I’ve Developed a Soft Spot for Some of the Worst Shows on the Internet

Users The Best Internet Slop Is Human-Made Behind the talking fetuses and the horny CEOs are real actors trying their best. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I’ve been watching part of a movie in nonsequential, two-minute clips on my TikTok feed. Here’s what I know: There’s a fetus inside a woman’s uterus, and the fetus can communicate in an omniscient, echoing Minnie Mouse voice with its mother. It also apparently has some weird all-knowing knowledge, because it warns its clueless mom about all the evil characters conspiring to abort the baby. There are people trying to go after the family in various schemes and plots, attempting to rob the parents of their money and house or rip the couple apart by look-alike women who want the stick-thin man so bad for whatever reason. It culminates in a deeply unserious fight scene where everyone is very obviously not throwing punches. It’s a Chinese vertical drama called My Dad Can Hear My Thoughts, or The CEO’s Unborn Savior, which I know because the title is splashed across the bottom, slapped on in a homemade, Canva-style sticker with a bright green highlight. Everyone looks like they’re wearing suits from Temu. I’m not really clear on any other details, to be honest. There’s 60 incoherent parts posted on TikTok and 24.3 million views. If I want to watch them in the right order, I have to download an app called Stardust TV. Stardust TV is just one of a massive buffet of vertical-drama platforms that have taken off in the past year. More people in the U.S. are watching microdramas on their phones than streaming services now, and it means that a glut of companies have entered the marketplace to meet that demand: ReelShort, GoodShort, DramaWave, DramaBox, NetShort, ShortsWave, MoboReels. They all kind of lend from the same grab-bag of words for their names, and they all offer a very similar kind of slop content. Racy, smutty, telenovela-style plots that have been diced up into clips and filtered into oblivion, so that every minute ends on a cliff-hanger and is submerged in this vague cloud of highly saturated Facetune. “That’s part of the fun, and part of the reason they’re filmed vertically for one person to watch alone on their phones. They’re a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure regardless,” wrote Kelsey Weekman for Yahoo News. It’s no secret that we’re kind of in a content race to the bottom right now. Social media and shortform video have pushed everything from music to documentaries into a race to truncate their lengths and make everything bite-size, in order to bend to the current of algorithm-centric audiences. Most of the in-app stories are flooded with ads, have some kind of slot machine feature of in-app coin earning for more clips, or require a straight-up weekly subscription, where you get charged $17 per week to keep watching household titles like Seducing My Sister’s Ruthless CEO Husband, My Husband, the Sword Immortal, or Sex Education by My Best Friend. The demand for more digestible, snackable pieces of content has given way to a huge market for slop. Life is demanding, and everyone wants something that presses on the “good feeling” buttons in our brains. You don’t need to decide what to watch or decipher subtext and creative interpretation. You don’t even need to wait for the drama to start. You just need to keep on scrolling. Erotica is, naturally, a huge player in this space, as a result, and it’s taken on a whole new life force in this era of mass-produced content. Vertical dramas are not your average 120-chapter homemade Wattpad Dramione fan fiction or the ankle-revealing sexual tension that Tolstoy waxed poetic about. This is the kind of stress relief that involves no foreplay. Vertical drama apps use a coin-earning system that rewards users with unlocked clips when they stay on the app longer. The adage that sex sells has held true for many years, but when consumers want something that will light up our brain synapses like a Christmas tree with no effort or critical thought on our part, it makes sense why sex is often a part of this slop content. That’s a precedent that is set up for spending. The weird thing is that even though there are plenty of A.I.-generated microdramas, and even though they often look pretty A.I.-generated, many of these stories are still very much made by humans. Vertical-drama stars have become influencers in their own right, though they do not hide the reality that they are indeed working on what might be the final frontier of human-made, low-budget internet smut. Olivia Rose Williams, a vertical-drama actor with 275,000 TikTok followers, often posts about the misogynistic tropes that women are often subjected to in stories, the on-set working conditions, and the fact that the jobs oftentimes are just means to an end. Other stars, like Vanessa von Schwarz and Ashlynn Judy, often poke fun at the unserious nature of their work, posting behind-the-scenes footage with ironic captions like “My job is so glamorous” and “The type of shit you wear in a vertical drama.” Von Schwarz told me that she’s been working in vertical dramas for a few years now, and in that time has already seen massive change happen within her work as the industry expands. “The sets move incredibly fast, so as an actor you learn to be prepared, adaptable, and make strong choices quickly,” she said. The use of A.I. is something that she is watching within the landscape. “As an actor, my biggest concern is consent and creative ownership, making sure performers have transparency and control over how their likeness, voice, and performances are being used,” von Schwarz said. “I don’t think innovation and protecting artists have to be opposing ideas.” More importantly, it doesn’t have to all be slop. Every new format of art has the potential to make something good. Issa Rae’s microdrama has already become critically acclaimed, and the fact that many actors have been able to continue to pursue their craft in a very difficult economic time is something that really cannot be disregarded. But, like drugs and porn and the Cheesecake Factory, it’s more about if the people want to consume vertical dramas in moderation, or if they want to fling themselves into the abyss of garbage content, regardless of what happens to their social lives or their brains. Really, the questionable part of vertical dramas is the gambling-style structure that envelopes them, not some inherent problem with the content itself. Stories about seducing your sister’s ruthless CEO husband, or getting sex education by your best friend, or an omniscient fetus that can speak to its mother through a weird, rattling voice-over, are what makes this world turn. “The goal shouldn’t be to simply imitate traditional film or television,” said von Schwarz. “The people who understand and respect the language of vertical storytelling while continuing to push it forward creatively are going to help define where it goes next.” Artificial Intelligence Internet TikTok