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Following the news that Margot Robbie’s turn on Neighbours is fated to be clipped into a microdrama, Ima Caldwell explains the ins and outs of the rapidly growing medium of social media soap operas, werewolves and all
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Alyx Gorman: For the uninitiated, what is a microdrama?
Ima Caldwell: Television distilled, for your dopamine-fiending pleasure! A microdrama is usually an episodic series filmed (or reframed) in portrait orientation, for phone screens. Each instalment clocks in at around 60-90 seconds and they’re aired to social media and on specialised microdrama streaming apps. They’re generally packed with enough plot twists to make daytime television look like slow cinema. One producer described them as “soap operas on cocaine” . Maybe the sort of thing you’d end up watching drunk at 2am .
Alyx: I downloaded ReelShort the other day and was kind of shocked at the content. Forced marriage mafia plotlines; Secretly Pregnant by the Homeless Billionaire. It basically looked like the greatest hits (and misses) of Kindle Unlimited’s alpha male romance charts . Is the Neighbours microdrama going to be that hectic?
Ima: You probably won’t see Margot Robbie’s character, Donna Freedman, fated to carry an heir for her crypto-billionaire werewolf on Ramsay Street, or pregnant by her Ex’s Professor Dad anytime soon. Neighbours is being recut for a vertical video series, after producer Fremantle struck a deal with company RoseBerry Media – which will adapt and distribute the show on its Epis streaming platform. Robbie’s 2008-11 storylines will be sliced into morsels by an AI-assisted production tool called RedSnapper, which both companies insist is used with human oversight. While it may lack the high highs of original microdramas, like Revenge of XXL Wife , it will be stripped of any slow moments.
The real drama here is off screen. Longtime Neighbours castmates are annoyed that their work is being algorithmically cropped without consultation. Whether that translates into addictive viewing remains to be seen – there’s a risk it ends up as enjoyable as an unskippable ad .
Alyx: Has this kind of recutting happened to other soaps?
Ima: Not officially on this scale, although we must not forget fans have already spent years cobbling together bootleg supercuts of their favourite soaps for social media. It’s interesting that a legacy production house has agreed to having its back catalogue used like this, though we’ve seen similar recuts elsewhere. There was Paramount’s chop of Mean Girls into 23 parts for TikTok, and an app recently reframed Alfred Hitchcock’s silent thriller The Lodger into short clips, with critics asking whether Psycho on Snapchat was next .
The hope is that microdramas will reinvigorate a struggling TV sector, but when studios start feeding archive tape into editing bots to a…