How to Write a Vertical Drama Script: Reading the Chart

How to write a vertical drama script is not a question our weekly chart answers directly. The keyword is not a title on the chart this week. What we have is ten ranked entries, all new in 2026-W43, with episode counts, free-episode allowances and completion rates drawn from our own audience only, not the whole market. Read as a set, those numbers describe the shape a commissioned script has to fill. They do not describe how to fill it.

How to Write a Vertical Drama Script: What Our Data Actually Measures

The score is viewers multiplied by (0.5 + 0.5 x completion). A title needs 30 or more viewers to rank, and viewer counts are rounded. Completion is the share of our viewers who reached the end of a run. Episode counts are the listed full length of each title. That is the whole basis for everything below. No script pages were reviewed for this piece, and none of the ten entries is a writing manual.

Episode Counts Arrive in Two Clusters

The chart does not spread evenly from short to long. It clusters, with a gap in the middle that no title fills.

• The Mafia Heir: 1,184 episodes, 20 free, 57% completion, rank 1 on 1,210 viewers.
• Rekindled Heartache: 1,016 episodes, 20 free, 66% completion, rank 7 on 90 viewers.
• Reborn to Win: 600 episodes, 20 free, 50% completion, rank 3 on 280 viewers.
• Infinity Stars: 460 episodes, 20 free, 69% completion, rank 10 on 60 viewers.
• Guardian to Groom: 52 episodes, 20 free, 58% completion, rank 6 on 120 viewers.
• I Married My Billionaire Nemesis in Three Hours: 35 episodes, 20 free, 53% completion, rank 5 on 130 viewers.
• My Online Girlfriend Is a CEO: 26 episodes, no allowance listed, 41% completion, rank 2 on 330 viewers.
• Summer Troubles (Movie): 9 episodes, no allowance listed, 75% completion, rank 4 on 170 viewers.

Two more sit outside that list. Last Witch Of Swendel lists 598 episodes, no allowance, 43% completion and 90 viewers at rank 9. Faking as My Brother: My Hockey Roommate's Dirty Desire lists 43 episodes, no allowance, 37% completion and 110 viewers at rank 8. The second of those carries the lowest completion on the chart.

Format splits eight live action against two animated. Both animated titles sit in the long cluster, Reborn to Win at 600 episodes and Infinity Stars at 460. The short cluster is live action only. On paper, that is a budget and production observation as much as a writing one, and the chart cannot separate the two.

Completion Runs From 37% to 75%

The top of that range belongs to a 9-episode title at 75% and to a 460-episode title at 69%. A long run is therefore not automatically a leaky one. The bottom belongs to 43 episodes at 37% and 26 episodes at 41%. Length alone does not predict who finishes.

Rank 7 and rank 8 are the useful pair for a writer. Rekindled Heartache drew 90 viewers at 66% completion. Faking as My Brother drew 110 viewers at 37%. They land next to each other because viewers carry more of the score than completion does. A script that holds people to the end helps, but it does not carry a small audience by itself.

The Free-Episode Runway Is 20 or It Is Unlisted

Six of the ten list exactly 20 free episodes: The Mafia Heir, Reborn to Win, I Married My Billionaire Nemesis in Three Hours, Guardian to Groom, Rekindled Heartache and Infinity Stars. Four list nothing in that field: My Online Girlfriend Is a CEO, Summer Troubles (Movie), Faking as My Brother and Last Witch Of Swendel. Those four are unlisted in our data, not necessarily absent, so we do not read anything into the gap. There is no middle value on the chart, no 5, no 12, no 30.

For a writer that number works as a structural target. On paper, 20 free episodes is the block a new viewer can sample before deciding anything. A draft that spends the whole block on setup has spent its sample on setup. That inference comes from the allowance, not from watching the episodes, and it is the closest this chart gets to advice.

What the Chart Cannot Say About Script Writing

Nothing here shows scene construction, dialogue, beat placement, cliffhanger timing or episode-level pacing. The chart ranks finished titles by audience behaviour. It cannot tell you whether a script opens on a confrontation or a close-up, or whether a reveal lands in episode 3 or episode 30.

• No script pages, PDF examples or templates appear in our data.
• No scene counts, page counts or runtime per episode are recorded.
• No information on how a title's opening minute is built.
• No data on the rule of 3, three-act structure or any other writing rule.

Four Inferences a Writer Can Carry Into a Draft

1. Pick the run length before the outline. The chart offers 9 to 52 episodes or several hundred to over a thousand, with little between.
2. Treat the first 20 episodes as the entire sample. Six titles set that allowance, so assume that block decides whether a viewer continues.
3. Write for completion as well as for the arrival. The score halves completion's weight but keeps it, so an ending that holds is worth something.
4. Do not read rank as a verdict on writing. Viewers and completion both feed the score, and neither one alone explains a position.

Our chart covers our own audience only, not the whole market, and this edition is ten new entries with no returning titles to compare against. Next week's revision may read differently. Until then, these numbers describe the shape of the job, and the script remains the part no chart can draft.