Fox is pouring some old wine into new bottles — hoping to make some extra cash by hopping on the microdrama craze.
In a first for Fox, the entertainment company is taking a full season of one of its primetime TV reality shows, “Farmer Wants a Wife,” and dicing it into short episodes averaging less than 2 minutes each. It’s then going to put those episodes on Holywater‘s My Drama app that specializes in microdramas.
The company said the microseries adaptation of “Farmer Wants a Wife” Season 3 will be a “fully reedited” vertical version the show: The season will be divided into 101 episodes, in what Fox calls a “mobile-first binge experiment.” On June 9, Fox will air the Season 4 finale of “Farmer Wants a Wife” and simultaneously launch the vertical version of S3 on Holywater’s My Drama app in the U.S. (and will promote the microdrama release in on-air promos during the finale).
In the My Drama app, a certain limited number of episodes of a series are typically free to watch. For more, you have to purchase additional episodes using the in-app “coins” currency.
According to Fox, a QR code will be featured on a lower third of the screen during the “Farmer Wants a Wife” Season 4 finale broadcast on June 9, and anyone who scans the code will receive enough My Drama coins to watch the entirety of the Season 3 episodes for free. If they don’t have the QR code, users will still be able to watch a significant portion of the “Farmer Wants a Wife” microdrama for free — about 80 episodes — but they will need to purchase coins to watch the full series.
Meanwhile, all episodes of “Farmer Wants a Wife” S3 are available for free (with ads) on Fox’s Tubi streaming service, as well as on Disney’s Hulu.
The launch of the microdrama-tized “Farmer Wants a Wife” represents a broader strategic push by Fox to expand My Drama’s U.S. footprint by incorporating premium unscripted series onto the platform.
Note that Fox is a part-owner of Holywater: The company last year made an equity investment in Holywater, a Ukrainian tech firm focused on vertical video. Earlier this year Fox announced a deal with Dhar Mann’s production company for a slate of 40 scripted shows to be released on the Holywater platform.
“Vertical storytelling is becoming an important new entertainment medium,” Tony Vassiliadis, executive vice president of operations strategy at Fox Entertainment, told Variety. “Fox has a strong presence in linear television and streaming, but we also want to understand how audiences engage with stories in mobile-native environments.”
According to Vassiliadis, “Farmer Wants a Wife” “gave us a natural opportunity to explore that because it already has many of the elements that work well in vertical storytelling — romance, emotional stakes, relationships, suspense and compelling cliffhangers. More broadly, we’re interested in learning how great IP can evolve as audience habits evolve.”
For now, the “Farmer Wants a Wife” microdrama project is an experiment. But Vassiliadis said “we absolutely see opportunities beyond a single title. One of the reasons we’re excited about ‘Farmer Wants a Wife’ is that it represents our first move into unscripted vertical storytelling. Up to now, much of the category has been focused on scripted romance and microdramas, so this gives us an opportunity to explore how audiences respond to a different format.”
Fox says the microdrama version of “Farmer Wants a Wife” S3 doesn’t just reframe the existing footage of the show, produced by Eureka Productions. The project, developed by Fox Entertainment Studios, takes the original season (comprising 11 episodes) and reformats them into 101 short-form episodes totaling just under 2.5 hours of content.
According to Fox, the entire season was “comprehensively reedited to preserve the emotional arcs, romance and interpersonal drama that made the series successful in its original broadcast form.” It added that the show’s “romance and emotional storytelling naturally aligns with the relationship-driven themes and tropes that resonate with My Drama audiences — who largely flock to the app for romance.”
The third season of “Farmer Wants a Wife,” hosted by Kimberly Williams-Paisley (who also hosts S4), aired in 2025 and featured four farmers courting eight women each.
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