Why R U The Series

2020 Thai BL series Why R U The Series brings back adorable Love By Chance actor Saint to our screens, and boy have we missed him! He's the biggest drawcard here, and definitely the top reason for watching Why R U in the first place. So is it worth watching?

Summary: University students and siblings Zon and Zol have a teasing rivalry. When Zon realises that Zol is writing BL stories about him being in an imaginary relationship with his nemesis Saifah, he insists that she delete them. She cheekily asks him to swear that he doesn't have conflicting feelings about Saifah (she saw them share an accidental kiss during a fight). He hesitates, but he swears to it anyway. Bad move! His obvious lie throws him into an upside-down BL alternate universe, where Zol's BL story about him looks like it's coming true, and he starts hallucinating some very famous BL characters. Meanwhile, Zon's friend Tutor starts to struggle in his own lifelong platonic friendship with beautiful party girl Hwahwa, after obnoxious senior Fighter starts dating her. Tutor's own low-key attraction to Fighter is shattered, and though he tries to move on, he still keeps himself shielded behind Hwahwa's friendship. But Zol is writing about Tutor and Fighter being in a secret BL relationship too...

This extremely slight series is very lucky to have Saint starring in it, because there's frankly not much else going on here. Initially I thought it might be a fun cross between a BL satire (like The Boy Next Door) and an light-hearted 'alternate reality' fantasy (kind of like Great Men Academy), but the secondary couple Zon and Saifah are so boring, the 'reality-switch' story fades into nothingness after a couple of episodes. Eventually, the writers make the much better choice of focusing more closely on its main couple Tutor and Fighter as the series progresses. (Though this is apparently due to COVID-19 restrictions affecting production and location shooting more than anything else.) There's decent chemistry between actors Saint and Zee, and their story can be surprisingly sexy and even touching, despite the deliberate BL 'alternate reality' warp.

It's a great pleasure to find that the most interesting characters in this series are women. Tutor's beautiful best friend Hwahwa is a challenging person to like at first, she's so superficial and ditzy. But her difficult relationship with Fighter makes you feel more sympathetic towards her than expected.  But it's Tutor's older sister Tong who steals the show with her intelligence, kindness and humility. There's a scene at an airport that will leave you in tears, she's so good.

The rest of the university characters are a complete mess and deeply annoying - especially Zon's various immature university friends on the football team, who are set up as comic relief but aren't funny in the least. All sorts of childish, stupid and confusing BL sub plots are set up around them in a half-hearted attempt to find a spark, but all of them fall flat. This is probably the prime example of the idiotic BL trope of making all the central characters' friends fall in love with each other. Even with the legitimate excuse of Zol's 'alternate-reality' stories creating their real-life narratives, they're painfully cringeworthy. Football team captain Japan's story is so unbearably bad, it will make your skin crawl. It comes as no surprise to see every single one of them vanish into thin air, with no resolutions at all.

The acting is OK, the direction is competent, the cinematography and set designs are surprisingly good, and there are a few fun scenes that more or less catch your attention. But the screenplay is beyond help. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, given all the production troubles with COVID-19 and the series' obvious, hasty rewrites. (The final episode in particular is dead on arrival; it's very poorly written, it rushes to its conclusion and has nothing interesting to say or show at all.) But it's honestly too much of stretch to be lenient here. It's such a shame, because the core 'reality-switch' story has a lot of potential. I could see what they were trying to do by pulling out all the cheesy BL clichés, to make us try to work out whether what we're seeing is the real world or the alternate BL reality world. But at a certain point they gave up making a satire, and all we're left with is a deliberate flood of BL clichés. You'd think this might turn the series into a pedestrian standard BL, but it can't even manage that because it's too boring.

Not even Saint can save this series from itself.

Rating: 8/20

Ending: happy

Best scene:

This is surprisingly hard because there are quite a few to choose from.

I was completely floored by the scene where Fighter and Tutor get into an enormous fight that totally annihilates Fighter. I don't want to go into more detail than that, as it's a big spoiler, but  anyone who has watched the series will know exactly the scene I'm taking about. Both Zee and Saint's acting in this scene is top notch.

Get ready for a few big surprises, when Zon has hallucinations involving a number of very popular BL characters!

Tutor also has some beautiful scenes with his sister that are the most honest, genuine and heartfelt moments in the series.

There are some unexpectedly hot beach holiday scenes in episodes nine and ten. After Love By Chance, where Saint was such a passive cipher, it's a real shock to see him off the P'New leash here, he's so bold and sexually forward.

Fighter's confrontation with his father is easily the most dramatic scene in the series.