With microseries drawing big attention and big investment from startup studios and legacy entertainment entities alike, one name keeps resurfacing: Quibi. Was Jeffrey Katzenberg’s ~$2 billion short-form streaming platform just too early? Would it do better in today’s environment, reaching an audience that’s now been primed by TikTok and YouTube Shorts’ endlessly scrollable dopamine drip?
These are questions no one can answer with 100% certainty. And even if someone could, there comes a point where it’s less about whether Quibi could succeed in our current era, and more about how studios already capitalizing on today’s microseries wave learned from its failure.
Second Rodeo is one of those studios. And founder/CEO Scott Brown, an Emmy-nominated director, writer, and ceative producer, saw inside Quibi firsthand: He made a show for it.
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Like the rest of Quibi, his show vanished during the shutdown in 2020. But he also directed 750+ episodes of Larry King‘s digital series on Hulu, executive produced The Rock‘s YouTube channel while at Studio71, and was a creative producer for MrBeast.
When I bring up Quibi, which I know is pronounced Kwib-ee but still remains lodged in my brain as Kwib-eye, Brown gives me an excuse to use: “It didn’t exist long enough to get established as a proper pronunciation.”
So why are things different now? Why does Second Rodeo–which produced vertical romance thriller The Diamond Rose and recently released musical microseries Playback starring Hannah Stocking–and other digital-native companies have a leg up?
“The #1 different is these apps and this format are not trying to train audience behavior,” Brown says. “When Quibi came out, TikTok was new, and yeah, we’d had Vine, but Shorts hadn’t launched in the U.S. Consuming storytelling in these small chapters, that wasn’t really something people did. Vertical content then was not what it is now.”
Brown adds that it’s not just the vertical bite-size elements at play here. “This vertical microseries moment is also contextualized within the larger scripted boom happening in digital,” he says. “Five years ago we didn’t have Dhar Mann, Alan Chikin Chow, Brooklyn Coffee Shop, so many other channels doing narrative content that’s working for what they are.”
He also nods to Asian apps like ReelShort and DramaBox, which he says were “willing to follow the data to find the audience and truly meet them where they are.”
Second Rodeo, he says, is doing that too. “One of the things that got me excited when I learned about this space is the fandom,” Brown says. “There are people an actors where the vast majority of their body of work is in vertical scripted format. They have followings sometimes in the six figures–active, energized followings.”
He relates this moment back to the early days of YouTube, saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it loves to rhyme. Creators were being slept on. I would work with people and see piles of fanmail.” It wasn’t until years later, during the COVID pandemic, that our industry and the creators driving it would get the external recognition they deserved.
With Second Rodeo, which he opened in 2023, Brown is taking his experience and all this precedent and putting heavy resources behind both creators and vertical.
“What we’re really doing is is investing in not only this one new format [microseries], but mobile storytelling as a new medium that will have many new formats within it,” he says. “It’s a highly lucrative, engaging format that fits into moments of your life.”
The studio has been “building infrastructure that allows us to create formats where creators, brands, and people that facilitate audiences finding this content can meet on common round,” he says, adding that scripted projects specifically are “a highly collaborative act and an opportunity for people to work together across all areas of the industry.”
Playback is the latest example of that collaboration. Starring longtime digital content creator Stocking alongside America’s Next Top Model winner Sophie Sumner, Amber Laird, Royce Lundquist, and Sarah Sampino, it follows an aspiring singer who gets her big break when a struggling rockstar invites her onstage with him.
Brown says Stocking was keen to join the production because “she wanted to play a villain. It was really refreshing and fun for her.”
Things move fast in Playback; it’s only a few minutes into episode 1 that main character Maddie Bryce (Laird) gets onstage with Luke Rivers (Lundquist). In that time, viewers learn about Maddie’s strained relationship with her funeral home owner mom, Luke’s growing discontentment with his career, and about a mysterious new uberviral music artist. We also learn Maddie’s a skilled singer/songwriter and that Luke’s agent (Sumner) may come across like a hardass, but has a good heart.
With regular TV, a screenwriter might take an episode or two–or even more–to divulge these character backstories and motivations. But for microseries, Brown says the quick info deluge is crucial.
“TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and vertical content in general has habituated most viewers to expect storytelling immediately,” he says. “Audiences really want that right away. We’re scratching an itch not being addressed in most narrative content.”
As for why Second Rodeo has gone in on romance for projects like The Diamond Rose and Playback, Brown says the genre’s approach to characterization and interaction is catnip for viewers.
“The flaws in characters is what drives the story,” he says. “In romance, you have two characters who have wounds to heal from, and they can heal because they’re complementary. I have a lot of respect for romance structuring.”
Brown says Second Rodeo’s microseries projects have been “joyous” to make, and that “where we go from here is going to be really exciting.”
“I love what I’ve made. I’ve made so many things that I’ve enjoyed, but the fact that I got to make Playback and that it makes sense for the moment, is amazing. I love independent film, and I was taking a swing, and it made sense for my background and my passion,” he says. “Our ending especially–I think the series of payoffs that happen is very satisfying.”
