It is late in the evening, and under the cold light of the shed where he waits for a ride home, Botkawee’s unhappiness over what has become of his life could not have been more pronounced. He is tied to a job that doesn’t pay enough to settle his debts. He is without love, friends, or family. Tomorrow, his first and as-of-yet only love, Pearmai, is getting married. He has just come from a bar where his college batchmates are celebrating her upcoming wedding and they called him boring for refusing their invitation to drink and dance.

After leaving the party, he sees a woman getting assaulted but he fails to muster the courage to do something. Botkawee is ashamed and deeply discontent. There was a time when he dreamed of a better life, he tells us, imagining it was his face that’s on the ad by the waiting shed, imagining it was him marrying the woman of his dreams.

A millennial story

There’s an unshakeable familiarity in this sequence of Be My Favorite, GMMTV’s latest flagship BL series, that can make one feel simultaneously seen and attacked. It is either one has known someone like him or has been him: a millennial who failed to live up to their potential despite their hard work, an introvert whose lack of confidence has effectively sabotaged their every shot at experiencing fulfillment and joy.

Be My Favorite is a fantasy series about a 30-year-old man who repeatedly travels back in time to get the girl of his dreams but somehow ends up making her future groom fall in love with him instead. But as early as its pilot episode, it’s also clear that aside from its romantic plot, the show means to tell a story about what it’s like to be in the quarter-life — a time when enough regrets and what-ifs have been accumulated despite still having much to live, a time for reassessing choices, recalibrating values, and reimagining our sense of self before moving forward.

Botkawee

Krist Perawat as Botkawee is the avatar for our millennial discontent. Seven years ago, when he was a rookie actor on SOTUS, he (with his then-on-screen partner, Singto Prachaya) helped popularize Thai BL across the globe. Now back in BL with years of experience under his belt, Favorite is immediately proving to be a vehicle for Perawat’s growth in craft.

If his role in SOTUS made him a pillar of the BL genre, Botkawee seems set to carve his name as an actor of considerable range. His performance is the show’s centerpiece, and he rises to the occasion beat by solid beat, effectively conveying Botkawee’s beaten-puppy vulnerability in the first half and his hilarious unhingedness through the rest. He frustrates you but you understand him. You enjoy his blunders but you don’t wish him harm. He’s a joy to watch, yet he can be uncomfortable to look at. Through Kawee, Perawat offers a mirror to the regretful millennial: what breaks our hearts to look at, what causes us discomfort, are what we fear we’ve become.

Pisaeng

Meanwhile, his eventual love, Pisaeng, is heartbreaking to look at because he’s what we fear we can only aspire to have and to be. If Botkawee’s name means “poetry”, a beautiful thing one may struggle to understand, Pisaeng’s means “light-year”: simply out of reach. And the hatred Botkawee feels towards him isn’t hate per se, but a manifestation of his fear and frustration of never becoming up to par. And this air of perfection, of an almost mythical unreachability, is immediately captured by the director and embodied by Gawin Caskey in one single shot.

Notorious for being a scene stealer in all his previous shows (and being MIA on social media), Caskey as Pisaeng is not only a well-deserved, long-overdue lead role, but a smart casting choice that turns the actor’s offscreen reputation into a narrative advantage. However, to say that Caskey works as Pisaeng just because of genes and his inherent mysteriousness would be a disservice to the work. His Pisaeng gets sassy but never mean, cocky but never obnoxious, brave but not without fear. In the wrong hands, Pisaeng could easily be a run-of-the-mill pretty boy too aware that they’re pretty. But Caskey doesn’t work in extremes, and gives the audience intermittent peeks through the cracks of his cool exterior to let us know there’s more depth and warmth to Pisaeng than we’re being let on. And as he turns around to look at Kawee when they are running, as he offers his hand with that huge smile on his face, he gives us a full tease of the warmth he comes with; he’s asking us to hold onto him, too. And we do.

A more grown-up audience

It’s still too early to say how mature the show’s themes are going to be and how deeply it will delve into them. After all, the pilot is entertaining enough to capture audiences from different age groups. However, it still feels like this show, along with many workplace BLs that are starting to outnumber those set in the campus, is a response to the fact that just like Krist, the BL audience who started watching years ago when he was still Arthit in SOTUS have grown and collected new life experiences and concerns that they now wish to see depicted on-screen. That we, too, would like another shot at getting back important chances and people we’ve lost along the way.

Pearmai

In Kawee’s case, it’s the first person to have ever shown him kindness; his first love, Pearmai, played by a lovely Aye Sarunchana, who somehow exudes the heart and warmth of Final Fantasy VII’s Aerith. She has also shown enough of her acting chops in other projects to let us know that if there are concerns about this character at all, it would be about its writing and not her capabilities.

We already know that Kawee will fall in love with Pearmai’s future groom instead. And if Favorite takes the expected route, then Kawee will end up with him. As the show moves forward, we should hope that the writing of Pearmai be rich enough to give her a life outside romance, and that the woman character’s existence is portrayed as neither the obstruction nor a mere springboard to queer love. For a genre invented and upheld for years by women, it’s the least that we could do.

Because so far, it’s how the show will treat its women that I’m afraid of.

Was that necessary?

The first episode features not one, but two scenes where a man hits a woman. The first time, Botkawee shamefully doesn’t intervene. The second time is after he time-traveled, when, drunk and convinced he’s just dreaming, he decides to step in and calls the man a “toxic masculine a-hole”.

The intention is clear: to illustrate how Botkawee can be the hero he wants to be if he were just brave enough and, also, to scream right at toxic masculinity’s face. But why must a woman be hit twice to prove this point? Why not another man getting bullied instead? Someone getting mugged? Toxic masculinity is at work, too, when we frame the trauma of a woman as a platform to showcase a man’s heroism.

Direction

Unnecessary violence against women aside, Favorite’s first episode is an otherwise great hour of television thanks to the potent direction of Waasuthep Ketpetch (The Gifted, Good Old Days). This is a director who refuses to leave any stone unturned, who has complete control over every aspect of his process, and with such apparent respect for the medium.

Its storytelling is crystal clear despite – and thanks to – its non-linear editing. Every beat is sure, with just the right amount of exposition at the beginning, revealing vital information only when it’s most effective, never dragging on. Its comedy hits all the punchlines, its drama tugs at the heartstrings. Aided by great visuals that are true to Parbdee’s brand, amazing sound design, effective musical score, and the performance of its leads, this is one of the strongest first episodes, if not the strongest first episode of any BL I have seen, perhaps, ever.

Verdict

The opening scene of Be My Favorite is a lecture where the professor quotes Aristotle, saying how humans didn’t realize the existence of time until they noticed that something changed.

Has it already been days since Friday? Because, still, I’m here: It’s late at night. Botkawee and Pisaeng are donning their biggest smiles, running in a dark alley under the yellow lamp posts. They are hand in hand, completely unaware that things are changing. And yes, I know I haven’t known them long enough. Yes, I know they’re just words on paper being acted out. But they look like they’ve never felt so free, and I want that, I want that.

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