Microdramas, often dismissed as lowbrow curiosities, eye the mainstream

Taye Diggs is a veteran actor who has starred on Broadway, in feature films and in prestige television shows.

Yet when he pitched his latest creative endeavour to potential collaborators, he sensed apprehension.

“We’ve met writers that didn’t want to put their name on the project,” Diggs said in a recent interview. “I’m proud to put my name on this. This is something new, and we’re putting out quality.”

Diggs is among the first well-known actors to enter the quickly expanding world of microdramas, the vertically shot, mobile-first soap opera bursts delivered in dozens of rapid-fire episodes, each lasting no more than a minute or two. An entire season can be viewed in less than two hours, episodes flipped through on one’s phone like so many TikTok videos.

But what for many established stars remains a quirky, lowbrow medium, better fit for struggling actors and artificial-intelligence-generated slop, is for Diggs and an increasing number of major entertainment players like Fox and NBCUniversal a critical vanguard.

“We are in a position right now where it’s kind of like the Wild West, where things that don’t make sense are making sense,” Diggs said.

This year, Diggs starred in and was an executive producer of Off Limits & All Mine, a 44-episode microdrama series that premiered in April on the short-form streaming app CandyJar.

His new project is designed as a companion piece to a Lifetime movie, Terry McMillan Presents: Paradise With You, in which he will star this July.

The idea is to use the modern microdrama format to fill in the backstories of characters originating in a more traditional medium. Diggs will not appear in the project, titled Tides Of Temptation, but he is an executive producer.

Nearly 30 million adults in the United States have watched a microdrama, according to a report in 2026 from Activate, a media and technology consulting firm.

What makes Diggs’ project different is not only the eminence he brings to it, but also the hope for a product more sophisticated than standard microdramas, which are often produced relatively cheaply and quickly. As Lifetime put it in a news statement, Tides Of Temptation will have “feature-level production value”, bringing “a cinematic lens to the vertical format”.

The series will be Lifetime’s first original microdrama feature, but the network is hardly the only legacy media company engaging with the form.

While comparatively obscure microdrama companies, with names like DramaBox and GammaTime, have received significant investment in the past year from venture capitalists and entertainment studios, NBCUniversal, BET, A+E Global and Fox have all announced plans to produce microdrama series.

“We’re in a new space and a new time,” said Aisha Summers-Burke, head of creative at BET Studios. “If we’re looking to the future, I think we’re all going to have to think about new ways about how we’re making content, how we are servicing the audience and how we maintain the audience.”

Reality bites

Some of those companies have decided to focus their efforts on translating the reality TV genre to the short-form video format.

NBCUniversal, through its Bravo network, is releasing unscripted microdramas with Madison LeCroy of Southern Charm (2014 to present) and with Georgia Gay, daughter of Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City (2020 to present) star Heather Gay. Both are among the network’s most-watched programmes, averaging more than 2.5 million viewers in their most recent seasons.

Fox, through a partnership with microdrama company Holywater, is slicing the third season of its reality show Farmer Wants A Wife (2023 to present) into more than 100 microdrama episodes. In 2025, Fox took an equity stake in Holywater.

And BET is partnering another microdrama platform, aTwist, to turn so far unannounced long-form episodes into digestible nuggets.

Many people initially dismissed the microdrama boom as following in the failed footsteps of Quibi, the short-form, mobile-only streaming platform that Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman started in April 2020 with nearly US$1.8 billion in funding – and that shut down six months later – or as a low-budget internet oddity originating in China.

But that was before microdramas earned US$11 billion (S$14.2 billion) in revenue globally in 2025, according to Omdia, a global technology market research and advisory firm. Activate’s report found that nearly half of Generation Z prefer watching YouTube or TikTok to traditional TV or streaming.

In April, Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated actress Issa Rae released what quickly became a viral sensation, a 57-episode microdrama called Screen Time, which her media company, Hoorae, produced in partnership with TikTok. It drew nearly 75 million views in the first week of its release. (Rae does not perform in Screen Time.)

“Younger audiences are increasingly mobile-first, and short-form serialised storytelling has become habitual viewing globally,” said Jenna Rosa, senior vice-president of unscripted development for Bravo and Peacock. “And so we’re just meeting audiences where they are.”

Bravo’s new microdrama series with Georgia Gay, Campus Confidential: Miami, which NBCUniversal released through its Peacock app on June 15, tells of life for Gay and her friends at the University of Miami through 50 crisp episodes. The network’s Salon Confessionals With Madison LeCroy, which will debut in July, will feature the secrets spilt by the clients who visit LeCroy’s hairdressing chair in Charleston, South Carolina.

Off Limits & All Mine, Diggs’ initial foray into microdramas, tells of a steamy relationship between a music mogul and his best friend’s daughter, who “returns all grown up and determined to pursue the one man she has always wanted”, as a summary on CandyJar put it.

“What’s great about this time is people don’t care” how they consume shows, Diggs said. “They will put on their phone and not watch NBC or CBS and watch YouTube for eight hours straight.”

“If people are watching this, let’s give them that,” he went on, referring to microdramas. “But then let’s just add a little bit. What will happen if we just increase this quality? What if there’s a meatier story? What if we have a slightly well-known actor?”

“It feels like we’re really laying down the foundation as we’re walking,” Rosa, the Bravo executive, said. “The reaction and reception that we get from the first step out will help to show us what success should look like moving forward.” NYTIMES