Charlotte Henderson’s day job looks a little different to most people’s. Most days, she’ll head to the garage in her house, where a line of costumes awaits on a rail: wigs, t-shirts, fake moustaches.
Then, she’ll start filming: all by herself, creating skits in which she plays all the characters, concocts her own storylines and edits her own content. “Genuinely the whole thing is just on my phone,” she tells me. “It's very low budget. Very, very low budget.”
The result has made her wildly successful: her account, @TheNursery_Nurse, has around 5m followers on TikTok, all of whom hang on every twist and turn of the story Henderson has created over the last few years.
It’s set in a children’s nursery, and its many characters (named, among other things, Winter, Autumn, Carly, Sorscha and Marjorie) are the main players in multi-episode plot arcs where they fall in love, spy on each other and deal with their co-workers.
Sometimes, there’s childcare involved: one episode is whimsically titled ‘Call for poo’. Sometimes, there are stakes: “I think the Ofsted series is one of my favourites by far,” Henderson tells me cheerfully.
Welcome to the world of TikTok micro-dramas: a niche, but growing corner of the internet where stories are told in one-minute chapters to their legions of fans.
Micro-dramas aren’t new. In Asia, they have proliferated for years on apps like Dramabox and Goodshort, which lets viewers watch series comprised of 60 – 90 second episodes, which boast titles like The Beggar King’s Bride and Unexpected Knot: My Husband is a Tycoon.
@thenursery_nurse The villain era has returned 😲 #nurserynurse #nurseryskits #thenurserynurse #tnn
♬ original sound - Charlotte
Millions of people watch them and the industry is estimated to be worth around £66bn. In recent years the West has started to get in on the action, with varying degrees of success. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman launched Quibi (short for ‘Quick Bites’) at the start of 2020, with around $2bn of funding. It lasted less than six months, crashing hard in December of that year. But even though Quibi failed, the micro-drama’s natural home is surely TikTok, where accounts like The Nursery Nurse, Bistro Huddy and Paloma Diamond have gained devoted fanbases for telling multi-episode character arcs in quick, digestible bites.
Henderson started making skits when she was furloughed from her job at a nursery during the Covid-19 pandemic – bringing the stories from her job to the small screen. But, she says, viewers started to take a “vested interest in the characters” and things snowballed from there.
“It started to become more about the story arcs and the storylines and less about the one-shot skits,” she says. “Then with the story arcs came more followers, who started seeing this as like a little mini soap opera. And now it's to the point where it’s own tiny little drama series.”
Watching a show in which adults awkwardly converse about work doesn’t sound like social media dynamite, but these dramas seem to thrive on the everyday.
@juliansewell Reuploading because TikTok muted the original #palomadiamond #oscar #monologue #actress #fyp
♬ Jacob and the Stone - Emile Mosseri
Take Bistro Huddy. This restaurant is one of the most popular on TikTok, but it’s not even real: instead, it’s a fictional place created by LA-based writers Drew Talbert and his wife, Andrea Kelley.
The show, which was sparked by the pair’s experiences working in a diner, features a revolving cast of characters, all played by Talbert, and covers topics like tipping culture, bus boys and ‘that one server who won’t sing the birthday song’ – all in skit form.
Or Paloma Diamond, which is run by New Zealand-based creator Julian Sewell and stars him in a wig as ageing starlet Paloma Diamond, who (we discover at one point) has been snubbed for an Oscar “eighteen times.” Currently, Sewell is in the middle of a series based on Paloma’s life in the 1980s, but a quick scroll down his timeline uncovers guest appearances from Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren, of all people. He also has a lot of followers: 2.2m, in fact.
@juliansewell Paloma is the GOAT @CeraVe #CeraVePartner #GOAT #fyp
♬ original sound - Julian Sewell
All this translates to a passionately devoted fanbase, which engages in frequent dialogue with its creators.
“You can read the comments and see what they're enjoying and then steer the story line in that kind of direction,” Henderson explains. To that end, The Nursery Nurse (like Bistro Huddy) has an active Reddit forum where viewers dissect storylines, share fan art and obsess over their favourite characters getting together (people are rooting for Marjorie and Autumn to get together).
The comments can make confusing reading for somebody not au fait with the lore, either. “Can someone PLEASE explain me Carly's arc,” one typical comment reads. The answer: “Carly’s working at the sister nursery now because she wanted a fresh start with people who didn’t know she was spying.” This went right over my head, but many of the show’s followers have been with Charlotte for years.
These skits are also precision-tailored for life in the modern day era. “I've got a very short attention span. So when I'm scrolling, if something doesn't get me straight away, I'm gone,” Henderson tells me.
That, in turn, has fed into her creative approach: “Part of the fun [of making the episodes] is trying to condense it down into two minutes: like, ‘Right how can I keep it snappy but also tell a story at the same time?’”
‘I've got a very short attention span. So when I'm scrolling, if something doesn't get me straight away, I'm gone’
The result has been successful enough to land Henderson a cinema tour of the UK and allow Talbert and Kelly to create a multi-avenue Bistro Huddy business empire. They, and Sewell, have been able to quit their jobs as a result of their online success. And last November, news came out that TikTok was considering investing more in its short-form minidrama content. Clearly, the app knows that its micro-drama creators are onto something.
Tickets for Nursery Nights are on sale now at musicglue.com/nurserynights
