Cooking Crush was a steady series. Steady, but also safe. Starting with the casting, the story, and the characters, Cooking Crush evinces a startling shortfall in artistic ambition. You, the veteran viewer of innumerable prior BL series, have seen this sort of tale before. Continuing with the writing, directing, and editing, Cooking Crush likewise innovates no fresh way of conveying a BL storyline. You, the veteran viewer of innumerable prior BL series, have witnessed countless episodes that look, sound, and feel like these episodes look, sound, and feel. While the ingredients may lack freshness, the recipe cooks up a final product that surehandedly delivers solid, dependable BL comfort food. That is to say, if you crave plain, simple fare that still hits the spot, Cooking Crush suffices for that purpose. If you hoped for a BL meal thatmight deliver something special, memorable, or different, then Cooking Crush will not be to your taste.

The series marks the return to BL of the hallowed Off-Gun pairing, veritable Pillars of BL Shipping. Their previous project, Not Me (2021), featured dark themes and a level of social criticism atypical of BL fare. That series impressed viewers with its depth and complexity despite the bleak tone and socially conscious messaging. Reportedly by request of the actors, this new project aimed far lower, and the result is an utterly conventional BL. The series will most likely satisfy BL fans in search of a reliably sweet, romantic story, one told without any of the social criticism or genre blending that have become commonplace in recent years. Cooking Crush is very much a BL series in the mold of pre-2020 BL productions. Perhaps that is all it ever needed to be to be considered a success. By contrast, it will not much satisfy BL fans desperate to see the genre evolve.

Cooking Crush is not a bad series. Lukewarm praise? Surely yes; yet, that tepid analysis is more than can be said of several other recent series released by formula-factory GMMTV. If Cooking Crush delivers no significant highs, it also avoids any significant lows. It just plods along in predictable blandness until the requisite 12 episodes have been counted down. En route it delivered sweet moments and dramatic moments. It had a main couple and a side couple. It had pesky parents and supportive parents. Its supporting cast offered familiar favorites and a charming newcomer. It avoided the hyper-dramatic penultimate curse episode (hallelujah!) and likewise avoided any huge, gaping holes in story logic (glory hallelujah!). Given the dizzying illogic some of those more overtly ambitious recent series foisted on viewers in search of compelling plot twists, I choose to regard the absence of ambitious plotting as a virtue. A simple story needs no great leaps in logic! And sometimes, simple is all we need. Mind you, this story was so insubstantial I doubt the story framework offered sufficient space for plot holes to form. Ambition in plotting was traded for safety in plotting. Unsurprisingly, given the studio’s reliance on formulaic storytelling, but few scenes or episodes exuded natural progression of human relationships. Characters start to feel attracted to each other because the storyboard says it is time for that "twist." The plot just moves along in a way that always seemed calculated—sweetness, followed by tension, followed by a fresh dose of redemptive sweetness. Cooking Crush was manufactured as a star vehicle for the Pillars heading the cast, and the story felt manufactured to win audience approval. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s nothing exciting with that either. The series was conceived to be a safe project for all involved. It delivered exactly that—BL comfort food. And absolutely, positively nothing more than that.

Off and Gun continue to manifest tremendous chemistry. (Fans of this ship absolutely should enjoy the series.) But in some ways, I don’t think their prior history helped this production. They are almost too comfortable with one another. The series never cultivated any palpable sexual tension, in part because we viewers are so accustomed to seeing Off and Gun together. The pairing of Doc and Chef seemed inevitable, just as soon as sufficient numbers of sponsor products had been placed on screen. By design, Cooking Crush was never intended to challenge the actors' performative skills the way their prior pairing had; yet, the blandness of this script may have overcompensated. Off and Gun are always engaging, and their bonhomie draws the viewer into the cozy warmth of the narrative. Still, in Cooking Crush the actors seem to glide through their scenes by relying on muscle memory rather than inspiration. To be fair, the flatness of the script, which crafted familiar, monotonous character types patterned from an overused and worn-out template, offered the duo precious little opportunity to demonstrate any growth in their craft. Nevertheless, I depart Cooking Crush with a firm sense that perhaps the time has come when the Off-Gun pairing has reached a point of diminishing returns.