Kim Taewook

BLGLFlix editorial view

Six episodes of ten minutes is sixty minutes of television in total. That is the whole series. One hour, and it took four production companies to make it.

Hold that number against what this site has recorded elsewhere in the same pass. A Thai girls’ love series runs eight episodes of fifty minutes, so four hundred minutes. A Taiwanese BL series runs thirteen hours. A Japanese one runs ten episodes on a quarterly broadcast slot. This entire Korean production is shorter than one episode of the Thai one.

That is not a criticism of the work, which we have not seen and are not reviewing here. It is a measurement of the space Korean BL is allowed to occupy. Everything this site has found on the Korean side points the same way. Friendly Rivalry reached sixteen episodes and still could not get a television slot, going out on a telecom app. Love Class grew from six episodes to sixteen across four years on streaming platforms. A BL web series cast two of its five actors out of a reality dating show because there was no other pool. And here, an hour of finished drama with four companies attached to it.

The recurrence of Shortime is worth logging. It is also the platform behind Fix the Error!, the six episode series documented elsewhere on this site. Two Korean BL web series, two different production teams, the same small distributor. Korea does have a place where this material goes. It is just very short and very far from a broadcaster.

One more thing, and it is the pattern this site keeps meeting outside Thailand. One person created, wrote and directed this. A Chinese director held ten crew jobs on a seven episode series. A Korean director wrote and directed three BL series in eighteen months. Where there is no studio, authorship concentrates in one person by necessity, and the credit list stops being a division of labour and becomes a description of who was available.