The hit cheesy sweet short drama has gone viral once again after being adapted into a longer-length series, "Is there any need to reshoot it all over again?"
The short drama that was extended from short to long, What a Good Obedient Girl, was labeled "completely absurd" and hit Weibo's trending search list for its awkward clips that make viewers cringe hard.
In the past, people mostly talked about adapting long-form drama IPs into short dramas, as if short dramas could only be derived from long-form works. But now, short dramas can also take the lead to "test the market response" for an IP, and provide a story framework for the creation of larger-scale works after verifying its popularity.
In a dim room, warm orange spotlights fall on a piano. The male lead gently carries the female lead to sit on the piano lid, then nimbly jumps onto it sideways. This scene is played in slow motion, slow motion and slow motion again with shots from three different angles, before the two kiss affectionately.
On October 15, the horizontal-screen web drama What a Good Obedient Girl hit Weibo's trending search list with the comment "so absurd" for this cringeworthy clip. The series premiered on Tencent Video on October 12, immediately topping both the hit ranking and trending ranking of the platform's short drama section on its debut day, and just finished airing at the end of October. Its split-box-office revenue exceeded 1 million yuan in 4 days, and reached 5 million yuan in 20 days.
"What a Good Obedient Girl is so absurd" hits Weibo's trending search. (Photo/Douban)
Audiences who are familiar with romance-themed short dramas must be no stranger to the IP "What a Good Obedient Girl". In early 2025, the vertical-screen short drama What a Good Obedient Girl starring Ke Chun and Yu Yin was launched, and its views exceeded 3 billion in just one month. It still ranks top 1 on the real-life drama collection list of Hongguo Short Drama so far.
The main storyline of this IP is not complicated: the female lead who was abused by her uncle's family is determined to use the male lead to escape, and later they fall in love with each other and take revenge successfully hand in hand. It also gathers a lot of "satisfying plot" elements: a talented female lead with tragic experience, a rich and powerful male lead who is a bossy president but has no desire to control, both leads are loyal to each other, ambiguous tension, revenge...
After becoming a huge hit, the development speed and path of this IP have attracted a lot of attention. It evolved from a hit novel on Fanqie Novel to a vertical-screen short drama, and now appears in a horizontal-screen web drama. It has also completed the filing and publicity for film production, and may be released in cinemas in the future.
The vertical-screen short drama version of What a Good Obedient Girl. (Photo/Hongguo Short Drama)
In the past, people mostly discussed the adaptation of long-form drama IPs into short dramas, as if short dramas could only be derived from long-form works. But now, short dramas can also take the lead to "test the market response" for an IP, and provide a story framework for the creation of larger-scale works after verifying its popularity.
If the vertical-screen short drama version of What a Good Obedient Girl satisfied the audience with classic satisfying narratives of two to three minutes per episode, can the horizontal-screen web drama with flipped screen and extended duration really realize the slogan of "high-quality production"? Will the audience still be willing to pay for this IP?
01
Flip the screen, extend the timeline
This is a revenge drama with the flavor of old-school Mary Sue satisfying stories.
After her parents died when she was 12 years old, the female lead was adopted by her uncle, and suffered ten years of mental torture from her uncle's family. In front of outsiders, she is a "good obedient girl" who never disobeys. But under this mask, she has amazing talent and vigorous ambition. The male lead falls in love with her unruly character by accident, and she also finds that the male lead is the perfect person to help her escape from her uncle's family, and she unconsciously falls in love with him from using him. Finally, the two join hands to take revenge successfully.
The character setting of a hypocritical, black-bellied good obedient girl and a pure young master from a wealthy family, as well as the story that brings great pain first then great satisfaction, indeed has all the qualities to become a hit short drama. Although the plot is old-fashioned and melodramatic, it is just like the online romance novels that many people stayed up late to read under the covers. Everyone knows it is like that, but they still cannot stop watching.
The original novel What a Good Obedient Girl. (Photo/Fanqie Novel website)
Audiences who have watched this short drama must be deeply impressed by this line: "Please be sure to save yourself from the fire and water of this world." Behind this is the core "female-dominant narrative" of this IP. The original author of the novel, "I Took Great Pains", once explained the reason for the huge success of the vertical-screen short drama version: "We always take female subjectivity as the core, and put the proposition of female self-rescue and the dual-power relationship at the center of the narrative."
But after the satisfaction fades, if you think carefully, there is a fatal contradiction in this story: it emphasizes that the female lead saves herself from the abyss, but at the same time, this self-rescue is built on the male lead's "preference" for the female lead, and this sudden and desperate love cannot be explained at all.
In the context of short dramas with two or three minutes per episode, although some viewers may realize this problem, most people still choose to hold the mentality of "it's just a short drama, there's no need to get tangled up".
(Photo/Screenshot from Douban)
If "being satisfying is enough" is the essence of vertical-screen short dramas, when the duration of the drama is extended and the space for explanation becomes larger, the logical flaws can no longer be ignored casually.
The vertical-screen short drama version has 88 episodes in total, each lasting about 3 minutes; the horizontal-screen web drama version has 29 episodes in total, each lasting about 15 minutes. After excluding the opening and ending credits, the effective plot of the latter is at least two hours longer than the former. Under the direction of high-quality creation, what content is used to fill the extra time?
In terms of plot, the horizontal-screen version has indeed made a lot of adaptations, and added plots that do not exist in the original novel and the vertical-screen version: the female lead returns to China and becomes the male lead's special assistant as the president. Perhaps the screenwriter wants to give the male and female leads more experiences of fighting side by side, so as to strengthen their bond. However, the aforementioned contradiction of unequal power has not been resolved, but has been aggravated by the new plot.
For example, logically the female lead has excellent ability and already has the advantage to apply for the special assistant position, but the drama still sets a plot where the male lead raises the recruitment requirements to expand the female lead's advantage, even his subordinate can't help teasing him: "You might as well just write her name directly on the recruitment list."
(Photo/What a Good Obedient Girl)
Another example: the male and female leads get married suddenly, because the male lead says to the female lead, "The identity of Mrs. Duan will become your strongest shield, which can help you get everything you want."
(Photo/What a Good Obedient Girl)
Another problem with these adaptations is that they only make the plot more focused on the emotional line of the male and female leads, and the images of other characters in the drama are still very vague. Xu Miaomiao, a professor from the Institute of Art and Aesthetic Education of Capital Normal University, once talked about the difference between the original novel of What a Good Obedient Girl and its vertical-screen short drama version: "Due to the difference between drama and novel, the micro-short drama weakens other secondary female characters, which I deeply regret. Because the original work is not just a romance story about love between men and women, but also shapes other powerful female characters besides the female lead."
This regret still exists in the horizontal-screen web drama version. The appearance of the female lead's best friend is only to help the female lead carry out her plan smoothly, and the appearance of the male lead's mother is only to bind the fate of the male and female leads earlier. At best, they are just tools for the male and female leads to entangle continuously and then decide to spend their lives together.
In terms of picture presentation, if we put the plot aside, flipping the screen from vertical to horizontal is indeed a way to show professionalism. After all, the horizontal screen, to a certain extent, symbolizes the glorious era of traditional film and television.
Compared with the vertical screen which focuses on the characters' expressions, horizontal-screen shooting pays more attention to the relationship between characters, scenes and picture texture. The horizontal-screen web drama version of What a Good Obedient Girl is indeed better in visual performance. But what needs more attention is how many of these cool-looking camera shots are well combined with the content expression.
In the horizontal-screen web drama version, the frequently used warm yellow lighting, excessive switching and slow motion of different shot sizes, and the unexpected 180-degree transitions, all make the audience confused. When the dreamy shots are not supported by enough substantial content, they are reduced to MV clips without plot, just to make the love between the male and female leads more visually pleasant.
The transition that makes many viewers type "?" in the comment area. (Photo/What a Good Obedient Girl)
This route of "high-quality production" for short dramas, on the one hand, hopes to retain the core expression methods and narrative structure of traditional film and television dramas, but on the other hand, it needs to control the duration to adapt to the current viewing habits of the audience.
When everyone is looking forward to the horizontal-screen web drama version polishing this hit IP to be more excellent, it can neither achieve more depth nor reach the ultimate "satisfying" experience, and fails on both sides. No wonder netizens commented sharply: "Is there any need to make this kind of drama again?"
02
The "turnaround battle" of long video platforms
A data released this year clearly shows the competition between long video platforms and Hongguo Short Drama.
According to the monitoring of QuestMobile, a domestic big data company, as of July 2026, the daily active users of Hongguo Short Drama have reached 168 million, with a year-on-year growth of 107%. This figure has exceeded the sum of daily active users of the four traditional long video platforms, namely iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video and Mango TV.
At a time when attention is extremely scarce, the territory of long video platforms is being squeezed crazily. They need to adjust their attitude to adapt to this short drama trend, but cannot be completely "Hongguo-ized". At this time, horizontal-screen short dramas may be a relatively moderate way to respond to the challenge.
Xu Mengjie, who plays the female lead in the horizontal-screen short drama version of What a Good Obedient Girl, also starred in another horizontal-screen short drama Lighthouse on the Other Shore in 2025, whose split-box-office revenue has reached 20 million yuan. (Photo/Lighthouse on the Other Shore)
In fact, horizontal-screen short dramas are not a new invention of long video platforms. Take Tencent Video as an example, as early as December 2021, it launched the micro-short drama brand "Ten Minutes Theater", focusing on high-quality horizontal-screen short dramas with 10 to 15 minutes per episode. At that time, short dramas had not yet become mainstream, and the term "horizontal-screen short drama" was not popular.
By 2025, "Ten Minutes Theater" was upgraded to "Ten Minutes Short Dramas", which included vertical-screen short dramas, trying to create a complementary mode of "in-depth narrative on horizontal screen + fragmented consumption on vertical screen".
The further development of hit short drama IPs is not the first case either. In 2024, the vertical-screen short drama Infatuation starring Wang Gege and Shen Haonan exceeded 100 million views on Douyin 5 days after its launch. The horizontal-screen short drama Deep Infatuation developed from this IP was also launched on Tencent Video in March this year.
