Tom Sainsbury isn't chasing trends - they keep arriving where he's at
A pashmina-wearing divorcee and the format worth billions
I am worried about a nameless woman who looks a lot like Tom Sainsbury.
She is a divorcee standing tentatively in her new independence as she takes the rubbish out, clutching a pashmina around her shoulders like it’s the last warm thing in a cold, cold world. She taps the handle of the bin, a gesture that reassures her and those watching that she might… just… be okay. She experiences a tiny thrill, a possible sexual reawakening, when the cheeky hedgetrimmer notices her new blonde hair after a trip to Tress to Impress. You sense she hasn’t been noticed in this way for years. She does all of this to the tune of Sleepwalker, Julia Byrnes’s melancholic finger-picking reminding her “she lived her life alone, before you.”
I have watched her blooming reinvention with the devotion I usually reserve for prestige television, except I’m watching it on Instagram, and the longest episode is about 48 seconds. Delivering the pre-finale plot twist, her ex has texted: “this was a mistake…I’m sorry”. There are only two more episodes until the finale. Will she return to her ex? Does she own any other pashminas? What is her name?! Where is Tress to Impress?
For all intents and purposes, despite them being parodies, these videos are gripping, episodic, serialised drama.
Recognition is Sainsbury’s most brilliant skill
The woman in the pashmina is the latest creation of New Zealand comedian, writer and actor, Tom Sainsbury, who has long been one of our most insightful observers. He creates recognisable characters in five seconds, often using a wig, an obvious filter, or a single prop or costume. The woman taking out the rubbish has racked up close to 950,000 views to date.
Sainsbury is a master of caricature, wrapping tropes in warm blankets, taking the piss without punching down and building characters out of recognition rather than contempt. You see yourself, and people and fictional characters you love or love to laugh at.
Specifically, you see a kind of middle-New Zealandness that makes you laugh, cringe and go a bit soft all at once. Mirroring identity is now something social media strategists call out as a recognisable and valuable hook in social media video.
Comedic talent is a gift on social media
Sainsbury is a prolific creator, seen on stage, on television, and in the long, steady stream of short-form videos that have built him one of the most devoted audiences in the country. Comedians tend to start with an unfair advantage on social media because content only works when it does something for the person watching, and the thing comedians are already preternaturally good at - making people laugh- is God-tier on social media.
Content is not the only thing he does, and looking at his vast pile of other work, I suspect he has not been coolly studying the mechanics of content creation full-time, nor applying his findings with surgical precision. His wheelhouse works incredibly well on social, and he’s been doing it long enough to have shaped a bit of our online culture and influenced what success looks like in New Zealand. Creator or consumer, we’re all laying algorithmic breadcrumbs that influence what we see and create.
His talent and work ethic are also impossible to ignore or distil into a formula. Despite the level playing field social media is meant to have enabled, creating for these platforms is far harder than it looks and relies more on natural ability, talent and work than the many people flogging content creation as a business would have you believe.
The mechanics of success on social media
Despite the unquantifiable nature of talent and work ethic, there are some mechanics to his success on social media - a combination of hard algorithmic truths and intrinsic human need - that are easier to dissect, understand and embrace.
You share the divorcee’s story because it’s funny and recognisable. You send it because you know a friend will like it, and it becomes shared language between you. Brilliantly, you return because it’s a series with a narrative structure.
None of that happens unless it holds your attention first. Sainsbury’s videos are short. The threshold-of-revelation moment at the rubbish bin is 19 seconds long. Watch time is valuable currency on Meta platforms and YouTube, and anyone making videos understands the brutal reality of skip, hold, completion, swipe-away and hook rates.
You then repeat all the sharing and sending because it has cultural cachet, the interest that compounds on attention. It’s the moment a thing stops being content you consume passively and privately and becomes a marker of who you are for having noticed it. The cachet is participatory; it accrues to the group as much as the sender, and the thing travels because being in on it together is the point.
The crucial thing is that cachet is now the distribution mechanism.
Reach is no longer handed to you or tied to your follower count; it is granted per piece of content by the people who decide it’s worth spending a little of their own social capital to pass along.
The audience has become the delivery system.
If you’re working on social media, your job is to make something worth carrying. It is a watercooler moment on steroids, and it travels on the backs of the people who love it, or it does not travel at all.
A format coming of age
Serialised content has come of age as a social media format and is going gangbusters if you follow the money trail.
Sainsbury’s last big serial drama in 2020 was the story of his impending marriage to Karlena, a Microsoft Paint fever dream of a woman who had more comprehensive character development than Rory Gilmore in the Gilmore Girls revival. I don’t think we would have called it serialised drama then, or even now; they were and are skit comedy videos that get us through lockdowns or just life at this point. Serialised drama is an old-world format term being given new life by an industry looking to monetise and hold attention. Storytelling instincts are storytelling instincts, and serial drama has existed long before Sainsbury or Instagram, but Sainsbury, no matter how low-fi or serendipitous his work or timing is, was about six years ahead of the curve with his Karlena yarn, and he’s right on it with pashmina woman.
Short, vertical serials known as microdramas that live on apps like DramaBox and ReelShort pulled in around $11 billion in US dollars globally last year, with forecasts nudging towards $14 billion for this one, according to Variety. Deloitte puts the forecast in-app revenue at $3.8 billion to $7.8 billion for 2026. Downloads of those apps surpassed 2.3 billion in 2025, more than double the year before, just as downloads of traditional streaming apps began to fall. Microdramas are massive in China, where they originated, with Wired reporting that half of all internet users have now watched at least one.
Many of these microdramas are in tried-and-true soap opera formats and determinedly low-fi. They’re not going to win Emmys with titles like Never Divorce a Secret Billionaire Heiress or Orange Cat Taoist Priest: Fighting the Zombie King, but they have people gripped and handing over money to keep watching.
I’m not implying that Sainsbury is some kind of cynical social media mogul deliberately crafting a multi-million-dollar microdrama play; he’s a master creator and creative, and as far as anyone can tell, he makes what he likes and always has. I don’t think he’s reading Puck or The Publish Press and chasing the moment; it’s just that the moment is turning up where he's standing.
Building the pipes for the binge
The platforms are also all in on serialised content, bringing content creators to the big screen in your living room. Meta launched Instagram for TV on Samsung smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV, and Google TV in the US in June. Instagram is testing longer creator content and episodic series that unfold across multiple episodes, with monetisation options for creators. Meta also offers tiered subscription plans through Meta One that provide better access to support, AI features, and verification. I think it's safe to say the company is laying plumbing for more than that. The living room and the subscription cash are the two things social media companies want next.
Early to where everyone is now rushing
Sainsbury has long been one of the sharpest people we have on social media, and he is far from the only one; a whole cohort of New Zealand comedians have understood this medium instinctively for years and have the advantages that come with social media-friendly material, performance skills and audience savvy. The thing they’ve been doing to grow fan bases, promote and showcase their work, or purely for their own amusement, just happens to be the thing Instagram is about to spend a fortune trying to own. By instinct and on a low-to-no budget (his work is low-fi and that's a compliment), Sainsbury is doing what a multi-billion-dollar industry is spending enormous money to manufacture.
To the woman in the paisley pashmina, please don’t go back to your ex.