The format keeps poaching from places we did not see coming. Pull up a stool. There is more on the menu than usual, so we kept it tight.
The HGTV prodco that pivoted to mobile-first chefs
A Tennessee TV shop best known for fixing up farmhouses just opened a vertical drama division, and the first cut is a Michelin-bound chef getting his life burned down on camera.
Rivr Media, the production company behind the Home & Garden Television (HGTV) hit Fixer to Fabulous, announced on Thursday it is moving into mobile-first scripted with Dash of Fire, a culinary microdrama premiering June 1 on Shortical. The series follows Troy Davenport, a rising chef who loses his restaurant, his reputation and his relationship overnight in a viral scandal, then washes up in a struggling neighborhood kitchen run by Corrine Miller, a self-taught lifer who is not impressed. A nice trope, executed by people who know how to shoot a kitchen on a deadline. Dash of Fire was created by and stars Jackson Tiller, who has roughly 40 vertical credits and around 1.5 billion cumulative views. Directing duty falls to Danny Farber, a 25-vertical veteran. The whole thing was shot in Knoxville, at World's Fair Park and the Sunsphere.
Why this matters for you: Two things just opened up. One, unscripted television's deep bench of below-the-line and producing talent is now welcome on a vertical set, with someone holding the budget who already knows what shoots in five days. Two, your pitch does not have to be set in Los Angeles anymore. Tennessee is a vertical hub now too. Watch where Shortical's next greenlights land.
Sources: Deadline · Realscreen · Broadcast · C21Media
Plenty more cooking around the table, served in two courses, US first.
🇺🇸 United States
1. Miami picks its first vertical eight. The American Black Film Festival (ABFF) revealed the inaugural cohort of its 9:16 Microdrama Project Showcase, eight series by creators of color that will screen exclusively on the Codeblack app during the festival's 30th edition, opening May 27 in Miami. A second cohort drops in the fall, so dust off your reel. → ABFF
2. Bill Block's GammaTime locks in a sequel pipeline. The former Miramax chief's microdrama platform inked a four-microseries co-finance and co-production deal with COL Group International's FlareFlow, kicking off with She Means Justice 2 dropping May 29 on GammaTime. Translation: a vertical hit can now spawn sequels on a Hollywood-style timetable, not just on the original platform's whim. → Deadline
3. DramaBox plugs into programmatic dollars. The vertical app signed The Trade Desk as its first global demand-side platform (DSP) partner, opening its inventory to brand buyers worldwide and giving the platform a real ad-revenue path alongside in-app purchases. If you have wondered when vertical would attract serious ad spend, this is the answer.→ PR Newswire
🌐 Worldwide
1. Vigloo doubles its slate and lands in LA. Korea's Krafton-backed microdrama platform plans to roughly double original production from about 200 verticals in 2025 to 400 in 2026, add monthly artificial intelligence (AI) visualized dramas, and roll out a creator analytics dashboard, all while its new Los Angeles office goes hunting for US co-productions. Gaming money keeps treating verticals like a live-service product, and it keeps working. → ContentAsia
2. Brazil gets its first dedicated microdrama platform. Tele Tele launches in June as the country's first vertical-only home, founded by former TV Globo, Sony and Netflix producer Thiago Teitelroit, novela screenwriter Antonio Prata and documentary filmmaker Camila Guerreiro. Telenovela DNA built for the swipe is exactly the cross-language intellectual property (IP) buyers have been hunting. → Variety
3. RoseBerry Media opens a library verticalization studio. The new mobile-first studio launched this month out of New York with tech hubs in London and Tel Aviv, and already has deals with A+E Global Media, All3Media International, Banijay Rights, Cineflix Rights and Fremantle to reversion library catalogs into vertical, pointing at a 500-title pipeline by year-end and a direct-to-consumer app this summer. Vertical adaptations of legacy IP are about to flood the shelf. Be the writer who knows the source material. → Deadline
Today's Pick
David Bloom and Daniel Frankel break down the vertical drama market alongside the week's big-media earnings and the OpenAI trial, the kind of crossover panel that puts the swipe economy in the same conversation as upfronts and quarterly calls. → Watch on Media Play News
Turns out the same crew that flips a farmhouse can flip a format.
Until tomorrow. Stay Vertical.