Seven or eight years ago, a new kind of televisual entertainment was born in China. Microdramas: over-the-top, soap opera-type series with splashy, schlocky premises such as infidelity, arranged marriage and secret billionairehood, in which each episode is a mere 60-90 seconds long, took off there among an audience of the phone-addicted.

And now, as with many cultural phenomena that start in China, microdramas have made it over here. The form is forecast to take in $1.5bn in revenue in the US by the end of this year. Channel 4 announced recently that it was launching its first microdrama, and the UK is already leading Europe in terms of microdrama-watching, with 8.2 million of us tuning in to these things every month.

Numbers such as this give me a queasy, vertiginous feeling about the vast difference in possible human experiences existing alongside each other at the same time. What do you mean, millions and millions of people are watching this stuff that seems, to me, catastrophically brainless and objectively bad? Who? What do they eat for breakfast? What do they dream of at night?

Before I read those numbers, I had only seen tiny snippets of microdramas embedded into news pieces about the phenomenon. I wanted to know what it was like to actually........

© The Guardian