TMTPost: AI micro-dramas enter 2.0 as output soars and quality concerns grow

On November 12, 2026, TMTPost published an analysis arguing that AI short dramas have moved past the phase of validating the tooling and into a stage of structured competition within the industry. The piece points to the back-to-back success of two breakout AI short dramas, 罪妻开荒 and 持械入宋, as the turning point. 持械入宋 was assembled online by a group that included ride-hailing drivers, mothers, freight drivers and office workers. It has reached 10 seasons with roughly 1,000 episodes, each under two minutes, and its self-reported total play count has surpassed 12 billion, with viewers still asking for new episodes. The article also cites industry figures showing that nearly 550,000 micro short dramas went online in the first ten months of this year, and AI-produced dramas accounted for more than 94 percent of them.

Alongside the praise, the article notes that concerns over homogenization and oversimplified writing have surfaced at the same time. The hashtag #红果短剧降智# trended on Chinese social platforms, and some critics have dismissed AI short dramas as computational junk, while others treat them as a breakthrough format. TMTPost frames this as a structural tension between commercial hype and content governance, stressing that lower production costs and lower entry barriers do not automatically mean relaxed standards or easy profits. A creator who is learning to make AI comic dramas told 商业新研社 that the workflow generally covers generating the story, writing the script and storyboard, extracting character information, producing character three-view sheets and scene images, writing prompts for video generation, and finally generating the video. The AI tools themselves are easy to pick up in a day or two, but producing quality work demands careful scripting, historical research, character building, narrative logic and prompt design, skills that take far longer to develop. The article adds that before 2026, short dramas were mostly live-action stories about comebacks, revenge, powerful bosses, family conflicts and warlords, aimed at lower-tier markets and older audiences, and that the industry's shift is still unfolding.