TALL STORIES

If you haven't yet been devouring vertical dramas - rapid-fire video series with over-the-top plots, streamed to your mobile phone - it's only a matter of time before you do.

- Words: MATTHEW SCOTT

The worst-kept secret in entertainment can now openly be shared.

Contemporary audiences increasingly like their content cheap and sometimes even nasty. That's the general consensus shared by those charting the rise – and rise – of vertical short dramas, the short-form series being consumed via smartphones, over episodes usually lasting no more than a minute (or two at most), and with self-explanatory titles such as The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband and My Lover is Two Decades Younger.

They're made on shoestring budgets, there are rapid and constant over-the-top plot twists – ideally one about every 30 seconds – and they're being watched by hundreds of millions of people.

The academic Pengnan Hu is so intrigued by the format that he's currently dedicating his life to a PhD at the Education University of Hong Kong, charting their emergence and their impact. “Not so long ago, it seemed no one was talking about this,” he says. “Now it seems everyone is.”

Hu believes that audiences know these tales – often of revenge and/or romance – are so wildly dramatic they'd simply never happen in real life, which allows people a certain freedom just to sit back and enjoy.

“There's been a lot of talk – or criticism – that these shows are ‘silly’, or that they all look the same,” says Hu. “But for the audience, they know what's about to happen, they don't want to devote too much attention to what's going on. They know the limitations of the format – and that gives them permission actually to enjoy the experience and feel good about it.”

If you know, obviously you already know, but if you don't then the explanation is simple: these short dramas are filmed with a vertical orientation more suited to smartphone screens, rather than the horizontal style more suited to cinemas or bigger and wider TV screens.