What If There Were Microdramas for Dads?

'Return Offer' isn't that, but it is better than your average microdrama

Return Offer

Like everyone in the entertainment industry right now, I am fascinated by microdramas. These are shortform vertical videos that tell serialized narrative stories. You could think of them as soap operas boiled down and reconstituted for TikTok attention spans. Seasons often have 50-100 episodes that are no more than a few minutes long. The format started in China, and the audience is predominantly women. The press keeps reporting eye-popping figures about how big the microdrama business is — ReelShort, one of the leading microdrama companies, reported $1.2 billion in in-app purchases last year. Viewers who want to know what happens next pay a little bit of money to watch the next episode. It’s a mildly distasteful business model that’s common in video games, and apparently there are a lot of people willing to pay for shows that way, too.

Microdramas are an innovative format with a lot of room to grow (they have to move away from in-app purchases and toward advertising if they want to be respectable, though). I love the idea of them, but I have a hard time actually watching them. They tend to be really bad. They have extremely low budgets, and are written and performed in an amateurish style. The most popular microdrama on ReelShort is called The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband, and it’s barely comprehensible if you’re used to watching normal shows.

Right now, microdramas are bad, but there are people trying to figure out how to make good ones. A startup called Watch Club recently launched that is offering a more premium microdrama experience. I watched the first seven episodes of its first show, a coming-of-age drama called Return Offer, and was pleasantly surprised at how decent it was.

Return Offer follows three interns at a San Francisco AI company who are trying to get hired full-time when their internship ends. It’s potentially life-changing money — “you guys are gonna be millionaires by the time you’re 25” — and even though the interns are friends, they’re competitive, and there’s only one spot. It’s a workplace drama with romance and betrayals and stuff like that. Unlike other microdramas I’ve seen, it’s TV-quality. If this were on Netflix, it would be one of its better young adult dramas.

The premise is timely — there really is an AI gold rush happening in San Francisco right now where a lot of ambitious young people are trying to become millionaires by the time they’re 25 — and it has an appealing tension between being seductive and repellant. I’m not saying Return Offer is as good as Industry or The Wolf of Wall Street, but those also have this tension. I enjoyed the intimate shaky cam, proficient performances, and thoughtfully selected costumes. Episodes end on intriguing cliffhangers. I genuinely wanted to know what happened next. Between episodes, there are bumpers consisting of in-character social media posts and text messages and other bits of supplemental material that creates a fun multimedia feel. The most impressive thing to me, though, is that the show is properly color-corrected, which is extremely rare for small productions like this. It makes it look polished and professional.

That professionalism is what differentiates Watch Club. Watch Club uses SAG actors and WGA writers, which other microdrama producers do not. The show was created by Devon Albert-Stone, Watch Club’s founding producer, who previously was co-head of development at Michael Showalter’s production company, and directed by Jackie Zhou, who directed Chappell Roan’s music video for “Hot to Go.” The company was founded by Henry Soong, a former product manager at Meta. It has a pretty cool app that also functions as a social network. After you watch an episode, you can respond to a poll about how you would react if you were in the characters’ shoes, and then post a reaction video about it. The interactivity is all very Gen Z.

Watching Return Offer and using the Watch Club app got me even more excited about microdramas. I still have some reservations about the overall business model and the quality, but maybe there really are opportunities for creative and economic growth in the microdrama space. What if men watched microdramas? What would a microdrama Dad Show look like? It would have to be an action thriller. My first thought is that it could be a riff on Taken. A father has to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Simple, familiar, lends itself to action and emotion. If you like this idea, I am looking for angel investors for my Dad Microdrama startup. To keep costs down, I’m going to use AI scripts generated by the company from Return Offer.