The soap series Bupphaesannivas (Love Destiny) is all the rage these days in Thailand. I enjoy some parts of it, especially one memorable episode a few weeks back when the female lead, a beautiful vixen in 17th century Ayutthaya, displays her vituperative talent by shouting at her servant, "Shut up or I'll smack your mouth with my piss pot." Neither did we see the piss nor the pot, but we get the picture. There's even a YouTube clip of that.
It's not a bad show. Mixing screwball with a period setting, putting an avatar of a modern woman into the court of King Narai and using real-life historical figures as characters, the series still relies on the allure of nostalgia and rom-com telenovela, and yet the heroine has a perky defiance that goes against the straight-up glorification of the past. It's not groundbreaking -- never expect that on TV -- but at least it's not another stiff, dull, self-aggrandising Ayutthaya theatrical. Love Destiny airs on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and the streets are reportedly empty those evenings as everyone rushes home to stare at the screen. The ratings are sky-high, evidently, and the hope that our ailing digital TV will have a future is being discussed. So why don't we ask Channel 3 to keep it on air for a few years, or maybe, like, forever, making it last longer than Game of Thrones?
Now let's take a moment to ponder if the popularity of Love Destiny could mean anything more than just high ratings, obsessive fandom and voluntary curfews. One wonders if this is a faddish, one-off hit, or if it really is going to be a lesson in content-making for our boring television. Is it a genuine cultural phenomenon that will make Thai history cool, or just something to be exploited and cast away? More ambitiously, is it going to be a curtain-raiser for our dream of cultural exports, like Korea does with their series that hypnotises the whole of Southeast Asia?
Quick to latch on to the bandwagon is the Ministry of Culture, which rides the coattail's of the show's popularity by hosting seminars, tours and history lessons on Ayutthaya. It's even reported that the ministry wants to finance a sequel. Not surprisingly, it compares Love Destiny to the Korean series Dae Jang-geum, which had Thailand in its grip back in 2005 and still serves as a benchmark in cultural promotion. Pity the Ministry of Culture: For all its hard work, budgetary constraints and bureaucratic endeavours to promote old-school Thai culture, it takes just one commercial TV series to whip up the wind of nostalgia, the craze for vintage wardrobes and interest in King Narai's era. The series blithely surpasses all of the ministry's unattractive cultural programmes.
Which is our point here. Love Destiny isn't the first TV drama to attract such high ratings -- it's not even the highest in history, according to some sources. The series is a smart, entertaining packaging of familiar content that, I predict, will spawn endless copycats in the next few months -- all TV dramas will soon deconstruct its formula of success and start doing historical pieces with a twist (all set in Ayutthaya). And then, rightly, this pop-cultural storm will blow away. Remember the other storm that shook Bangkok last year, the singing contest called The Masked Singer? Another show that emptied the roads, that boasted huge ratings, that got everyone excited, that heralded "the future of television". All hogwash, it seems, because there are now singing contests on every channel from 8am to 10pm, all mediocre, all repetitive, bleeding the trend to its hoary death.
In the age of fragmented playing fields, both in content and platform, Thai TV can't pin its hopes on just one phenomenon. Quality shows are always needed, but content-makers also need to diversify, to take risks, and more importantly, to develop an audience with a wider taste -- look at the Korean series and their wider range of themes, from suspense to romance to comedy, and see how so many of them have landed on Netflix and been seen across the globe. Love Destiny, sincerely, isn't going anywhere near that.
Likewise, the state can't just throw its weight behind one phenomenon in the false hope of establishing a cultural flag-bearer. What it has to do is improve the system and support young talent -- instead of hitchhiking with a popular show only to be dropped off mid-way and needing to hitch another ride. Again, Korea has a constant supply of good series and movies because the state supports creative schools, builds studios and funds film festivals. It finds the right balance between artistic and commercial impulses, and it treats this as a long-term cultural policy rather than milking a fleeting trend. That's the destiny we need.