Vertical dramas are short-form video series specifically designed for vertical viewing on smartphones. The content is shot and edited in a vertical (9:16) format, making them ideal for watching on the go on your mobile phone.

The pioneers of this form of entertainment are Chinese, with this style of short series first appearing on drama platforms like iQIYI. Because the dramas have to grab the notoriously short attention span of mobile users, they tend to feature attention-grabbing storylines, a fast pace and recognisable characters and tropes.

Then at the end of 2023 it went global, with the set up of vertical production companies in the USA, Australia, Spain, the UK, Turkey and more. Have a look at your mobile phone app store now under entertainment, a lot of those names that you see alongside Netflix will be vertical streaming platforms, with perhaps the most well known one, Reelshort, dominating the charts.

So why do we love them? Well vertical dramas contain a lot of the tropes that BookTok readers and romance fans know and love: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Contract Marriage, Secret Billionaires, Mistaken Identity, Werewolves, Vampires, Mafia, High School Romance and more.

But there is so much more to verticals than just the tropes we know and love: incredibly talented actors and actresses, production crews pushing creativity and innovation to the limit in 8-10 day shoots, and clever writers finding new ways to tell familiar stories. I really think that this is the future of entertainment, as verticals have an extraordinary way of connecting directly with the viewer, understanding what we like, and creating more of it! Verticals are here to stay.