On AI micro-dramas, Mills & Boon and the stories we pretend we don’t watch
Not a billionaire’s penthouse. An Airbnb.
I recently found myself watching a very important contribution to pop culture: I Pretended to Be Engaged to the President’s Son Who Is a Nepo Baby, and Then I Turned Him into a Socialist.
Okay, that may not have been the exact title, but you get the drift.
Unless your algorithm is better than mine (which it probably is), you’ll have come across micro-dramas by now. They’re episodic stories, usually thirty to forty episodes long, each under a minute. I’m talking specifically about the AI-generated kind, with no human actors in sight. Except, presumably, the people making money off them. I assume they’re human and not some super-sentient robot. Yet.
As a writer, and a researcher whose day job involves making AI tools better, I was always going to be drawn to the place where stories and AI collide. I have a complicated relationship with AI. Or rather, I like to piss off people on both sides of the argument.
But this isn’t just about AI. It’s about stories, and the peculiar hold they have on us. Even those of us who like to think we have taste. Or some semblance of it.
Because there I was, watching anime-looking characters with robotic voices deliver some of the worst dialogue ever written. I knew it was terrible. I kept watching anyway.
Eventually, I ran out of free credits and subscribed to the app for a week.
For research, of course.
It starts innocently enough, as most things do. A video appears on your For You feed: a woman discovering that her penniless husband is actually the billionaire CEO of the company where her rich ex-boyfriend works. You have no idea why the algorithm thinks you’d care. Or perhaps it knows you better than you’d like, because guess who clicks?
The first five or six episodes play automatically. Just as the husband is about to reveal his identity, you’re invited to watch more, which means downloading an app with a reassuringly soft name and an icon that looks like it belongs to a meditation service. Another five or six episodes are free. By now, you’ve watched perhaps twelve minutes of a forty-minute story, and you’re invested in the marital fortunes of two people who don’t exist.
Then comes the paywall.
A weekly pass, a monthly or annual subscription, credits to unlock episodes, or an advertisement you can sit through to earn one more minute of story. At that rate, finding out whether the billionaire finally reveals himself could take longer than the average Indian wedding.
People have, of course, found workarounds. On Reddit, someone is desperately looking for episode 26 of I Married the Don. Entire episodes turn up on Dailymotion. Telegram has dedicated groups that curate and share these stories, a public service nobody would want on their CV. All that effort to avoid paying for something most people would be embarrassed to admit they wanted to watch in the first place.
I would like to say I observed all this from a dignified distance.
I have Googled some of these titles myself.
So yes, as I’ve already confessed, I subscribed for a week. My bank details were sitting right there in the App Store, so it took exactly one tap. What I haven’t told you is that I cancelled the moment the payment went through. I do this with every app I subscribe to, because I am a practical sort, you know. My post-purchase dissonance kicks in almost before the confirmation email does.
Which brings me to a rather uncomfortable question. Why am I watching this stuff?
We live in an age when audiences have seemingly never been more discerning. Plot holes are dissected, creators are held accountable, and fictional characters are expected to behave in ways that make sense in 2026.
Like many English-speaking Gen Xers in India, I grew up adoring Friends. When a new generation discovered it on streaming, they revisited the characters with a rather different set of expectations. First, Ross was declared problematic. Fair enough. Then they worked their way through the rest of the gang. By 2026, even Phoebe was apparently problematic. Phoebe! What did she do?
At this rate, the only person on Friends who will emerge morally unscathed is Janice. Oh. My. God.
It’s also rather remarkable that we hold fictional characters to standards of accountability that oligarchs and political leaders routinely escape. But I digress.
And yet, in the middle of all this scrutiny, AI micro-dramas cheerfully dispense with logic, nuance and several decades of social progress. And here I am, watching them.
Then again, perhaps I was always the intended audience.
I grew up watching South Indian film heroes leap off buildings, single-handedly defeat thirty villains and emerge without so much as a torn shirt. Whenever I questioned the plausibility of something Rajinikanth had just done, my mother shut the discussion down with two words: “It’s cinema.”
That was it. The entire critical apparatus of film appreciation in our household. It’s cinema. Don’t ask questions.
And I learned.
I believed that Shah Rukh Khan could be the fabulously wealthy son of the Raichand family, fall in love with a girl from Chandni Chowk, and have it all end in an emotionally satisfying family reunion. I accepted that a perfectly sensible heroine could mistake a man with a new hairstyle for an entirely different person. I understood that a hero could be beaten to a pulp, get up, deliver a speech about his mother and then defeat everyone who had just beaten him.
I wasn’t merely suspending disbelief. I had been trained to give it an extended holiday.
So perhaps the algorithm hadn’t made a terrible mistake after all. These dramas hadn’t stumbled on an unsuspecting viewer. They’d found someone who had spent decades building exactly the muscle needed to enjoy them.
After watching a frankly indefensible number of these dramas, I’ve concluded that there are roughly five plots in circulation. The characters change, the billionaire acquires a different company, occasionally someone gets a new hairstyle. The stories remain reassuringly familiar.
1. The Revenge Glow-Up. A fat girl with a heart of gold falls hopelessly in love with someone she can’t have, usually the high-school football star. She is unfailingly kind, because apparently a fat woman can’t be allowed a physical flaw and a personality flaw. She is humiliated, rejected and sent away to transform herself. Sometimes it’s fat camp. In one particularly inventive version, her family loses all its money and physical labour makes her thin, an ingenious way of suggesting that fat people simply haven’t been working hard enough.
She returns, thin and unrecognisable. In the rarer ending, the man loved her all along and she couldn’t see it because she didn’t love herself. In the more popular one, she destroys him socially, financially or romantically. Sometimes all three.
Five years ago, the internet seemed to be in the grip of body positivity. Today we live in a GLP-1 world, and thinness has made a spectacular comeback as a cultural aspiration. These dramas seem to have received the memo.
2. The Secret Billionaire. A poor man is insulted by his girlfriend, fiancée or in-laws for his unfortunate lack of money, unaware that he is secretly the CEO, founder or majority shareholder of a vast corporation.
My favourite variation has him turn out to be the venture capitalist funding his romantic rival’s company. After several minutes of insults about his financial inadequacy, he pulls his investment and sends the company’s valuation into free fall.
Nothing says romantic vindication quite like a collapsed funding round.
Why he hid his wealth, even from the woman he planned to marry, is never explained. But then, that would rob everyone of the chance to be publicly humiliated later.
3. The Class Uprising That Isn’t. There’s something faintly Parasite-like about these stories, with a dash of Downton Abbey. The haves and have-nots inhabit physically separate worlds, and the colour grading makes sure you don’t confuse them. The poor live in a vaguely dystopian, desaturated landscape; the rich have marble floors, grand staircases and chandeliers. Apparently, the wealthy are still living in the Gilded Age. As someone who isn’t rich, I can neither confirm nor deny this.
The poor are insulted, excluded and reminded of their place. You expect the story to turn into a critique of class and inequality.
It doesn’t.
The downtrodden hero turns out to be even richer than the oppressor, or makes enough money to become one. The system stays intact. The only thing that changes is who gets to be horrible to whom.
4. The Gold-Digger Gets Her Due. A woman leaves a good man for a wealthier one. The good man is handsome, kind and, inevitably, secretly worth billions. She is destined for spectacular punishment.
The economics of romance haven’t moved much: the man must provide, the woman must prove she isn’t after his money, and everyone talks about money constantly. If New York was the fifth character in Sex and the City, money is the main character here.
5. Get Off My Bugatti. This one deserves its own category, if only for its sheer commitment to nonsense. Also for the hoops I jumped through to find it. When I couldn’t access the Telegram groups sharing it, I nearly paid for credits before Dailymotion obliged.
An administrative manager at a large tech company is sent to pick up the CEO in the company Bugatti, which she has been passing off as her own. She meets a man who says only that he works in tech, and treats him accordingly. Her parents join in, because public humiliation is apparently a family activity. They insult him, throw water at him and make it abundantly clear he is beneath them. Eventually, she threatens to run him over.
He stands in front of the car.
She accelerates.
And then, in a feat of technological ingenuity that makes my own work in AI look rather pedestrian, he takes out his phone and stops the car remotely.
He’s the actual owner, of course.
The crowd gasps. Her parents are speechless. Justice has been served via what appears to be a proprietary Bugatti app.
Why would she claim to own the company car on her way to collect the CEO? Why would a billionaire endure several minutes of abuse instead of introducing himself? Why is everyone standing around watching a potential vehicular homicide?
These stories aren’t interested in plausibility. Their conflicts are ludicrous, their resolutions even more so, and the satisfaction depends entirely on how spectacularly the villain is brought down.
I watched the whole thing.
For all their elaborate plots, these dramas run on a single engine: humiliation followed by vindication. The humiliation is prolonged, the vindication spectacular, and neither is subtle.
Nobody in these stories is capable of mild disappointment. They deliver extended monologues on each other’s worthlessness, poverty and appearance, and every disagreement ends with someone being told they are unfit to breathe the same air as the speaker.
And almost all of it happens in public.
There is always a crowd. Outside a mansion, in a hotel lobby, at a wedding, in the middle of an office, a group of well-dressed strangers materialises whenever someone is about to be humiliated, apparently with nothing better to do.
They watch. They whisper. They offer helpful commentary.
“How dare she speak to him like that?”
“Doesn’t she know who he is?”
What they never do is intervene. Spectators to cruelty, occasionally disapproving, never lifting a finger. Which, come to think of it, makes them rather like the rest of us watching these dramas.
My favourite thing about the crowd, though, is its moral flexibility. The moment the secret billionaire reveals himself, it changes sides. The man they were mocking thirty seconds ago is suddenly worthy of respect; the woman they were cheering is a disgrace.
The crowd’s moral compass, it seems, is calibrated to net worth.
Then there is the violence.
Everyone slaps everyone. Men slap women, women slap men, parents slap children, and occasionally people seem to be taking turns. I grew up with the great cinematic slap of the 1990s Hindi film. Thappad ki goonj, as they said. One resounding slap at the emotional climax, then stunned silence, dramatic music and possibly a family estrangement lasting twenty years.
In these dramas, the slap is practically punctuation.
It isn’t only slapping, either. There is kicking, punching, blood, guns and knives. And the romances are the strangest of all.
We’ve always loved the couple who start out hating each other. From Pride and Prejudice to Hindi television serials, the proud man and the spirited woman have spent centuries trading insults before discovering they are soulmates. But Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy managed it without assaulting each other. Here, the hero and heroine can slap, threaten and humiliate one another and still end up together in the final episode. It sometimes looks a lot like domestic abuse with a wedding planned at the end.
And this is where the AI comes in.
Because the characters are synthetic, the slaps rarely connect. A hand travels towards a face, the head turns a fraction too late, and someone reacts as though they’ve been hit with a cricket bat. The technology has mastered photorealistic billionaires but remains unsure where exactly the human cheek is.
Of course, we’ve watched human actors perform violence for as long as cinema has existed. But there’s something about these slightly unreal faces, the awkward movements and the complete absence of a human performance that seems to create another layer of distance. I find myself watching acts of cruelty that might trouble me more in a conventional drama.
Perhaps the artificiality makes it easier to consume.
The violence is also gender-agnostic: women slap men as readily as the other way round. An impressive commitment to equality, if you ignore the gender politics underneath, which seem to have been retrieved from a rather dusty cupboard.
I started watching these dramas because they were ridiculous. Somewhere along the way, I realised how much time I was spending watching people be cruel to one another, waiting for the moment the cruelty would finally change direction.
Written down rather than animated, these stories would probably find a comfortable home in the smuttier corners of Wattpad. But their spiritual ancestors are much older.
I’m talking, of course, about Mills & Boon.
I grew up in a household where reading was practically a moral obligation. My parents made sure I read widely, and like many English-speaking Indian children of my generation, I worked my way through British and American literature, the Russians (every well-read Indian child of a certain vintage apparently had to suffer through the Russians), and later the great boom in Indian writing in English.
But alongside this respectable literary education ran another curriculum entirely.
Mills & Boon.
We read them in secret, traded them with girlfriends and discussed them with the seriousness usually reserved for literary criticism. There was something wonderfully conspiratorial about the whole enterprise. We knew these weren’t books we were supposed to admire. We devoured them anyway.
At business school, our hostel ran an informal lending library of sorts. Someone would stand in the courtyard and yell up, “Does anyone have some trash?” And from one of the upper floors, a book would come flying down.
There was always a stash somewhere. Someone always had a spare. We looked out for our girlfriends.
My own supply chain was fairly elaborate. There were the secondhand bookstalls around Priya Cinema in Vasant Vihar, where I could rummage for hours and emerge with a wildly eclectic haul: a Dickens, a Terry Pratchett, a couple of Regency romances and something with a shirtless man on the cover. I rarely paid full price for anything.
Then there was my very cool aunt, who actually bought Mills & Boon at full price. I regarded this as a level of financial extravagance I could only aspire to. Fortunately, she was generous about lending them to me.
Looking back, the plots weren’t terribly different from what my algorithm serves me today.
There was always the horrid but devastatingly handsome man, usually rich, powerful and emotionally constipated. The heroine was coy, demure and apparently innocent, with a surprising reserve of inner strength. He was the immovable object; she was the irresistible force. They disliked each other intensely, misread each other’s intentions and spent much of the book exchanging remarks that would probably get them reported to HR today.
Naturally, they fell in love.
The power imbalance was part of the appeal. So was the fantasy of being the one woman who could soften an otherwise unbearable man. The stories were repetitive, the gender politics dubious, and the endings almost always predetermined.
And we loved them.
Which makes it rather difficult to blame AI for the terrible stories I apparently enjoy. The narrative chassis has been around for generations. We’ve simply swapped the brooding aristocrat for a tech billionaire, the country estate for a penthouse, and the disputed inheritance for a hostile takeover.
There is, of course, one difference. Those books were written by people, however formulaic. As someone who writes, and who worries about what generative AI means for other writers’ livelihoods and creative rights, I can’t quite shrug that off.
But I also can’t pretend my appetite for these stories began with an algorithm.
Long before an app asked me to pay to unlock episode thirteen, I was standing under a hostel balcony, waiting for someone to throw me some trash.
There’s one more thing I’ve noticed about the particular corner of AI micro-dramas my algorithm has led me into.
Everyone is white.
The billionaires, the penniless-but-secretly-wealthy men, the cruel mothers-in-law, the gold-digging girlfriends, the women who lose weight and return for revenge. All white. The stories are set in New York or Los Angeles, or some vaguely American city where everyone owns a mansion, a Bugatti or both.
It’s an oddly homogeneous world for stories so obsessed with social difference.
Class is everywhere. Wealth decides who gets to speak, who gets humiliated and who deserves respect. But race, that other rather consequential organising principle of American life, is conspicuously absent. Oppressor and oppressed are both white. The only hierarchy that matters is one that can be overturned by producing a bank statement.
Whether this is deliberate or simply what generative AI produces when asked for rich and beautiful, I can’t say. But the effect is curious. Race is complicated; class, here, can be reduced to a penthouse and a shabby apartment. Nobody has to reckon with histories that can’t be resolved by discovering that the man in the cheap suit is worth seventeen billion dollars. Everyone can be terrible to everyone else without the story having to acknowledge who has historically been terrible to whom.
And the audience isn’t necessarily as white as the fictional world.
In my wanderings through Reddit threads and Telegram groups, I’ve come across what seem to be plenty of Indian viewers, and others from outside the West, all hunting for the next episode of a story about American billionaires behaving badly. That’s an impression, not a demographic study.
But the scale of the broader appetite is hard to dismiss. According to Lumikai’s State of India Interactive Media Report 2025, India’s micro-drama market reached roughly $300 million in its first year of meaningful scale, with 450 million downloads and 100 million monthly active users. Those figures cover the whole market, including Indian productions with real actors, not just the peculiar AI-generated corner I’ve been inhabiting. Still, that’s an extraordinary amount of attention, and money, going towards a form of entertainment routinely dismissed as disposable.
I wonder if, for viewers like me, the distance is part of the pleasure. These characters don’t inhabit a world we immediately recognise. Perhaps that makes their behaviour easier to watch without asking what any of it means for our own lives. The cruelty is familiar, but the people and places are comfortably elsewhere.
Or perhaps I’m giving an algorithm that has learned to manufacture handsome white billionaires far too much credit.
Either way, it strikes me as curious that stories built almost entirely around social inequality should inhabit a world in which one of its most enduring forms barely exists.
In an essay about what can only be described as AI slop, I’m going to do something possibly blasphemous and invoke one of the most original literary voices of our time: Arundhati Roy.
In The God of Small Things, writing about Kathakali, Roy observes, “The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets.”
She describes stories whose endings we already know, whose characters and fates are familiar, and which we return to anyway. The pleasure isn’t in being surprised by what happens, but in experiencing the telling.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Get Off My Bugatti deserves a place among the great stories of our civilisation. Somewhere, a literary critic has just suffered a minor stroke.
But perhaps there is something about the familiar that keeps pulling us back. The humiliation, the revenge, the billionaire who was a billionaire all along. We know how these stories end, often before they’ve properly begun. Sometimes the title has already told us.
And yet, we watch.
Of course, Roy was writing about stories that endure because of the richness of their telling, not ones that can be manufactured by the dozen to keep us watching for another sixty seconds. It would be a rather spectacular act of literary vandalism to confuse the two.
But the appetite for a familiar story is real, even when the story itself is terrible. And that leaves me with a contradiction I can’t quite resolve. As a writer, I find the prospect of endlessly manufactured stories, stripped of so much human imagination and creative labour, deeply troubling. As a researcher, I’m fascinated by how effectively they hold our attention. As someone who paid actual money to watch a man remotely disable his own Bugatti, I’m not sure I have much moral authority left.
My subscription ran out after a week. I haven’t renewed it.
I knew how the stories would end anyway.
Subscribe if you’d like to read more of my attempts to make sense of things through words.
Leave a Reply