Today I Learned

“Guys, please watch this insane ad I got on TikTok,” the caption of a viral thread on X (formerly Twitter) read last month. The thread, which has more than 20 million views, contains clips from a film titled Forbidden Desires: Alpha’s Love, about a college professor named Adrian who falls in love with his student, who also happens to be his stepsister. Also, Professor Adrian is a millionaire. And a werewolf.

The plot begs a number of questions: Why does a werewolf millionaire need to hold a salaried job as an academic, albeit in an unspecified discipline? How does the university provost feel that his stepsister is in his classroom? And why does Professor Adrian look kind of like a hunkier Conan O’Brien? To quote Professor Adrian himself: “Stop asking questions for answers which you don’t need to know.”

Forbidden Desires: Alpha’s Love is one of many vertical series, a nascent sector of the Western entertainment industry consisting of feature-length soap operas broken down into approximately 90-second increments and consumed on your phone. The plots are simple — they either involve werewolves, billionaires, CEOs, vampires, or more often than not, a combination of all four — the scripts nonsensical, and the acting quality ranging from decent to sub-pornographic. The female lead is always clumsy, with flawless ombre waves; the male is tall, dark, wealthy, and brooding, in the model of 50 Shades’ Christian Grey. More often than not, the principals are young, conventionally attractive, and white. “They have a very specific look for all of these verticals. I like to call it the CW Network look,” says Kyra Wisely, an actor who has starred in such projects as Fated to My Forbidden Vampire.

ReelShort has more than 30 million downloads and generates more than $10 million in revenue per month, according to Jia; in November 2023, it briefly outpaced TikTok in downloads on the App Store, rising to the Number Three spot.

The platform does not exclusively operate via a traditional, subscription-based streaming model, but provides users with free access to a select number of episodes before they must purchase “coins” to unlock the full series. (The series can cost between $20 and $40 to finish, though it’s possible to avoid paying by watching ads to earn free coins; users also have the option to purchase a one-time subscription.) It’s a paradigm shift from conventional wisdom about streaming, and that’s by design, according to Jia. “Hollywood is arrogant,” he says. “Unfortunately, their production structures, their content delivery methods, and content selection process are in the Stone Age.” By the end of this year, he predicts, verticals will be a billion-dollar industry.

(Of course, all the creatives involves are paid very little.)

Another consistent complaint is the quality of the screenwriting, which is, almost uniformly, borderline incoherent. Because screenwriters are often not explicitly credited, some actors tell Rolling Stone they were unsure if humans even wrote them. “I think a lot of these scripts are written by AI,” Ryan Watson Henderson, the star of Flash Marriage to My Werewolf Husband and My Husband Killed Me and Then I Won the Megaball, says. “There are certain beats in the story that happen, almost to a formula.” He considers this a compelling acting challenge unique to verticals: “I try to bring some of myself to it and hopefully make it as human as I can,” he says.

While representatives for most major platforms did not respond to requests for comment on if AI is used for scripts, ReelShort, at least, employs up to 20 (human) in-house writers and editors to generate its content, according to Jia.

Generally speaking, there is a degree of secrecy surrounding the writing processes of vertical series, though many of the sources I spoke with claim that many of the scripts for other platforms are originally written in Mandarin before being translated into English. “I was told they were translated by human beings,” says Leomax He, a director who has worked for platforms such as FlexTV and DramaBox. “But I don’t know. Some dialogue sounds like AI.” Actor Troy Dillinger says he once pushed back against a literally interpreted stage direction for a series (not on ReelShort) requiring his character to beg for something “hat in hand.”

“They had this ridiculous fedora from Target. I was like, ‘I’m not wearing that. ‘Hat in hand’ is just an expression,’” he says. “And they were like, well we talked to the client, and you have to have the hat in hand.’ So I was like, ‘OK, just give me the fucking hat.’”