Ben x Jim

Ben x Jim is a Philippine boys' love web series produced by Regal Entertainment, written and directed by Easy Ferrer, and released in Tagalog and English across two seasons between 15 October 2020 and 9 April 2021. Fifteen episodes were made in total, seven in the first season and eight in the second, with individual instalments running from twenty-seven to forty-three minutes. The first season went out free on Regal's own YouTube channel and was also carried by the Heart of Asia Channel; the second moved behind the paid Upstream.PH service and was billed there as BXJ Forever.

Benjamin Mendoza is twenty-three and living by himself, eight years into a degree he is finally close to finishing, when the national lockdown shuts everything down around him. The restrictions push him back into contact with Jimson Alcantara, who was his closest friend as a child and has not been in his life for years. The reunion is awkward and then it is not. Feelings both of them had put away come back with nothing much to do but be noticed, and the pair spend fifteen episodes deciding whether to admit to them. Yana, Flo Guimary, Leo Portugues and Val each complicate the picture in turn, some of them out of affection and some out of self-interest, and the second season inherits consequences the first one set in motion.

The production is notable for who made it rather than what it did. Regal Entertainment is one of the oldest and largest film companies in the Philippines, with a catalogue stretching back decades into mainstream cinema, and this was the studio putting its name and its YouTube channel behind a boys' love title. The commercial experiment continued into the second season, which shifted viewers from a free channel to a paid platform and in doing so split the series across two very different kinds of access.