Love Beneath the Stars

Love Beneath the Stars is a six-episode Philippine boys' love series, also billed as The Boy Foretold by the Stars the Series, written and directed by Dolly Dulu and co-produced by Dreamscape Entertainment with Clever Minds Inc. It streamed on iWantTFC from 16 August to 20 September 2021, with episodes of around thirty minutes. The project was announced on 2 February 2021, a little over a month after the film it continues.

The story resumes where the feature stopped. Dominic Benjamin Fuentes Cruz and Lucas John Armada are together, more or less, and now have to keep a relationship running inside an all-boys Catholic school that has no procedure for one. Classmates who tolerated a rumour respond differently to a fact. Teachers who could ignore it no longer can. The boys' families arrive with their own positions: Faye, Dominic's mother, played by Agot Isidro, and Luke's mother, played by Nikki Valdez, want different things and neither of them wants this. Mark, the coach, played by Victor Silayan, occupies the ambiguous space between the institution and the pupils. Baby R, the fortune teller who set the whole thing in motion, returns.

What the series does, and the film could not, is stay in the aftermath. A feature has to end at a decision; six episodes can sit with what follows one. The move to iWantTFC also changed the audience: the film reached viewers through a festival, while the series arrived as ordinary subscription programming, the same route as any other title on the service.

The direction of travel is worth noting on its own. Most screen boys' love in this catalogue begins as a series and, if it succeeds, acquires a film. Here the film came first and the series followed, which meant the production had a known cast, a proven pairing and a finished first act before it wrote a single episode. That is an unusual position for a Philippine BL title of this period to start from.