Rub-a-dub-dub, vertically.
"Melrose Place is a really good show."
These Are The Days Of Our Lives
As the entertainment industry continues to grow and change… new things are always emerging. Netflix. Bingeing. Day and date1 releases.
And now, verticals.
If you’re not familiar with them, verticals are short sequential clips of a movie shot with a vertical frame and meant to be watched on your phone. These clips are considered episodes and each one is a few minutes long and ends on a cliffhanger… and then the next and the next… until you reach the end, with all the episodes combined amounting to the length a feature film (usually around 50 total).
They have titles like:
Backstage Romance with the Popstar
Rockstar Dexter Hayes thinks he found his next hit when he dumps his loyal assistant Casey for rising star Scarlett Hart.
Lila Cobb once saved Alexander Vaughn, the hottest hockey player. One night of passion between them left her unexpectedly pregnant.
Betrayed housewife Maria’s life is upended when she unexpectedly inherits a vast mafia empire at her grandfather’s funeral.
Reeling from her husband’s infidelity, Kate seeks solace in what she thinks is a counseling session, only to end up in a passionate affair with her best friend’s son.
They are almost all soaps, clearly.
And they are becoming hugely popular.
I started watching Days of Our Lives in elementary school and honestly it was like giving someone pre-disposed to alcoholism their first beer. I was hooked. By junior high I had my friends watching and we’d all go home from school, call each other on our landlines and then watch the back half of Days (it started at 3p so I always missed the beginning unless I stayed home sick) while we were on the phone so we could discuss everything in real time.
Were Hope and Bo ever going to catch a break? Was Jack really a bad guy or just a charming rogue? Was Shane in the IRA? Was Marlene really buried alive and then possessed by the devil?
By the time I was entering high school, besides the fact that I had developed a weird thing for guys with eye patches (the hot biker dude on Days was named ‘Patch’ because… you know… he had an eye patch), I had transitioned to something WAY MORE AWESOME.
BEVERLY HILLS 90210.
Teens! Beautiful teens being entitled and rich and OMG who’s that mopey guy with the sideburns… meow (yes I had a Dylan McKay poster on my ceiling). I claimed Brenda Walsh as my inner spirit animal and when Melrose Place came along… I was in, of course.
This scene from Reality Bites landed so hard for me:
I knew these shows were bad. I knew the storylines resorted to cheap tricks and cliffhangers to keep audiences on the hook. The thing is… they still worked.
Drama and excitement and anticipation… they are strong feelings. And people often want more and more of them. If a beautifully told story takes 3 million dollars, 6 months to shoot and edit, and plays out over 2 hours with 3 heartbreaking moments that leave the audience breathless….
What if we JUST cut to the chase? What if we became moment delivery machines, artificially pushing audience’s buttons in a formulaic (but serviceable) way?
And that’s the bummer about soaps, and now verticals, ultimately. They are… manufactured rather than written, so to speak. Soaps are stories OPTIMIZED. Jacked up. All the extreme highs and lows. Audience satisfaction devices.
This means, a lot of other standards can fall and the product will still deliver results. They can churn these things out like a product, with traditional soaps airing five days a week, shot inexpensively on soundstages with the same old sets, everything standardized for economy.
And if traditional soap operas were stories on steroids….
… then verticals are stories on steroids and meth (okay, I know meth is kind of weak here but I couldn’t think of what was more crazy than steroids. I’m an old, and meth was the best I could come up with. Any suggestions?)
These things are shot on shockingly low budgets, often getting all 50 episodes shot for a story in a single week.
They follow the same format for success that soap operas did but turnt to 11. They get right to the money shot (if you’re just now realizing the similarity of all this to porn, then you are a pure angel): Hot Single Mom Marries Billionaire. That’s it right there, isn’t it? Why mess around when we all know what people want?
They’re just here to give you a quick fix. They treat viewers (correctly) like addicts. And it works.
I know, because half the time this shit works on me! As stated above, I love soapy things. I can’t help it! I’m human! It’s literally DESIGNED to make me feel things!
But these new verticals… they seem a step too far even for me.
They seem like what would have been on the Violence Channel right after ‘Ow, My Balls!’ in Idiocracy.
Today I’m offering up…
3 movies about soaps…
and 3 soapy movies that, maybe are a little manipulative, but they are also a delight.
Movies About Soaps
1. Soapdish
Damn, this movie is hilarious. It’s particularly hilarious if you ever watched old school soap operas. A sharp satire of every crass aspect of making delightful trash (and I mean ‘trash’ in the most loving way).
2. Tootsie
Dustin Hoffman’s performance is next level in this.
That said, having rewatched this semi-recently, I think he treats the women so terribly (poor Teri Garr!) and is so clueless about the fact that he is, that I don’t think he redeems himself enough at the end. I mean, he really does some awful stuff! As a woman, I have to admit, I bristled a little. But, the movie is so good that I still recommend it 100%.
3. Delirious
I have not rewatched this recently and it’s probably terrible. But I loved it when it came out. Mostly because I loved soaps and loved John Candy and the premise really is delightful. And there are some very creative gags in it.
Soapy Movies
There are tons of soapy movies aka melodramas that are just as formulaic as General Hospital or Help I’m in Love with a Hockey Player (those verticals are obsessed with hockey players for some reason). See: Titanic, A Star is Born, The Notebook.
But there are good ones, too!
1. Singles
The soundtrack wins all the awards. I also get really invested in all the love stories and when Matt Dillon says ‘Bless you’ in the elevator and Bridget Fonda looks at him… it’s just the best.
2. An Affair to Remember
There’s a reason why this is a classic. I already knew the end when I watched it because they talk about in Sleepless in Seattle and it STILL worked on me! I sobbed like a baby at the end and then gasped when Cary Grant turns at the door…. SO GOOD!
3. The Age of Innocence
I just read Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and it got me thinking about Scorcese’s adaptation of Age of Innocence and just how amazingly good it is. The longing, the complications, the DRAMA. Five stars.
This is a distribution strategy where a film is released simultaneously across multiple platforms—typically in theaters and on streaming services or video-on-demand (VOD)—on the exact same day.
Great article! But no mention of Quibi to watch on devices? Although shot horizontally, wasn't Quibi supposed to be what verticals have become? And ouch, after spending a gazillion dollars getting the Quibi platform and shows developed, it failed spectacularly within months. I subscribed, however, and loved the bits that were 5 min. long instead of 3 min. Was Quibi just ahead of its time? And I don't think verticals are just cutting up a feature into 3 min. segments; I've watched some verticals that are simply that; the segments don't end with a question or cliffhanger, proving that they weren't developed as verticals. I no longer see the point of watching. Your thoughts?