The two-minute soaps putting Corrie and EastEnders out of business

Three times a week at 8pm, almost four million Brits sit down on their sofas and find themselves transported to the cobblestones of Coronation Street . But while those Corrie loyalists are sipping their tea and checking in with Ken Barlow, millions more are on TikTok and Instagram consuming a new form of TV: short vertical videos, increasingly with long-running, complex storylines, known as “microdramas”.

What exactly is a microdrama? The word (which is not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary) relates to short-form content that sits somewhere between the mind-numbing sketches so prevalent on vertical videos, and actual recognisable serials. Creators on Vine and, later, TikTok and Instagram Reels have flirted with the format, but it has only been in the past couple of years that their