Pop culture phenomena go through a progression of cultural ubiquity that’s usually pretty easy to track. The first, and best, stage, of course, is “You haven’t even heard about this yet,” when things are both at their undeniable coolest, and those of us not glued to the cutting edge are freed of the burden of learning about them at all. But then the long, frequently miserable slide down the sled hill of public awareness begins, as the video format or meme or joke topic or whatever it is first becomes widespread on social media, and then bleeds into mainstream entertainment, and then, fuck, they’re everywhere. “Co-opted by a political candidate for an ad” is somewhere near the end of the descent, right before you slam head first into the solid brick wall of cultural relevance known as “shows up in a Wendy’s ad.”
Such is the fate of the online vertical microdrama, the latest widespread efforts to monetize our various online video scrolling addictions, and which has now wound up in the playbook of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. This is per Variety, which reports that Raman—who’s currently polling better than incumbent Karen Bass in the hotly contested mayoral race—has decided that the one thing her campaign was really lacking was the same kind of cinematography seen in such internet-sequestered “shows” as Rented A Billionaire Husband For Christmas or Claimed By My Ex’s Alpha Brother. (Real shows, by the way, available on prominent microdrama site ReelShort; it’s actually pretty hard to make up fake titles in this genre that sound noticeably more absurd than the genuine stuff.)
Raman actually started running microdrama ads earlier this year, after her campaign was approached by a supporter who ran his own production company dabbling in the nascent form. (“They were both very supportive and also quite skeptical of… ‘What even is this?’” he revealed.) Although they didn’t feature the candidate, the videos—”pairing soap-opera plotlines with detailed discussions of Raman’s positions on public transit, tenant protections, and rent stabilization”—were genuinely successful, snagging 850,000 views during the run up to the race’s primary back in June. (Apparently working better than rival candidate Spencer Pratt’s turn to full-blown AI slop; truly, the 2020s are a remarkable time for public political discourse.) The campaign commissioned a new set of four for the election proper, including loaning out the candidate to actually show up in them this time; they apparently include parodies of Mean Girls and The Pitt, along with a lot of nods to the importance of the film industry—because, for all that they’re patently ridiculous, microdramas are apparently where a lot of film professionals have had to turn lately to keep the rend paid, amid Hollywood’s various ongoing woes.
Anyway: We assume we’ll see about three more candidates try this thing, before the whole concept is permanently poisoned; that’s just the way it goes, after all, on the pop culture sled ride toward hell.
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