WILL THE MICRO-DRAMA BOOM LAST?

While the entertainment industry has embraced the format, micro-dramas are not a magical cure for its many ills

- Lata Jha

Two young women, who share an apartment in a metro city, go about their daily lives, bickering one moment, planning something the next.

The kitchen is messy, there is tea simmering on the stove and talk of sleeping late.

One day, the flatmates suddenly realize they had volunteered to host a retro movie-themed party that night. Thanks to suggestions from their social media app, they quickly put things together. But one of them is in for a shock when she realizes her former boyfriend is also on the guest list. And waiting at the front door. More such twists and turns follow in ‘Party of Two’, a micro-drama series on Instagram.

If it all seems rushed, it is meant to be so. Plot twists come in every couple of seconds, there is no time to linger on emotions or character development. The story arc moves fast, because each episode has a lot to say in less than a minute—the entire series comprises only seven episodes. The idea is to hook viewers and keep them scrolling from one episode to the next.

These bite-sized videos stream on Instagram and Meta. ‘Party of Two’ was developed in partnership with creative agency Communique, directed by Samudra Sengupta and Gopikrishnan Nair, and features amateur actors no one has heard of. Yet, it has to date garnered over 80,000 likes and thousands of comments per episode (the number of views don’t show up on Instagram).

These short, vertical-format videos, known as micro-dramas, are made primarily for the mobile screen. And they have grabbed viewers by the eyeballs—over the past 18 months, millions of Indians across the country have become addicted to these shows, which for the most part are lurid romances. According to media consulting agency Ormax, the new content format has established a meaningful footprint in India, amassing 73.2 million viewers in less than a year of existence.