Another day, another app to watch microdramas on.
aTwist debuted this past week, and I have had a lot of feelings watching it. It launched from TV vets Jana Winograde, Susan Rovner and Lloyd Braun, which makes things immediately more interesting. Why? Because as television vets, they should know what makes a hit and what doesn’t.
And their resumes are genuinely absurd — Winograde ran Showtime, Rovner was chairman of NBCUniversal content and president of Warner Bros Television, and Braun chaired ABC Entertainment Group and WME. That’s not three people dabbling in a trend. That’s three people who spent decades deciding what got made in legacy television walking into verticals on purpose.
Which is the part I find fascinating, honestly. For a while the industry treated this format as a curiosity — a thing happening on phones that didn’t concern real Hollywood. Now the people who used to run real Hollywood are building the phones’ programming. That’s a genuine shift in who takes this medium seriously, and I’ve been waiting for it.
What I picked first
After subscribing, I sat down to look through everything and figure out what to watch first.
I settled on Hollywood Starlet, because I’d been hearing about it for a bit. Starring Eric Guilmette, Bella Mraz, and Molly Anderson, the drama centers on: “Starlet, an overlooked and under appreciated cleaner who spends her days working hard to financially support her abusive sister and mother. Despite her harsh domestic life, she harbors deep dreams of becoming an actress. Her life changes completely when she crosses paths with Jack Prince, a famous, well-known Hollywood actor. Jack is captivated by Starlet’s raw acting talent and quickly falls for her. Stepping in as both a romantic interest and a mentor, Jack helps her escape her toxic family dynamics, kickstarts her professional acting career, and guides her on a rapid rise toward Hollywood stardom.”
Making Hollywood feel new
Having been around the Hollywood machine a lot, I wondered how they’d make this feel fresh while still fitting in the drama and the chaos.
The first thing I notice in any drama is the settings, the location, and the costuming. And instantly, those three things were different here.
When it feels like everything is different — when it feels like someone is handing the viewer something new — you’re automatically intrigued.
I want to underline this, because I complain about it constantly and it’s the fastest tell for how much a production actually cares. Wardrobe and location are the cheapest, most efficient storytelling tools available in a format where you have ninety seconds and no room for exposition. In a story specifically about a woman moving from invisible to seen, what she wears and where she stands is the arc. You can show me her transformation without a single line of dialogue if you’ve thought about it. Somebody here thought about it.
With the upsurge in dramas’ popularity worldwide, the money these apps are making, studios’ insistence on AI, and the mainstream promotion the format has started to get, it feels more important than ever that people put their best foot forward.
aTwist has clearly decided to up the game and create something that plays differently with Hollywood Starlet.
And that’s a strategic choice as much as an artistic one, I think. When you’re the new platform in a crowded market, you cannot win on volume — the incumbents have years of library on you. The only available advantage is looking better than everyone else, immediately, in the first three seconds. Production value is aTwist’s whole pitch, and they made sure you’d see it before you’d read a synopsis.
A quality script changes everything
The first thing I’ve thought about since watching this is that a quality script makes all the difference.
Hollywood Starlet comes from the mind of Bradley Bell, head writer and executive producer of The Bold and the Beautiful.
He put his foot in this script and made sure it carried the essence of a soap opera while also playing into the dreams people actually have, and selling a fantasy.
A fantasy of getting the guy and getting the dream.
And honestly? Bell is the most obvious hire in the world once you say it out loud, and I can’t believe it took this long for someone to make it. Daytime soaps have been solving the exact problems verticals have for fifty years. Enormous episode counts. Tiny budgets per unit. Cliffhangers on a relentless schedule. Emotional beats that have to land in two minutes because that’s all the time there is between commercial breaks. The man has written more compressed melodrama than almost anyone alive.
Vertical dramas have essentially been reinventing soap opera structure by trial and error. Bell already knows it. Every instinct that makes daytime work — the pace of revelation, the way a scene ends on a look, the confidence to be sincerely emotional without irony — transfers directly. And you can feel it. This doesn’t play like a vertical trying to be prestige television. It plays like a soap that happens to be vertical, which is a much more honest and much more effective thing to be.
Selling the fantasy
Selling people on those things isn’t a bad thing. People want to escape their lives, and in doing that, feel a little better about them. At least, I know I do.
I think that’s part of the fun of dramas, or of entertainment in general.
The beauty of this one is that you watch Starlet, who is working so hard to take care of everybody else. It’s an escape from the world immediately around us, and a reminder that you have to put yourself first.
You cannot pour into everyone else’s cup when you aren’t pouring into your own.
And that’s why the premise works on people rather than just entertaining them, I think. The Cinderella story gets dismissed as wish fulfillment, but look at what’s actually being wished for here. Starlet isn’t dreaming of money. She’s dreaming of being allowed to want something. Her family has organized her entire life around her usefulness to them, which is a very specific and very recognizable kind of abuse — not being hit, being spent.
So the fantasy isn’t the mansion. It’s permission. That’s why it lands with people who will never be discovered by a famous actor: because most of us know exactly what it feels like to be the person everyone else’s life is built on top of.
Bella Mraz
Mraz shined here, for several reasons.
The first is that she can play an enormous range of emotion, and it doesn’t matter whether you agree with her character — she draws you in.
She can go from making a character feel invisible to being seen, which is kind of hard to explain, but showing a character’s growth like that is genuinely difficult. I say that because so many people simply don’t have the ability to do it with the characters they play.
Let me try to name what she’s actually doing, though, because “invisible to seen” is a specific technical achievement and it deserves the credit. Playing invisible is much harder than playing sad. It means shrinking your physical presence on purpose — smaller gestures, eyes down, a voice that expects to be talked over — while still holding the audience’s attention. You have to be compelling while performing the state of being overlooked. Those two demands work against each other, and most performers pick one.
Then the growth has to be physical rather than announced. Nobody in this story ever says Starlet has changed. Mraz has to show it in how much room she takes up in a frame, and by the back half she’s occupying twice the space she started with, without a single line calling attention to it.
Mraz shows she’s put a lot into her characters and that she takes her craft seriously.
She’s definitely taken risks with the roles she chooses, and that’s part of what draws attention to her and makes her an in-demand actress.
Eric Guilmette
Guilmette has always been interesting to me.
Why? Because the first thing I ever saw him in, I thought great body, great face. I was distracted. It took a while before I went back, rewatched it, and realized why he dominates the microdrama space.
He gives it everything he has — but he also makes sure people notice who he’s acting alongside.
That second thing is rarer than it should be, and it’s worth stopping on. Generosity is a real skill in a two-hander, and it’s genuinely counterintuitive, because the instinct in a competitive market is to take the scene. Guilmette does the opposite. He plays to his partner, which makes their work better, which makes the whole drama better, which ultimately makes him look better than hogging it ever would. Actors who understand that math tend to have long careers.
It’s also exactly right for this particular role. Jack is a mentor. The entire function of the character is to make room for someone else to become something. If Guilmette played him as the center of gravity, the story would break — Starlet’s rise would become his accomplishment instead of hers. He has to be magnetic and deferential simultaneously, which is a strange assignment, and he lands it.
Guilmette has presence, and not just in dramas — online too. He’s a poet, and if you watch his Instagram, you’ll see how deeply this man feels things and how much they affect him as a person.
He brings that emotional depth into the roles he plays, and it absolutely translates.
Both actors are true to their hearts and their training. The two of them carry this drama with their range, and they ground the outrageousness in reality.
Well. The drama’s reality.
And that grounding is the whole job in this format, really. The plots are heightened by design — that’s the contract. What determines whether a vertical feels like a guilty pleasure or an actual story is entirely whether the performers are playing real people inside the absurdity. These two are.
Molly Anderson deserves more
We can’t forget about Molly Anderson.
In the world of dramas she tends to be a supporting character, but her characters are what move the dramas forward.
I loved that you genuinely couldn’t decide whether she was the villain or whether she’d just been manipulated.
That ambiguity is the most interesting writing in the whole series, and it’s a soap opera instinct through and through. Daytime never lets an antagonist be simply evil, because you need her for four hundred more episodes and pure villainy has no second act. So you build her out of grievance instead — someone with a legitimate complaint who chose an illegitimate response. That’s the version you can’t stop watching, because you keep having to re-decide how you feel about her.
Anderson is good at playing the villain. But there isn’t a drama of hers I watch where I don’t think she’s underutilized.
This one included.
And I’d argue the underutilization is a structural thing rather than an oversight. Verticals allocate almost all their runtime to the central couple, because the romance is the product. Which leaves the most complicated character in the story — the one whose motives are actually unresolved — getting scraps. Anderson keeps being handed the most interesting person in the script and the least amount of time to play her. Somebody should give her the lead in something morally ambiguous and just let her go.
The production
Hollywood Starlet was different from the usual drama, and I can appreciate the care that went into making it, because it was obvious.
The show is set at Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Hollywood, California, and was filmed across multiple stages, with Kristen Brancaccio serving as director and writer, and executive producers Anthony Ferrari, Oliver Bell, Paxton Fuller and Graham Lawyer.
Multiple stages at a real studio lot is not how most verticals get made, and you can see every dollar of it. It also tells you something about intent. Shooting on stages means controlled lighting, real sets, and the ability to design a frame rather than find one. That’s a legacy-television approach applied to a phone-first format, and it’s precisely what you’d expect from founders who came out of network TV.
My one complaint
My only real complaint is that it ended so abruptly.
As a viewer, I wanted to see more of Starlet’s journey to get to that ending.
And that’s the one place where the format’s arithmetic beat the storytelling, I think. Everything in this drama is built to make her rise feel earned — the invisibility, the family, the slow reclaiming of her own wanting. Then the destination arrives on a schedule rather than at a conclusion.
Which is a shame specifically because of what this story is about. A fantasy of becoming someone needs the becoming. That’s the whole pleasure. Skipping to the arrival gives you the outcome without the transformation, and the transformation was the part I subscribed for.
Still. This is a real piece of work from a platform that just launched, made by people who clearly decided the format deserved craft. If Hollywood Starlet is the standard aTwist is setting, I’m going to be on that app on Thursdays.
