Nitinun Supappong

BLGLFlix editorial view

Line up the episode counts and the argument writes itself. Thirty four. Seventeen. Twenty six. Twenty five. Thirty. Fourteen. Forty two. And then eight.

Every full length drama on this record is a Thai lakorn of fourteen episodes or more, several of them over thirty. The one girls’ love series is eight episodes. Not eight short episodes either: they run about fifty minutes each, the same length as everything else this writer does. Thai GL is getting the mainstream industry’s writers, the mainstream industry’s episode length and the mainstream industry’s production house. What it is not yet getting is the mainstream industry’s episode order.

That is a real qualification of something this site said earlier in the same pass. Writing about Mon Maew we called Thailand the only country in the region where the queer pipeline is a company rather than a workaround. That still holds, and this page is more evidence for it: The Secret of Us was not made by a specialist BL studio and sold to Channel 3. Channel 3 is listed as the production company. The country’s oldest commercial terrestrial network made a GL series itself, in house, with one of its own writers. Set beside the Channel 7 lakorn adaptation recorded on the MostlyCloudy page, both of Thailand’s big terrestrial networks are now in this business directly.

But being inside the building is not the same as being given the same resources. Forty two episodes for a period fantasy romance and eight for a queer one, from the same writer, in the same year, on the same channel, is a number worth remembering the next time Thai queer drama is described as fully mainstream. It is written by the mainstream. It is broadcast by the mainstream. It is commissioned at a third of the length.

One more thread, because the crew list closes a circle we opened earlier. The Secret of Us was directed by Saratswadee Wongsomphet, who also directed Yes or No in 2010, and produced by Orawan Tankitibutr, who had a small part in that same 2010 film. This site has already used those two careers to argue that Thai GL never started in 2022 because it never stopped. Here they are again, on the series a Channel 3 lakorn writer was assigned to.