Save Our Sets: A Microdrama Lifeline Arrives — With Jobs

A wood-paneled courtroom. A cozy apartment. A bar top that could be in a restaurant in Brooklyn or Silver Lake. 

The newly built sets at Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Hollywood look like they’d be right at home as backdrops for Hulu’s All’s Fair or CBS’s The Bold and the Beautiful, which both shoot on this lot. But they’ve actually been built with microdramas and vertical productions in mind. 

With traditional TV and film production still majorly down in Southern California, and the scrappy microdrama market rocketing, the move is a savvy way to capitalize on a fast-emerging arena of entertainment that has mostly grown outside of mainstream Hollywood, while also encouraging low-budget projects to stay in Los Angeles.

These standing sets, designed and constructed in partnership with short-form studio Knockout Shorts, are an appeal to the on-screen billionaires, werewolves and romantics that typically populate vertical series. 

“Our number one goal is, as cheesy as it sounds, to elevate the space,” says Knockout Shorts co-founder Chris Crema as he gives me a tour of the set. “We want to find projects that feel like they play in the world of verticals, but are elevated, and that means better talent as well.” Taye Diggs recently exec produced and starred in a 44-part microdrama for the CandyJar app, while Issa Rae produced a project called Screen Time.

“As you bring in bigger and bigger names, and as more of Hollywood wants to get into this space, I think there’s more of a crossover between traditional Hollywood infrastructure and this kind of vertical short-form market that’s exploding,” Crema continues. “It’s like a secret side of production in Los Angeles.” 

And the city will take any kind of production it can get. Sound stages have deadened amid years of runaway production, with some being rented out as event spaces or offered at a deep discount. According to a FilmLA report from March, average sound stage occupancy clocked in at 62 percent in the first half of 2025, down a percentage point from the prior year and down from a whopping 90-plus percent from 2016 to 2022. 

When The Bold and the Beautiful relocated to Sunset Las Palmas Studios after nearly 40 years at CBS’ Television City, the move was eventized with a big ribbon-cutting ceremony on the lot that once was the home of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu Productions, and before that saw Mae West and Marx Brothers movies filmed on its stages. The fanfare over snagging a soap opera now reveals the stakes for sound stages.

So this is Hollywood’s new bargain: After a few years of dismissing microdramas — a multibillion-dollar business in China, whose storylines skew corny and soap operatic and which rarely hire union crews and talent, legacy players increasingly are dipping into the medium, from Fox Entertainment’s stake in Holywater to Disney inducting DramaBox into its competitive incubator program. And indie companies like Knockout are proliferating. Now the city’s production facilities are pivoting too.

Below, what my tour of Sunset Las Palmas’ innovative new setup reveals about the new opportunities microdramas are creating across the industry: 

• What “premium” microdramas could mean as Disney, Fox and legacy Hollywood circle the space
• How vertical productions have become a “lifeline” for young creatives and workers breaking into Hollywood 
• Knockout’s unique proposition to premium-ize microdamas and how Sunset Las Palmas helps
• How Sunset Las Palmas’ standing sets blend microdrama tropes — think steamy bedroom scenes — with traditional production needs
• The speed advantage: how productions can show up, flip on the lights and shoot on day one — and the No. 1 cost they eliminate