How to deal with unsaved nested models in serializer?

Question

My input is a JSON object that represents a video channel. It has some simple fields and fields that contain an array e.g. tags.

What I want to accomplish is parse the JSON, turn it into a Channel model object that a tags property with a list of Tag model objects. I set it up as a many to many relationship.

Tag has only 1 field: title, but the JSON input is an anonymous array like "tags": ["tag1", "tag2",...].

On channelSerializer.is_valid(), it fails. Hacking around, I converted the input from "tags": ["tag1"] to "tags": ["title": "tag"] which worked but I don't like hacky solutions.

I'm at a point of making a service, pull out tags, create a channel objects, convert tags independently and add it to channel...but I feel I'm missing a better, standard method.

What is the recommended approach for this situation in Django?

Code that definitely has some issues:

class Tag(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(unique=True, null=True, blank=True, max_length=255)

    class Meta:
        db_table = "tag"

class Channel(models.Model):
    tags = models.ManyToManyField(Tag)


class TagSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Tag
        fields = ['title']

    def create(self, validated_data):
        return Tag.objects.create(title=validated_data)


class ChannelSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    tags = TagSerializer(many=True, read_only=False, required=False)

    class Meta:
        model = Channel
        fields = '__all__'