Fox is pouring old wine into new bottles. It’s a new large-scale experiment that the company hopes will yield valuable new insights into the microdrama epidemic.
In a first for Fox, the entertainment company is taking an entire season of one of its prime-time TV reality shows, “The Farmer Wants a Wife,” and reformatting it into shorter episodes, each averaging less than two minutes. The episodes will then be posted on Holy Water’s My Drama app, which specializes in microdramas.
The company said the microseries version of “The Farmer Wants a Wife” Season 3 will be a “completely re-edited” vertical version of the show. The season will be split into 101 episodes and is being dubbed by Fox as a “mobile-first binge-watching experiment.” On June 9, Fox will air the Season 4 finale of “The Farmer Wants a Wife,” simultaneously launching a vertical version of S3 on Holy Water’s My Drama app in the U.S. (and promoting the microdrama’s release with an on-air promo during the finale).
The My Drama app usually allows you to watch a certain number of episodes of a series for free. To watch more, you need to purchase additional episodes using the in-app currency “coins”.
According to Fox, a QR code will appear in the bottom third of the screen during the Season 4 finale of The Farmer Wants a Wife on June 9th, and those who scan the code will receive enough MyDrama Coins to watch the entire Season 3 episode for free. If you don’t have a QR code, users can still watch most of the “Farmer Wants a Wife” microdrama (about 80 episodes) for free, but you’ll need to buy coins to watch the entire series.
Meanwhile, all episodes of “Farmer Wants a Wife” S3 are available to watch for free (with ads) on Fox’s Tubi streaming service and Disney’s Hulu.
The launch of the micro-dramatized Farmer Wants a Wife represents Fox’s broader strategic push to expand My Drama’s U.S. footprint by bringing premium unscripted series to the platform.
Note that Fox is a co-owner of Holywater. Last year, the company made an equity investment in Holywater, a Ukrainian technology company focused on vertical video. Earlier this year, Fox announced a deal with Dahl Mann’s production company for 40 scripted shows to be released on the Holy Water platform.
“Vertical storytelling is becoming an important new entertainment medium,” Tony Vasiliadis, executive vice president of operational strategy at Fox Entertainment, told Variety. “Fox has a strong presence in linear TV and streaming, but we also want to understand how viewers engage with stories in a mobile native environment.”
According to Vasiliadis, The Farmer Wants a Wife “already has many of the elements that work well in vertical storytelling: romance, emotional stakes, relationships, suspense, and compelling cliffhangers, so it gave us a natural opportunity to explore that. More broadly, we’re interested in learning how great IP evolves as audience habits evolve.”
For now, the “Farmer Wants a Wife” microdrama project is an experiment. But Vasiliadis said, “We absolutely see opportunities beyond a single title. One of the reasons we’re excited about ‘Farmer Wants a Wife’ is because it represents our first move into vertical unscripted storytelling. Up until now, much of this category has focused on scripted romances and microdramas, so this gives us an opportunity to explore how audiences respond to a different format.”
According to Fox, the “Farmer Wants a Wife” S3 microdrama is not simply a reconstruction of existing footage from the show, which was produced by Eureka Productions. The project, developed by Fox Entertainment Studios, reformats the original season (consisting of 11 episodes) into 101 short episodes, totaling just under 2.5 hours of content.
According to Fox, the entire season has been “comprehensively re-edited to preserve the emotional arcs, romance, and relationship drama that made the series successful in its original broadcast format.” It added that the show’s “romance and emotional storytelling are a natural fit for the relationship-oriented themes and tropes that resonate with My Drama viewers, who primarily flock to the app for romance.”
The third season of Farmers Want a Wife, hosted by Kimberly Williams-Paisley (who also hosts S4), aired in 2025 and featured four farmers courting eight women each.
