MostlyCloudy

BLGLFlix editorial view

That word lakorn in the second keyword list is the whole story. Lakorn is the Thai evening soap, the format that has held the mass terrestrial audience for decades, and Channel 7 is where it lives. A BL novel being made as a Channel 7 lakorn is not the specialist BL industry making another series for its own audience. It is the mainstream drama machine taking a BL story and treating it as ordinary programming.

Hold that next to what this site has recorded elsewhere in the region and the gap is startling. In Korea, Friendly Rivalry reached sixteen episodes with a name cast and still went out on a telecom operator’s app, because no broadcaster would take it. In China, a director held ten crew jobs on one seven episode series because there was no other way to make it. In Thailand a BL story is being written into the country’s most conventional television format on one of its biggest channels. These are not different stages of the same journey. They are different arrangements of who is allowed to broadcast what.

The other thing worth noticing is where the two adaptations went. One to GMMTV, the largest name in Thai BL, airing on ONE 31. One to GYB Entertainment, airing on Channel 7. Different studio, different director, different producer, different channel. Compare Mon Maew, the GL novelist whose two adaptations both stayed inside Idol Factory. The Thai studio system does not lock up its authors. The book is the asset and it travels, which is why a single novelist can end up supplying both the youth studio and the terrestrial giant inside the same production cycle.

Four writers into this pass, the same shape keeps appearing in four countries. Mon Maew kept by a studio through two entirely different productions. Jang Yeong-seon writing two of three Love Class seasons under three different directors. Yang Pi-ying carried across the Fragrance seasons. And now MostlyCloudy, supplying two studios at once. In an industry usually discussed through its actors and its pairings, the person who actually persists from project to project is the one who wrote it.