Make It Right - Season 1
I came across references to Make It Right - Season One in an online forum that was ranking the best Asian BL series ever made. It was right up near the top, so this encouraged me to give it a try. This review only looks at season 1, I'll review season 2 later once I've watched it.
Summary: After he finds out his girlfriend has been cheating on him, high school student Fuse has a big night out with his friends and gets very drunk. His friend Tee helps him back to his own place to stay the night, and they have sex. Tee is enamoured but Fuse is very confused. The push and pull of a blossoming BL romance ensues. Fuse is also pursued by hero-worshipper Rodtang, which makes Tee jealous. Fuse's brash womanising friend Frame is secretly using gay dating apps. An anonymous hookup turns out to be his classmate, nerdish Book, which turns both boys' lives upside down.
Make no mistake, this is a cookie-cutter BL high school drama. It brings nothing original to the table, and struggles to come up with even a variation on the narrative template that we haven't already seen many times before. This might sound odd, but Make It Right was the first time I really felt I was watching a BL series whose main characters are children. It's puerile and moronic, full of schoolboy fart and shit jokes, and sex-obsessed slapstick.
Where the show sometimes excels, however, is with its patches of fantastic writing. This is the one and only BL drama I've come across where the characters express their feelings in detail to the one they love, and it's often really nicely expressed and touching. It's also very frank about sex. When there's a profession of love, it's not just the usual "Yeah I like you, let's have sex" - though that's still there too - but an emotional, well-reasoned explanation that is very moving. At one point, on a brief holiday together, Fuse delivers the romantic soliloquy of the series to Tee. When the latter prevaricates about kissing Fuse when invited to, Fuse gently points out that he knows what Tee's afraid of (getting hurt, and also being the cause of Fuse cheating on his girlfriend). "You're disobeying your heart," Fuse gently tells a wonderstruck Tee. "I know it's wrong to kiss you, but you need to stop thinking about other people and think a little of yourself and what you want. I want to see your happiness, the happiness of your heart. Though I can't always give that to you, isn't it enough that we are together here and now?" This heart-melting moment is up there for me with Apo's lovingly considerate advice to Waii in Waterboyy The Series as one of the best sequences of romantic dialogue I've heard in a BL drama yet. And amazingly it happens two or three more times over the course of the first season! In my opinion, the best scripts unite fine characterisation with the purpose of the drama itself. Even such a tiny amount of emotive exposition goes a long way to contributing to such a noble aim, especially in such a formulaic genre that noticeably lacks direct expressions of feeling. Perhaps this is just my Westernised perspective on how communication should work in a relationship though, be it on TV or otherwise. I get the impression that Asian cultures are far more reticent and avoid this sort of directness (certainly, most Japanese people are and do). So perhaps they are able to understand and read more into silences and non-verbal communication than a Westerner ever could. In any case, it's quite a revelation that a BL drama such as Make It Right that's generic in every other way can still be so refreshingly candid on this front.
It's obvious that this series has taken its cues (and I would guess its producers too) from Love Sick. Its production and structure are very similar, and while both shows are hampered by poor acting and listless direction, they both put great faith in the magnetism of their lead actors. But Make It Right is actually far more successful in almost everything else it achieves than its very popular predecessor. It has learnt the lessons of tighter scripting and characterisation which Love Sick lacked. The best example of this is the keenly interesting relationship that develops between Frame and Book. Both characters are nicely written and sympathetic, but it's the astonishing character of Frame who lifts this show up to the next level. He's a deeply flawed selfish boy, but with an immense capacity for love and generosity, and a bold fun-loving impulsive personality that I've never seen in a Thai BL drama before. Watching him progressively fall in love with Book despite himself is the show's finest asset and its greatest pleasure. Once the Fuse / Tee relationship has been more or less established early on in the series, with mixed results, Book and Frame's relationship dominates the remaining episodes through sheer force of personality. They soon overshadow the central relationship with no difficulty. It's easy to see why many viewers prefer their relationship to Fuse / Tee. There's so much more interest in it, and the actor playing Frame is highly watchable.
The final episodes drop sharply in quality for some reason. It's as if they ran out of ideas on how to finalise the various season one plot strands and also create anticipation and interest in a second season at the same time. Flashbacks become ominously more frequent, Fuse performs a dull love song on a guitar which seems to drag on for about ten minutes, the narrative gives way to soundtracked montages, and there's an overwrought lesbian love quadrangle that gets way out of hand. Disappointingly, Fuse / Tee almost drop away entirely. We get an adorable scene with Book acting cute with Frame and feeding him some gyoza (again with the product placement!!) but the season abruptly ends when a few inconsequential subplots get cliffhangers or sad endings. It was a deflating experience, especially after the short stretches of fine work that had gone before it.
I will definitely be watching season 2 very soon in any case, it's a fine show overall and recommended.
Rating: 12 out of 20
Ending: Happy
Summary: After he finds out his girlfriend has been cheating on him, high school student Fuse has a big night out with his friends and gets very drunk. His friend Tee helps him back to his own place to stay the night, and they have sex. Tee is enamoured but Fuse is very confused. The push and pull of a blossoming BL romance ensues. Fuse is also pursued by hero-worshipper Rodtang, which makes Tee jealous. Fuse's brash womanising friend Frame is secretly using gay dating apps. An anonymous hookup turns out to be his classmate, nerdish Book, which turns both boys' lives upside down.
Make no mistake, this is a cookie-cutter BL high school drama. It brings nothing original to the table, and struggles to come up with even a variation on the narrative template that we haven't already seen many times before. This might sound odd, but Make It Right was the first time I really felt I was watching a BL series whose main characters are children. It's puerile and moronic, full of schoolboy fart and shit jokes, and sex-obsessed slapstick.
Where the show sometimes excels, however, is with its patches of fantastic writing. This is the one and only BL drama I've come across where the characters express their feelings in detail to the one they love, and it's often really nicely expressed and touching. It's also very frank about sex. When there's a profession of love, it's not just the usual "Yeah I like you, let's have sex" - though that's still there too - but an emotional, well-reasoned explanation that is very moving. At one point, on a brief holiday together, Fuse delivers the romantic soliloquy of the series to Tee. When the latter prevaricates about kissing Fuse when invited to, Fuse gently points out that he knows what Tee's afraid of (getting hurt, and also being the cause of Fuse cheating on his girlfriend). "You're disobeying your heart," Fuse gently tells a wonderstruck Tee. "I know it's wrong to kiss you, but you need to stop thinking about other people and think a little of yourself and what you want. I want to see your happiness, the happiness of your heart. Though I can't always give that to you, isn't it enough that we are together here and now?" This heart-melting moment is up there for me with Apo's lovingly considerate advice to Waii in Waterboyy The Series as one of the best sequences of romantic dialogue I've heard in a BL drama yet. And amazingly it happens two or three more times over the course of the first season! In my opinion, the best scripts unite fine characterisation with the purpose of the drama itself. Even such a tiny amount of emotive exposition goes a long way to contributing to such a noble aim, especially in such a formulaic genre that noticeably lacks direct expressions of feeling. Perhaps this is just my Westernised perspective on how communication should work in a relationship though, be it on TV or otherwise. I get the impression that Asian cultures are far more reticent and avoid this sort of directness (certainly, most Japanese people are and do). So perhaps they are able to understand and read more into silences and non-verbal communication than a Westerner ever could. In any case, it's quite a revelation that a BL drama such as Make It Right that's generic in every other way can still be so refreshingly candid on this front.
It's obvious that this series has taken its cues (and I would guess its producers too) from Love Sick. Its production and structure are very similar, and while both shows are hampered by poor acting and listless direction, they both put great faith in the magnetism of their lead actors. But Make It Right is actually far more successful in almost everything else it achieves than its very popular predecessor. It has learnt the lessons of tighter scripting and characterisation which Love Sick lacked. The best example of this is the keenly interesting relationship that develops between Frame and Book. Both characters are nicely written and sympathetic, but it's the astonishing character of Frame who lifts this show up to the next level. He's a deeply flawed selfish boy, but with an immense capacity for love and generosity, and a bold fun-loving impulsive personality that I've never seen in a Thai BL drama before. Watching him progressively fall in love with Book despite himself is the show's finest asset and its greatest pleasure. Once the Fuse / Tee relationship has been more or less established early on in the series, with mixed results, Book and Frame's relationship dominates the remaining episodes through sheer force of personality. They soon overshadow the central relationship with no difficulty. It's easy to see why many viewers prefer their relationship to Fuse / Tee. There's so much more interest in it, and the actor playing Frame is highly watchable.
The final episodes drop sharply in quality for some reason. It's as if they ran out of ideas on how to finalise the various season one plot strands and also create anticipation and interest in a second season at the same time. Flashbacks become ominously more frequent, Fuse performs a dull love song on a guitar which seems to drag on for about ten minutes, the narrative gives way to soundtracked montages, and there's an overwrought lesbian love quadrangle that gets way out of hand. Disappointingly, Fuse / Tee almost drop away entirely. We get an adorable scene with Book acting cute with Frame and feeding him some gyoza (again with the product placement!!) but the season abruptly ends when a few inconsequential subplots get cliffhangers or sad endings. It was a deflating experience, especially after the short stretches of fine work that had gone before it.
I will definitely be watching season 2 very soon in any case, it's a fine show overall and recommended.
Rating: 12 out of 20
Ending: Happy
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