Fox cutting whole season of reality dating show into 101 chunks to feed to the microdrama people

Viewers of Farmer Wants A Wife who hate Hulu and love being interrupted every 120 seconds while watching a show are in for a real treat.

By William Hughes  |  June 3, 2026 | 10:53pm
Okay, imagine this, but scrunched into a much smaller frame and with instructions to swipe every 2 minutes. (Screenshot: YouTube)
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Fox cutting whole season of reality dating show into 101 chunks to feed to the microdrama people

America’s ongoing war with its own attention spans continued apace today, as Fox announced (per Variety) that it was taking the recently aired third-season of its reality series Farmer Wants A Wife—the dating show about farmers, and the wives they want—and chopping it into 101 2-minute episodes that will then be fed into My Drama, one of several apps that cater to fans of what’s been referred to as vertical or microdramas. There, the series will live alongside such major hits as Alpha King’s Hated Princess, The Alpha’s Cursed Luna, and, of course, My Blind Husband Is A Billionaire, all apparently popular picks on the service, which charges its users $50 per month (after introductory offers) to watch various flavors of “title culled from the cheap parts of the Kindle Store” romantic dramas in this chopped-and-screwed presentation. (Alternatively, you can interact with the grotesque microtransaction scheme the services uses for its app, where you buy Horny Robux coins that can be spent to unlock individual clips of shows, divorcing users from a sense of how much they’re actually spending to watch.)

All of which, Fox—which rebooted Farmer Wants A Wife a few years back, after it had a short run on The CW in the 2000s—decided it absolutely wants to experiment with getting into bed with, even though, from our quick perusal, getting in bed with anybody on My Drama runs a serious chance of a werewolf/mafia/horny college professor encounter. The network will not only be putting the season of the reality dating show (which aired last year) onto the service, but will run ads promoting it during the show’s upcoming fourth season finale next Tuesday, including a promo giving users enough coins to unlock all 101 chunks of the season in full. This, despite the fact that you can literally stream that whole season right now on Hulu for significantly less than a My Drama subscription costs you, and without having to swipe to the next vertically cut video every 120 seconds.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to watch TV shows about horny lycanthropic college professors who may or may not ties to organized crime, of course. (Although you could probably find some made with more care than the average My Drama offering.) But these vertical drama/microdrama sites do often seem like they’re engaging in predatory behaviors, trying to hook their viewers on salacious moments before tightening the financial noose. (You can get a much more in-depth exploration of the issues with the model right here.) We get that TV networks are pretty damn desperate at this point to meet their viewers where they actually are—i.e., their phones— at this point, but there’s still something very odd about taking an existing show, cutting and editing it down for vertical consumption, and then feeding it to a site like this. Don’t the Farmers deserve better than this? And what, praytell, of the Wives?

 
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