondent at Puck News.
So Julia, in the first half of the show, we talked about micro dramas. You know what these are? Yes.

Speaker 1 Do you have a favorite one?

Speaker 6 In the sense that they're all the same, I suppose I enjoy all of them as much as I dislike all of them.

Speaker 7 What is the appeal?

Speaker 1 What is the love of hate grounded in?

Speaker 6 Do you know what it is?

Speaker 6 It's not for me, and I understand the love for it, though. I think the Venn diagram of people who like microdramas and people who love to read smutty fan fiction is like one giant circle.

Speaker 6 And I think actually the appeal of microdramas is that they're not a Netflix original or a Martin Scorsese movie. They're the complete opposite.
They're a guilty pleasure at 99 cents a chapter.

Speaker 1 We were going to title this episode The Second Screen Problem, but nobody actually knows what that means. When people in the industry talk about the second screen problem, what do they mean?

Speaker 6 So it depends on who you're asking in the industry.

Speaker 6 If you talk to creatives, the second screen, meaning the phone that you're watching TikToks on while watching a movie on your big TV or the iPad you're surfing X on while watching a TV show on your big TV, the second screen is just a lack of attention that is being paid to the main movie or film on the television.

Speaker 6 But if you talk to executives, the question or the problem of the second screen rather is one of, does the adoration for TikTok and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts mean that people will spend enough less time with our streaming services that they'll cancel and we have to fight back for those subscribers.

Speaker 6 But before the phone came around, people would do this with magazines and they would do it with books and they would do it with other things.

Speaker 6 We've always been distracted by other forms of entertainment competing for our attention. We've just never had as many things competing for such tiny slices of the attention pie.

Speaker 1 And Instagram is much more compelling than like reading a Dean Kuntz novel during

Speaker 1 the TV show.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it requires far less brainpower.

Speaker 1 I want to ask you about something that got everyone so angry when we found out about it earlier this year.

Speaker 1 So there was reporting in N Plus One saying that Netflix executives are telling writers to dumb down the writing in TV shows and movies and make it really clear what is happening.

Speaker 1 So this scene from the movie Irish Wish is used as an example in their reporting.

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Speaker 1 Do people in the industry, as you are, do people who cover the industry, did they know that this was happening?

Speaker 6 So I think it's important to clarify that no one is out, and by no one I mean, no executive is out saying, dumb this down.

Speaker 6 No executive is out in the town saying, hey, by the way, make shittier television. That's really going to help us when we increase prices again.

Speaker 6 Right. What they're saying, if this is being said to people, and I have personally never heard it in my reporting,

Speaker 6 what they would be saying is, we understand that our audience has less attention than they might have 10 years ago, and our audience has more opportunities to put that attention on another video format, whether they're watching Reels or TikTok.

Speaker 6 And we understand that that is our direct competitor in a way that

Speaker 6 someone flipping through a magazine while watching a movie, that was not necessarily going to be a direct competitor. So it's not about dumbing down.

Speaker 6 It's about acknowledging where the future of competition is coming from.

Speaker 1 That actually makes a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 1 From the perspective of the business, what actually surprised me is how many people seemed so furious about this.

Speaker 13 So I hate scripted television so much, like, especially lately. Like, I don't know, it's just like mind-numbing.

Speaker 10 But I can't help but feel that this change is going to lead to the downfall of society.

Speaker 1 Where do you think, as consumers of the stuff, as the people watching,

Speaker 1 why does this make us angry?

Speaker 6 I think we all want to believe that we are of higher quality caliber than in fact we are.

Speaker 4 And by that, I mean, you look at all these people who are outraged.

Speaker 6 I mean, I'd be outraged. If someone came out and said Netflix is, you know, purposely dumbing stuff down, I'd be like, well, that sucks and I don't like it.

Speaker 6 But in reality, I was watching Frankenstein the other night with my fiancé and he was playing Candy Crush the entire time.

Speaker 6 And then in a group chat the next day, he's complaining about the quality of films.

Speaker 6 But the quality of the film, such as Frankenstein, a beautiful Guillermo del Toro movie, which is not the Lindsay Lohan Irish Wish, it has nothing to do with a Netflix executive coming out and saying, you know, you've got to dumb this down.

Speaker 6 It has everything to do with the fact that they're responding to what people are saying in the actions that they do. And if people really did not want Irish Wish, they would not watch Irish Wish.

Speaker 6 But the Lindsay Lohan Christmas movies, for example, and all those other kind of Netflix fare that we associate with a specific trope are heavily watched.

Speaker 6 One of the effects of what you're seeing play out is that we had a golden age of television about 15 years ago.

Speaker 2 It's your job!

Speaker 10 I give you money, you give me ideas.

Speaker 2 You never say thank you!

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Speaker 8 Say my name,

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Speaker 8 You're goddamn right.

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Speaker 6 15 years ago, a lot of the bigger movie stars and the writers and directors in film who didn't want to make Marvel movies and didn't want to make big sci-fi blockbusters moved to TV.

Speaker 6 And so for a period of about 10 to 15 years, we had a great moment of just stunning, well-written, gorgeous television.

Speaker 6 And then what happened was the competition for eyeballs on the TV screen started to really speed up and you had YouTube come in. Oh

Speaker 6 my

Speaker 15 double rainbow all the way across the sky.

Speaker 6 And you had Mr. Beast.

Speaker 2 Who would win in a game of tug of war?

Speaker 4 The strongest man on earth or a hundred kids?

Speaker 6 All of a sudden, people were watching this type of fare on their television screens, and that meant that they were watching less Netflix or less Hulu or whatever it might have been.

Speaker 6 So all of the prestige fare that really worked on cable, you know, 20 years ago, it stopped working as much today.

Speaker 6 And so you're getting a lot more unintentional slop, but it's not because they're trying to produce it. It's that they're trying to produce just more content than ever before.

Speaker 6 And if you put quantity over quality, you're going to inherently get some

Speaker 6 rough gems

Speaker 6 mixed in with all those diamonds.

Speaker 1 Could you envision a world where viewers say, we don't want the slop, we don't want the dumb shows, we want prestige, or is that unlikely to ever happen?

Speaker 6 I actually think that's exactly what's going to happen. And it's going to take some time, but here's what I think is going to happen.

Speaker 6 The amount of generative AI content, so we talk about SOAR too, you think about even these micro dramas a little bit, which in part are being made because of generative AI technologies that are allowing them to make things cheaper and faster.

Speaker 6 This is going to increase the amount of content. We're going to enter an infinite content era and a lot of it's going to be really sloppy.

Speaker 6 And as humans who love good storytelling, it's like how you are seeking out really good TV and I try to seek out really good TV and films.

Speaker 6 We're going to have to go and figure out where that is and we're going to pay for it.

Speaker 6 And so you might have an Apple TV Plus or a Netflix in 20 years, 25 years, be $40, $50 a month, but you'll pay for it because they will end up leaning into higher quality programming and backing away from some of the slop as that slop takes over all of our other content viewing.

Speaker 6 But in order to get to that breaking point, things have to break a little bit further.

Speaker 1 It is incredible to me that your take is so optimistic. I don't think I've heard this before.
Everyone's so down on the future of movies and television.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 6 there is a world that is inevitable and where YouTube will eat everyone's lunch. It's kind of, it's been happening.
It'll continue to happen.

Speaker 6 The baseline quality of YouTube videos will likely get better over time as creators get more savvy, but it's never going to replace the need to watch a really good movie or a really good TV show.

Speaker 6 Now, I think the number of those titles will come down, and I think that's going to be really cataclysmic for people who work in Hollywood and people who work in this, in this industry, because you'll have fewer jobs.

Speaker 6 But in terms of producing really high caliber art, throughout it all, really really high quality art has always stayed and people have always sought it out.

Speaker 6 I really do believe that there's a world for some of these streaming services, not all, some of these directors and actors, not all, to continue to leave a really strong mark.

Speaker 6 But it's going to be a much smaller industry than it has been over the last 100 years.

Speaker 1 But there will still be an industry and it will still make good stuff.

Speaker 6 And it won't charge you 99 cents a chapter.

Speaker 1 Julia Alexander, media correspondent with Puck News, thank you.

Speaker 1 Kelly Wessinger produced today's show. Jolie Myers Edited.
Patrick Boyd and Adrienne Lilly are our engineers. Miles Bryan and Melissa Hirsch.
Check the facts. I'm Noelle King.
It's Today Explained.

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