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Plot twist: we set out to unwind with one calm little vertical drama and somehow ended up keeping a running tally of which cliffhangers hit hardest. The tally has a favorites tab now. We are aware. We are not fixing it.
The Daily Show is shooting a vertical soap
Here is a sentence we did not expect to type. The Daily Show is making a microdrama. On July 21 the Comedy Central staple announced The Daily Show Presents: Two Billionaires Fight to Dominate the Country... And My Heart!, the first vertical microseries from any late-night franchise, and yes, that title is doing exactly what you think.
The plot is peak format. The president's daughter Alonka reveals that her aging father would rather nap in the Oval Office than run it, so two obscenely rich tech gods, Egon Husk and Jiff Davos, race to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) president to govern in his place, all while battling their feelings for her. It is a swipeable soap that spoofs both the state of the country and the microdrama genre itself, the romance, the swerves, the ninety-second hooks. This is not a random side quest either: the show is the No. 1 most-viewed cable program across social media in 2026 and just posted its highest-rated second quarter among viewers 18 to 49 in nine years. No premiere date yet. When the format becomes the joke, the format has officially arrived.
Why this matters for you: A comedy institution just decided the best way to satirize the culture is to make a real vertical series, which means comedy writers, actors and directors now have a marquee credit to point to. If you make people laugh, take note: the genre stacked with mafia heirs and revenge romance just proved it has room for sharp, self-aware comedy, and a room as good as The Daily Show's thinks the form is worth the effort. That is permission for you to bring the funny one to a buyer too.
Sources: TheWrap · The Hollywood Reporter · LateNighter · Señal News
A late-night room walking onto a vertical set is the big swing; here is who else moved something worth your attention, stateside first and then the wider map.
🇺🇸 United States
1. BuzzFeed just committed to 100 vertical titles. BuzzFeed Studios signed a production pact with vertical firm MuVpix to make more than 100 microdrama titles over the next two years, co-creating original intellectual property (IP) and reimagined classics built natively for TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, connected TV and MuVpix's own app. First out is Romeo & Juliet, Reimagined, launching in August. A digital-media brand that reaches a generation just turned into a volume commissioner, and a 100-title slate needs writers, crews and casts to fill it. → Deadline
2. Shooting vertical is not cropping your widescreen. A new cinematography guide makes the case that portrait is its own craft, not landscape squeezed into a phone: different compositional instincts, a different relationship between subject and background, a different sense of what the frame is doing for the story. If you came up framing for 16:9, this is the reset, and the directors who internalize it early stop making vertical that looks like accidental leftovers. → AXIS AI Studios
3. Here is where the paid vertical acting work actually lives. A fresh Backstage rundown maps the apps hiring actors right now, and the money is real: ReelShort lead roles pay upward of USD 1,000 a day, supporting parts start around USD 300, and DramaBox's app-store revenue jumped to about USD 220 million across 84 markets. If you act and have been circling the format, this is the door-by-door guide to which platforms are booking, and what a day on set is worth. → Backstage
Here's what else is new:
Microdramas are stretching into microseries. A TheWrap read out of the Vertical Media Summit tracks the format maturing past ninety-second episodes toward longer, more ambitious microseries, a sign the storytelling runway is getting longer for anyone who wants more room to build. → TheWrap
US publishers are chasing creators into vertical video. A Digiday briefing details how American publishers are leaning hard into vertical video to compete with creators and grow ad revenue in 2026, which quietly widens the pool of buyers paying for phone-shaped storytelling. → Digiday
🌐 Worldwide
1. A Korean unicorn just planted a K-drama vertical app in Japan. RIDI, the South Korean content company behind Japan's popular webnovel service, launched its global short-drama platform Kanta in Japan on July 8, delivering Korean-style vertical series in roughly one-minute episodes updated daily, with a new K-drama title rolling out each month. Its flagship pairs comedian Jung Junha with ATEEZ idol Yunho. A dedicated new shelf in a market analysts already size in the hundreds of millions is another buyer looking for stories that travel across a language. → The Korea Herald · Asiae
2. A new global app is handing creators 80% of every unlock. Lollipop went live worldwide on July 9 with a mix of human-acted and AI-generated short dramas across thriller, romance and fantasy, subtitled in more than 10 languages, and its pitch to makers is the number: 80% of every unlock fee goes straight to the creator whose series a viewer paid to keep watching. A revenue split that generous is rare enough to be worth a second look for anyone weighing where to publish independent work. → Manila Times · GlobeNewswire
3. Describe a story, get a shootable vertical drama back. New platform Meantio launched on iOS, letting a creator type a story idea in plain language and receive an AI-generated script and storyboard, then scene-by-scene shooting guidance and built-in editing, all in one app, plus a community layer to reach viewers directly. The AI here is aimed at the on-ramp, the blank page and the storyboard, not the performance, so treat it as a way to take more swings, not fewer risks. → Yahoo Finance · GlobeNewswire
Here's what else is new:
In Southeast Asia, local microdrama is beating the K-drama imports. New research pegs microdrama as streaming's fresh top-of-funnel across the region, with homegrown titles outperforming dominant Korean imports in Indonesia and Thailand, where 44% to 46% of users now engage with domestic content. → Variety
Southeast Asia's paid streaming base keeps swelling. Premium video-on-demand (VOD) subscriptions across the region climbed 19% to about 61 million in 2025 per Media Partners Asia, the kind of audience growth that pulls commissioning money toward local-language stories. → Variety
Today's Pick
If you are weighing a jump into vertical, spend a walk with actor, producer and microdrama consultant Alicia Read, whose on-screen work has reached more than 200 million viewers, as she talks through what pulled her into the format and what it actually asks of a performer. → Listen on Spotify
The day the sharpest room in comedy writes your format into the punchline is the day it truly landed, so keep making the thing that is worth spoofing.
Until tomorrow. Stay Vertical.
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