The most popular dish on the menu at Bistro Huddy is the Santa Fe Chicken. Unfortunately, you can’t order it, no matter how often the restaurant’s regular customers do. That’s because the brick-walled bistro isn’t a restaurant at all. Rather, it’s a green screen set up in the Los Angeles home of Drew Talbert and his wife, Andrea Kelley.
Diverging from the stand-alone skits, the life hacks and the memes that populate so much of social media, Mr. Talbert and Ms. Kelley, both actors, are the writers of a long-running dramatic series native to the apps. The fictional reality show, which has nearly six million followers between TikTok and Instagram, is centered on Bistro Huddy’s staff and customers, with a cast of more than a dozen characters played by Mr. Talbert, including Joey, the salty head chef who is dating Amber, the hostess; Terry, the stressed-out manager; and Tim and Pam, a Southern couple who punctuate the end of their sentences with a hearty “Roll Tide!”
In a medium often associated with disposable content, Mr. Talbert and Ms. Kelley are part of a growing group of microdrama content creators who have started long-term projects that bring the audience back for each new segment. He employs wigs, costumes and sets to build an immersive world shot on an iPhone in one-minute increments. The result is a series that, in quality and viewership, outdoes many TV and streaming programs.
Another master of that subgenre is Julian Sewell, who has created a soap opera with a jazzy, saxophone-filled soundtrack set in 1984. The series, which has nearly three million followers on various platforms, revolves around Paloma Diamond, an actress whose signature look includes big hair, bright eye shadow and bold clothes. Blending fiction and reality, Mr. Sewell made headlines last January when he revealed that, in his world, Paloma Diamond had been snubbed by the Oscars 18 times.
While “Bistro Huddy” and the Paloma Diamond soap opera (whose official series name will be announced when the season finale is posted in mid-December, according to Mr. Sewell) aren’t the only serialized microdramas that are purpose-built for social media, they are among the most well developed. Other creators have story lines that take place in a variety of settings, such as preschools, corporate offices, hotels and family homes, with audiences ravenously waiting for the next installment and dreaming up plot developments of their own in comments sections, Reddit threads, the fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own and response videos.
