Guest Post: A Different Approach to Vertical Drama Production and Distribution
Guest Post by Eli Shell
Excited to share with you a guest post authored by filmmaker and producer Eli Shell. You’ve likely heard of his In-House vertical (@inhouse_show on Instagram and TikTok).
If you’d also like to contribute a guest post, feel free to get in touch via hello@behindtheverticals.com.
I Made a Workplace Comedy About a Failing Aromatherapy Brand. It Got 2 Million Views. Here’s What I Learned.
Nobody greenlit In-House.
No development deal, no network, no brand partner writing checks before we rolled camera. Just a thesis I couldn’t let go of:
Ads get skipped, stories get followed.
So we made it ourselves. Vertical mockumentary, eight episodes, 2 million views. Now we’re in development on Season 2. Here’s what I learned.
Treat Season One Like a Startup MVP, Not a Pilot
The legacy model for scripted content has one gear: greenlight or don’t. You pitch, you wait, someone with budget decides your idea is worth financing, and then you make the thing. But here’s the thing:
No one actually knows anything.
Not in Hollywood.
Not in verticals.
The solution comes from the world of startups: Minimum Viable Products. Test the product with a small spend, learn from it and scale what works.
We went into In-House Season 1 with a clear constraint: keep the budget low enough that the downside is a learning experience, not a crisis. That meant making real creative decisions about where production value actually mattered in a vertical frame. It meant launching with the explicit goal of generating data, not just views. Retention curves, drop-off points, which episodes drove follows…
And which didn’t.
That data became the creative brief for Season 2. We identified the specific moments where we lost people, an early title card overlay that was killing cold-open momentum, inconsistent episode length, pacing issues in the middle episodes, and we fixed them.
Season 2 isn’t a sequel. It’s a corrected version of a proof of concept.
That’s a startup logic, not a Hollywood logic.
The Format Has Its Own Grammar. Learn It Before You Scale.
Vertical series aren’t short films shot on a phone. They’re not TV episodes with the sides cropped. In vertical, you have no cold open. No act break. No grace period. The hook has to live in frame one, not the first ten seconds. The viewer’s thumb is already moving. Your job in that first beat isn’t to set up the story; it’s to make stopping feel like a mistake.
Comedy has a structural advantage here that I don’t think the space has fully clocked yet. In In-House, we built episodes where the joke, the character beat, and the episode’s narrative hook are all the same moment. One beat doing three jobs. A joke lands in three seconds; drama needs runway. When it works, you’re not just making people laugh, you’re making them need the next episode. That’s the format working the way it was built to work.
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Self-Funding Is a Positioning Move, Not Just a Financing One
Self-producing wasn’t just necessity – it was leverage. It’s about data ownership, creative control, and, most importantly, what I bring to the table when I walk into a room with a brand or a platform.
We own In-House. The IP, the footage, the audience data, everything. When I sit down with a potential sponsor for Season 2, I’m not pitching a concept. I’m presenting a live asset with an audience and a track record. That’s a fundamentally different conversation.
Brands are starting to figure out that serialized storytelling builds compounding equity in a way that a thirty-second pre-roll never will. The audience that watches six episodes of a show associates that brand with something they chose to spend time with. That’s more than impressions. That’s affinity.
Self-funding Season 1 wasn’t just how we made the show. It was how we made the show valuable.
What’s Coming
The vertical space is about to get more interesting and more competitive at the same time. Most of the format experimentation so far has happened in drama and romance. I think the next wave is genre — and specifically, genres that play to what vertical does structurally better than any other format.
Comedy is still underleveraged, for the reasons above. Horror and thriller are the ones I’m watching most closely. Tight frame, no escape, a jump scare hitting on a phone six inches from your face — the format was almost engineered for it. Horror audiences have also already proven they’ll pay to be scared, from theatrical dominance to platforms like Shudder. That’s a monetization signal worth paying attention to.
The third genre bet I’m making is reality. Not traditional reality — narrative reality, built around creators who already have audiences. Vertical gives influencers and content creators an on-ramp into serialized storytelling without abandoning what their audience already shows up for. That’s a lane nobody has really cracked yet, and it’s sitting right at the intersection of where creator economy money and scripted IP money are both trying to go.
For In-House, Season 2 is in pre-production now, with brand sponsorship and additional cast conversations underway. The story gets simultaneously bigger and goes deeper. New characters, new storylines, the production gets smarter. The thesis stays the same.
Nobody’s going to greenlight the format that changes this industry. Someone’s just going to make it. We’re trying to be that someone. The question is are you building or are you waiting?
Love this and totally agree. This is such an exciting new space and opportunity for creatives. I hadn't quite heard the benefits of self-funding broken down in this way before:
"I’m presenting a live asset with an audience and a track record. That’s a fundamentally different conversation" and "Self-funding Season 1 wasn’t just how we made the show. It was how we made the show valuable."
It feels like a new conversation around self-financing. Quite exciting and empowering.