How the family behind 'The Bold and the Beautiful' is branching into microdramas

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Set us as preferred On the set of CBS’ legacy soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” at the Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Hollywood, two actors were caught in a fiery exchange.“Do you want to know where Jack was last night?” actor Skyla Lynne asked with a sly grin.

“He was with me.”From behind a monitor displaying a vertically oriented feed, the director interjected: “Could you pause a bit more in between those lines? We might want to do an episode break there.”The scene wasn’t for an episode of the famous soap opera.It was part of the 40-episode second season of “Hollywood Starlet,” a new microdrama series from “The Bold and the Beautiful” head writer Bradley Bell and his son Oliver.

Hollywood Inc.As traditional film and TV production keeps shrinking in Los Angeles, YouTube creators are expanding into Burbank’s soundstages.“I’ve been doing soap operas my whole life, and it felt like there’s been a buzz about microdramas, and it really felt like a natural extension to the stories that we do,” Bradley Bell said.

“[On soap operas] we build two cliffhangers usually on Fridays to keep the viewers over the weekend.Here, you do it every couple of minutes.

It’s like speeding up the dance routine, but it’s really right in our lane of soap operas.”Microdramas are the scrollable, cliffhanger-heavy stories built for phone screens.They are giving audiences a new way into the kind of stories that once belonged to traditional soap operas and telenovelas.

The so-called vertical format originated in China a few years ago and has drawn a growing global audience thanks to its short, addictive nature.Hollywood names, including Issa Rae and Kevin Hart, are joining in.

Now, Bell is moving into the space.The 16-time Emmy winner and his son Oliver recently launched a production company called Red ...