Not Me (2021)

The most daring BL from GMMTV to date

When I started watching Not Me, I started wondering if it's BL at all. Gone is the excessive use of beauty filters or blurring effects to make the actors look unnaturally perfect. Instead, you can see the actors' complexions, pores and all. The cinematographic elements tend to be dark and gritty, and one might be surprised by how politically daring it is to talk about the problems with Thai society. And while fans may start watching the series thinking that it is yet another Off-Gun BL vehicle, the series takes its own sweet time developing their characters' relationship to a point where they are clearly in love with each other. It has the sort of guts to chart new territory that the Thai BL industry needs.

To be sure, Not Me does not eschew all BL conventions. Quite early in the series, we get to see White (Gun's character) and Sean (Off's character) sharing a bed, Gun falling into Sean's arms, etc. However, the ship for the other couple, Yok and Dan, starts sailing faster and one may wonder if the White-Sean ship is going to happen at all. But what is surprising is that it leaves out a whole lot of feel-good fluff. The main characters may be mostly university students, but their vigilantism is legally problematic and morally ambiguous. There isn't much putting them in a glamorous light although they seem to be good people. With Not Me, we are definitely not watching the typical idealized rich-and-handsome or romanticized struggling-poor-but-cute leads though some of the main characters are wealthy and others are poor. They are not guys who go around campus with legions of screaming fans. If they are privileged in some way, the access to that privilege is questioned.

Of course, not everything that is different from the norm is great. So what makes Not Me such a riveting watch? The plot development, for one, is excellent. There is a good story beyond the BL. And while a revelation in one of the later episodes about how Black (White's twin brother, also played by Gun) gets injured at the start of the story isn't totally unpredictable, it is interesting how the person behind his injury is portrayed with a certain degree of ambiguity rather than as an outright villain. It is hard to tell how the story will end until you have watched the last episode.

The story of White impersonating Black and joining the latter's vigilante group isn't a story that will definitely benefit from an infusion of BL into the plot. It is good enough on its own, and having BL relationships may attract more fans while alienating others. If we consider the social impact of the series, it is a good thing to have such a series instead of series that cater only to BL fans because the portrayal of gay relationships can reach more than just a niche audience.

Despite all the praises I can shower on Not Me, I shouldn't exaggerate how ground-breaking the series is. While the social criticism is strong at the start, the society's problems seems to be very much reduced to a single villain (Tawi) later on despite hints that getting rid of him isn't going to change society. Certain deep-seated social issues like how the wealthy have connections that help them get ahead of others who may be equally or better qualified also seem to take a backseat later on. Yet, the series has done what I don't expect from a GMMTV production. (If I remember correctly, The Gifted came close but seems to chicken out of it.) Such a production deserves all the support it can get. If nothing else, the commercial viability of such a production will mean that it won't just be indie, low-budget productions that would venture into the same sort of social criticism.

I don't usually take the numbers in my reviews seriously, but I would say that if we take everything else we can out of the series except for the BL, the BL would at most be 8/10. But it is everything else that is working together with the BL that elevates the series to 9.5/10. With the same cast and production team, GMMTV could well have made another excellent but mostly safe series like Bad Buddy. But I'm really glad it didn't.

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