ShortFlix blog ·
If you liked Marry My Husband, try these second lives
Seven rebirth micro-dramas, one for each stock scene of the form, from a death in a prison cell to the nanny in the kitchen.
On the morning of her big exam, Shi Yi’s mother hands her medicine for a cold. The label says it was made on 5 May 2004 and expired on 4 May 2006, and today is 7 June 2008. Shi Yi has taken this dose before. In her first life it is why she failed the exam and missed the university she wanted. This time she tells her mother the medicine is two years out of date, asks her father to stay home for two days, and remembers, happily, that she knows all the answers.
That is the first episode of Summer in Love, and if you liked Marry My Husband, you know its engine. Kang Ji-won catches her husband with her best friend, dies at his hands, and wakes up ten years earlier with a plan to pass him on. Chinese calls the form chongsheng (重生), rebirth, and micro-dramas have worn it into a set of stock scenes: the death, the date check, the first slap, the shock of a new world, the family that does not know you.
Below is a checklist of seven such scenes, with one series for each, in the order a second life meets them. Every pick comes from a different channel and wakes its hero at a different moment. All seven are Chinese, because the form is: 125 of the 138 rebirth micro-dramas on ShortFlix are in Chinese. One series per channel cost us WeTV’s Revenge of the Best Actress, the nearest thing to Marry My Husband we read. It opens at a film star’s funeral, where her fiancé and her best friend flirt in the mourning hall.
The death
Rebirth of the Deposed Heir
Chinese · 兔兔剧时光 (Bunny Drama Time) · 70 episodes so far, most a minute to a minute and a half · started 17 July 2024
Most rebirths start with the hero’s own death. This one borrows somebody else’s. Ye Qingzhou, the son of Prince Yu, is due out of prison after five years, and on the day of his release the guards find him on the floor of his cell and kick him for faking it. Then the body gets up with a different man inside. He looks around the dungeon, and one of his first questions is whether he wasn’t just working late at the office.
Go Princess Go, the 2015 Chinese web series, put a modern man’s soul in a crown princess. This one puts an office worker in a prince’s disgraced son, who gets up and knocks the two guards down. The Chinese title, 无敌废世子, calls him the invincible deposed heir, so do not expect him to lose a fight. The title also promises 80 episodes, and the channel has posted 70 so far.
The date check
Summer in Love
Chinese · WeTV (Tencent Video) · 18 episodes, seven to twelve minutes each · started 27 February 2023
Episode 1 has the line every rebirth needs (“What year is it now? What date is today?”, in the channel’s English subtitles). Summer in Love makes the answer count: the second chance falls on exam day, with a mother who sides with her son whatever he does and a brother who has just pushed his sister’s head under water as a prank.
Then the second life gets crowded. Xia He, the childhood friend she wants to be with if time can go back, wakes up 18 again in episode 3. Episode 4 is the rescue (she stops her father’s accident), and by episode 11 the ex-husband she married in her first life has come back too. Episode 18’s title promises that after two lifetimes they finally get together. At seven to twelve minutes an episode, it suits an evening, not a bus ride.
The first slap
My Savage Wife
Chinese · 魔女月野 · 18 episodes, most two to five minutes, four of them about 25 · started 2 March 2022
A boxing champion, a TV drama, a fall. Yueye (the heroine shares her name with the channel) binges dramas, gets so angry at one heroine that she takes a tumble, and lands inside the plot as the bullied young wife of the Gu family. Here the slap comes first: by the title of episode 18, the mother-in-law beats her as soon as she arrives, and one punch swells the older woman’s face like a pig’s.
The Chinese title, 我的野蛮夫人, plays on 我的野蛮女友, the Chinese name of the Korean film My Sassy Girl. Episode 1’s title has her spending wildly and infuriating her mother-in-law, and by episode 3 her CEO husband wants a divorce. The joke is violence against a mother-in-law, which some viewers will not find funny. The playlist also wanders: upload 9 is a 25-minute cut of episodes 1 to 12.
The shock of a new world
The Leopard Cat Scholar 2
Chinese · MangoTV Short Play · 20 episodes, seven to fourteen minutes each · started 17 October 2025
After a thousand years, a spirit gets a body back, and is surprised to find it is a fresh corpse. Chinese has a phrase for the trick, 借尸还魂 (borrowing a corpse to bring back a soul), old enough to be one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems. Episode 1 is about what the soul finds next. Qingshan Academy is now Qingshan University. Tao Ran, whom he knows at once, does not remember him and wants him in an MRI scanner; the spirit refuses, in case the machine gives him away, and says he was born in the mountains. When he calls Tao Ran by name, he has to claim he read it on a trophy.
It is a second season, and the channel’s note says it carries on from the first. Wang Yizhou and Xie Xinhao star, and the same note promises jumps between 2005 and 2025. Episodes this long make it a weekend series.
The family that does not know you
Reborn at 18: The Great-Grandma Takes Charge
Chinese · FlickReels · 30 episodes, about a minute each · started 6 June 2025
Rebirth usually sends a woman back to her own youth. FlickReels sends a professor forward. She dies in 1955 and wakes 70 years later in the body of an 18-year-old schoolgirl, the mother of a company chairman in his seventies, with a row of handsome great-grandsons to sort out. 17 Again put a father in his own children’s high school; here the oldest member of the family is the youngest person in the room.
Its first episode, at 68 seconds, is the shortest here. Mind the commitment, though: ShortFlix lists three more seasons, which add 84 episodes.
The same husband
The 1980s Marriage Defence
Chinese · 七柚剧场 Seven Grapefruit Theater · 50 episodes, one to three minutes each · started 30 March 2025
Jiang Xin, a fashion designer with her mind on work, wants out of a marriage that has hemmed her in for years. She wakes up in the 1980s, and the title of episode 2 does the double take for her: back in the past, and the husband is still him. He now runs a textile factory. The Chinese title, 80年代婚姻保卫战, means roughly the battle to save a marriage in the eighties. Peggy Sue Got Married sent a wife on the edge of divorce back to 1960 and her husband’s teenage self; this one makes the second life a second look at the same man, who, a title says, finally gets it in episode 15.
Her head start is exam papers. In episode 6 she hands her husband’s younger sister the past years’ questions, and the girl does not believe her. The villains get labels in the titles instead of names, the scheming man and the scheming woman, so do not come for subtlety. Come if you want to watch a marriage mended rather than escaped.
The view from the kitchen
Reborn as the Nanny in a CEO Drama
Chinese · 王志猩 · 34 episodes over two seasons, most two to five minutes · started 2 April 2024
Who brings the tea while all this happens? This comedy’s title, 重生之我在霸總短劇裏當保姆, means reborn as the nanny in a CEO short drama, and the channel’s whole bio is the same joke about playing bit parts. The episode notes put Wang Ma’s working life to the viewers. Episodes 2 and 11 ask what Wang Ma should earn a month. Episode 13 asks whether she should work for the Gu family or the Li family next, episode 15 whom she should swap souls with, and episode 18 says she has forgotten Butler Zhao. The Gu family share a surname with Yueye’s in-laws in My Savage Wife.
Season one ends with episode 25, billed as the grand finale, and a special and a second season follow. The jokes assume you have sat through the dramas they mock, so watch this last.
Wang Ma has not retired: seven episodes of her second season are up, and the fourth asks whether the Gu family is finished.
How we picked
Every series here is a micro-drama whose hero gets a second life, in an earlier year or in a new body, and each comes from a different channel. We left out dubbed versions, series made with AI, teasers, re-uploads and recap channels. We read each first episode’s captions, or the channel’s own notes and episode titles where there were none. We did not count views. Episodes play from each creator’s own YouTube channel.
Sources: plots of Marry My Husband, Go Princess Go, 17 Again and Peggy Sue Got Married, the Thirty-Six Stratagems and the Chinese title of My Sassy Girl, from Wikipedia.
