Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV, and When Queer Media Goes Mainstream: The Lakorn Corner, Part 2 -- The Incredible Miracle That Is The Miracle Of Teddy Bear, and How Its Performance Speaks to the BL We Watch Today
[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I'm continuing a three-part sub-series on queer primetime lakorns in Thailand, this time highlighting 2022's magnificent The Miracle of Teddy Bear.]
TW: child abuse and a few major spoilers. I absolutely urge you to watch this show, and I really don't want to spoil anything, but please know that this show is one of my new favorite Thai queer dramas, so if that means anything to you, maybe watch it first before getting to this piece!
Hello again! Welcome to part two of the OGMMTVC's sub-series, The Lakorn Corner, where I'm examining important moments in television when Thai queer media and themes, concentrated mostly in the niche Series Y/Thai BL genre, crossed over into mainstream spaces -- namely the lakorn, or primetime drama, space.
Last week, I wrote about 2019's The Fallen Leaf, Thailand's first-ever queer primetime lakorn, which focused on the life story of a transgender woman. I posited in that piece that The Fallen Leaf made a number of significant breakthroughs for broadcast primetime Thai television, especially in centering very specific ideas and themes of LGBTQ+ equality that reached a much bigger audience than the shows of the smaller Series Y genre had ever had previously. Important to note is that The Fallen Leaf aired on the One31 channel (which belongs to GMM, an entertainment conglomerate that also owns GMMTV).
Since the airing of The Fallen Leaf, One31 has subsequently aired two more very important (and VERY huge) queer primetime dramas, 2022's Khun Chai/To Sir With Love, and 2024's Spare Me Your Mercy. The wonderful @clairedaring posited in the tags of my post on The Fallen Leaf that the immense popularity of TFL on One31 allowed One31 to widely broaden its scope of experimentation beyond the traditional heterosexual romances that usually dominate the lakorn genre.
This is important for me to note because, a few years later, Thailand's biggest broadcast channel, Channel 3, decided to broadcast a queer lakorn of its own: The Miracle of Teddy Bear. I want to posit right away that one theory I have about Miracle being able to occupy arguably the biggest primetime airing spot on Thailand's broadcast television was due to both the massive success of The Fallen Leaf in the same time slot on a different channel, as well as the explosive and exponential growth of the smaller Series Y/Thai BL genre between 2019 and 2022, which likely led Channel 3 executives to believe that its own broad and mainstream audience was ready for queer content in primetime. I'll get more into this in a moment.
(The Miracle of Teddy Bear is actually -- HA -- the third queer lakorn to have aired in a primetime slot, as the flopped comedy Rak Diao aired earlier in the year of 2022 on One31. However, Rak Diao did not make a large cultural impression on queer media in Thailand as did The Fallen Leaf, Miracle, or Khun Chai, so I'm leaving it off of this list.)
As opposed to The Fallen Leaf (which centers a single transgender female character), I've seen The Miracle of Teddy Bear categorized as either a BL and/or a lakorn. This discussion on Reddit regarding "lakorn BLs" describes the confluence of "new" queer storylines within the long-existent soap opera/Thai lakorn structure, especially with the subsequent airing of Khun Chai (To Sir With Love) later in the 2022 autumn season.
It's important for me to note here Miracle wasn't a typical lakorn OR a typical BL. It was not a soap opera, it was not a historical drama, and it was not a typical romance. It was very much an exploratory and penetrating drama, but it happens to be labeled as either BL and/or lakorn due to its airing time and its themes.
I emphasize these mundane points because I want to highlight, as I said in my review of The Fallen Leaf, that
as opposed to The Fallen Leaf, which centered one queer main character,
The Miracle of Teddy Bear was the first queer drama to air in a primetime slot on a major Thai broadcast channel *that centered same-sex relationships*.
Considering that Miracle focuses a huge part of its dialogue on love and acceptance, rather than a lifespan-focused psuedo-bildungsroman format like The Fallen Leaf, we MUST therefore juxtapose Miracle against the airing of GMMTV Series Y dramas, which air on GMM25 in Thailand, a channel akin (to us in the States) to, say, the WB or MTV, meaning -- a channel that is not as popular and culturally widespread or significant as the broadcast-level ABC/CBS/NBC channels of the States.
AS WELL, Channel 3 was already showing BLs by the time of Miracle's airing, particularly Secret Crush On You, earlier in 2022 and produced by Idol Factory. But Idol Factory's BLs on Channel 3 air in later timeslots, often at 10 pm or 10:30 pm -- certainly not targeted to a much wider primetime audience.
In other words: in every hotel room I stayed in during my trip to Thailand last year, I had Channel 3, but I never had GMM25. International fans that watch GMMTV dramas on YouTube must understand that while *we* have easy access to most GMMTV dramas, thus making GMMTV dramas plentiful fodder for online fandom -- that GMMTV dramas WITHIN Thailand face tremendous competition from het and queer shows airing on more culturally prominent channels, if they're not web-exclusive shows.
As I noted in my review of The Fallen Leaf, I pondered the reasons why One31 executives approved that show's script. One31 is known for being a bolder channel than the more staid Channel 3. But I also wonder -- it may have helped the One31 executives to approve The Fallen Leaf precisely because its transgender main character was NOT centered in a romance (in fact, she was centered in a notorious love tangle involving her uncle-in-law, her father, and her aunt) (I know, I know).
When I think about this, to jump three years later into 2022 and to see that Channel 3 approved of The Miracle of Teddy Bear's script -- I do think, circuitously, that the airing and popularity of BLs previous to The Miracle of Teddy Bear certainly helped Channel 3 to consider airing holistically queer content, partially centered within a same-sex relationship, in a primetime slot. The amazing @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup of @the-conversation-pod, along with the utterly inimitable and dearest @happypotato48, posited recently that the creators of Miracle may have gotten AWAY with getting this show to air, because the premise of the show -- an inanimate teddy bear is alived to become a human -- itself was so absurd as to perhaps be interpreted as comedy.
According to this EXCELLENT reporting and analysis post by @flowerbeasblog, Miracle's ratings were unimpressive, maybe even dismal, as compared against mainstream het dramas airing in the same timeslot. (Here's another Reddit post about Miracle's low ratings as well.) In conversation with @happypotato48, he shared with me one social media post by a Thai fan that read, "i saw the rating and feel so hopeless about this country."
In the podcast linked above, @happypotato48 further clarifies,
For people who didn’t know this show aired on the time slot called ละครหลังข่าว, or after news lakorn, on the most popular channel in Thailand, channel 3, and the rating was not good. It was bad, like really really bad, a lot of the BL girlies didn’t show up for it and the lakorn aunties just think it was too weird and was not ready for any gay leads lakorn. And it’s pissing me the fuck off because this show depicted the queer truth unapologetically and because of that reason that’s why there haven’t been a BL show [on Channel 3] in that time slot since.
For us international QL fans, however, we should note, again through @flowerbeasblog's excellent work, that Miracle happened to outperform the much-more-niche, Series Y GMMTV dramas by multiple points.
In other words: as compared to GMMTV QLs, Miracle bested them easily. But Miracle vastly *underperformed* when put up against other primetime dramas on bigger channels.
(I will have more to say on QL vs. lakorn ratings in part three of this sub-series, when I review Khun Chai.)
Moving on to the actual show itself, @happypotato48 also shared with me that Miracle had a vocal base of passionate fans who were excited about real exploratory LGBTQ+ content airing in such an accessible time slot and channel for a wider Thai audience.
My amazing writing friends @bengiyo (here) and @lurkingshan and @twig-tea (here) have written fabulous essays about this INCREDIBLE show, both of which dive well into important plot points and the surrounding history of the show's airing.
I was so blown away by this incredible 2022 queer drama, so impressed by the show's ability, as @bengiyo wrote, to leave not a single thread of a storyline behind for the sake of rushing towards a conclusion. Each episode did not contain a minute of wasted time. Each minute of this show was rich in its themes and plots, describing the incredibly difficult lives of queer children growing into adults, and managing the trauma cards they were dealt with by the imperfect, often biased, and sometimes evil adults that raised these children.
I can take a couple guesses myself, as an Asian child of Asian parents, as to why Miracle didn't perform well during its airing. For a much wider Thai audience than the typical girlies that watch BLs -- an audience that certainly included parents and grandparents -- Miracle was a HELL of an exercise of accountability towards underperforming adults who are involved in the raising of queer children.
The Miracle of Teddy Bear took a goddamn SCALPEL to the biases, the trauma, and even the violence that adults commit unto children and other adults, in the name of demanding that children conform to their demands and to societal expectations. If parents were watching this live -- parents who could have either been raising, or had raised, queer children -- and raised them in the context of bias and conformity, than I can only imagine that this show made them squirm in shame. But besides this point about shame, Miracle, as I mentioned before, was also not a typical primetime romance drama. It was heavy, emotional, penetrating material, and a primetime audience may not have been primed to deal with such heavy content at that airing time.
I urge you to read @bengiyo's and @lurkingshan and @twig-tea's in-depth essays on Miracle's plot, but I'll run quickly through it now to get to some important points that I want to highlight.
Our main protagonist, Nut, lives with his mentally impacted mother, Na. She hallucinates regularly, speaking to a man that she calls her husband. One day, Tofu, a teddy bear that Nut owns, comes to life. While Na accepts Tofu immediately, Nut is extremely concerned by the sudden appearance of a strange man in his house (who wouldn't be). The connection between human Tofu and Nut's suddenly-missing teddy bear is not made, and Tofu is eventually accepted by Nut to live in his house and take care of Na.
Over the course of the series, it is revealed that the man that Na hallucinates (Saen) is not actually her husband -- but is the twin brother of her deceased actual husband (Sibmeun), a husband that was devastatingly homophobic and abusive to both Na and Nut while he was alive. Na and Saen had previously been in love, but due to a confluence of events, Na ended up marrying Saen's twin brother, Sib.
This single decision, in all of its intergenerational traumatic glory, is the kingpin to a cascade of horrifying trauma for Nut as he grows up.
Nut knows he is gay throughout his life and is punished brutally by his father, time and time again, for it. Na is blamed and punished separately by Sib for her fault of not "correcting" Nut of his sexuality. Nut is brutally separated by his high school boyfriend, Tatarn, by Sib, who originally learns of Nut's relationship through a homophobic teacher who narcs on Nut and Tatarn after seeing them together.
Tatarn himself is an injured protagonist in a separate storyline, as this generation of children become adults, of how his effort to fight the government against taking over his family's land leads him to a series-length coma. With Tatarn in a suspended state, Tofu is able to come to life through Tatarn's life force, and Nut and Tofu eventually fall in love. I want to emphasize that there's SO MUCH MORE to this series that you must catch up with in Ben's and Shan's/Twig's essays, or, ideally, in stopping everything and watching this show.
The utter BRILLIANCE of this series emanates first with Tofu -- a grown man borne out of a teddy bear, who knows nothing about how the human world functions, thus establishing Tofu as a brilliant and objective narrator commenting on the fallacies of human behavior that he observes around him, Nut, and Na.
Tofu is able to ask the most simple questions about why people act the way they do. He poses these questions like a child.
Where does homophobia come from? Why does it exist?
Nut himself asks, in the BRILLIANT episode nine of this series -- why do people have to disturb our love?
And with Tofu's existence, Nut is able to begin exploring his repressed and traumatic memories, to finally be able to tell the story of his brutal childhood to an objective listener.
He says to Tofu, in episode 10 (I paraphrase here),
"[my parents] ruined it for me. They ruined my self-esteem. They never explained [their homophobia] to me."
Nut goes on to tell Tofu that his high school boyfriend, Tatarn, was the first person in his life that didn't make him feel like an intruder.
This theme (there were so, so many themes in this show, from traumatic patriarchy, to embedded and generational misogyny, omg so much) of internalized homophobia and intergenerational trauma reminded me of an Instagram post I once saw from an older gay man, who wrote about missing his young adulthood due to the trauma of his upbringing. He wrote that it wasn't until his 40s that he could actually LIVE as a gay man, because he spent his 20s and 30s in fear of prejudice, and processing the trauma that he had grown up with. He wrote that his is the case for most queer people -- that one's 40s are the equivalent of a heterosexual's 20s.
We catch Nut fully processing this, after a lifetime of internal and external struggles, with Tofu, to the point of Nut seeking therapy at the end of the series.
There are many more storylines dealing with homophobia (including that evil fucker Jan, FUCK YOU JAN), as well as unfettered support for queer children, as we see through Gen and his lovely family. We see parents changing their views on same-sex relationships, through Song and his father, Anik.
I want to note something for the sake of the OGMMTC syllabus and the history of Thai BL, as this show aired starting in March of 2022. What remarkable show had ended just two months prior?
That's right, GMMTV's inimitable Bad Buddy. (BBS GIRLIES CAN'T LEAVE 'EM ALONE.) As I made comparisons between GMMTV and Channel 3 earlier, I also want to compare what Bad Buddy represents vis à vis homophobia versus how Miracle dealt with it.
We all know that Bad Buddy exists in GMMTV's common No Homophobia Bubble. We all know that Bad Buddy leverages other themes, including intergenerational trauma, school infighting and bullying, and personal and family rivalries, to represent conflicts that commonly arise in situations of homophobia. We all know that the resolutions that Pat and Pran come to at the end of the show are oftentimes compromises that queer couples must make to survive in love and the world.
I believe that one of the reasons why The Miracle of Teddy Bear underperformed in ratings at the time of its airing is because, unlike Bad Buddy, Miracle surgically dissected just about every emanation of homophobia that one could possibly imagine. (TW: child abuse, spoiler) At one point during a flashback to Nut's childhood, we see Na saving Nut's life by slapping him in front of his homophobic father, as a means of distracting the father from potentially killing his gay son.
As I keep repeating, The Miracle of Teddy Bear is not a BL. In the context of the show's conversation about homophobia, the series ACTUALLY COMMENTS ON SERIES Y, brilliantly so, as Nut himself is a Series Y screenwriter, and Miracle demonstrates that Thai BLs are actually GOOD for reaching audiences that may otherwise question same-sex relations.
And Miracle is also not a romance. Except for the re-animated teddy bear, Miracle strikes about as realistic a vision of the difficulties of love and acceptance as I've seen in a fictional drama.
And I drank every minute of it up. It was incredibly refreshing to me to watch a truly queer piece of art just absolutely dissect almost every experience of the trauma of a queer child growing up in a difficult environment, and processing those difficulties in his adult life.
There are a few other pieces on the OGMMTVC syllabus that touch upon this brutal angst. From The Love of Siam, to Gay OK Bangkok, to Dew, to The Eclipse, there is a world of Thai queer cinema and shows, some of which include BLs, that don't shy away from wrangling with the oft-present brutality of growing up and living queer.
As I think about how Miracle performed in primetime broadcast ratings in 2022, I'm thinking about what some of us in critical circles have been discussing regarding the last year and a half of GMMTV shows -- GMMTV being the biggest producer of Thai BLs at the moment. GMMTV shows, since Bad Buddy, have not been as critically incisive into worlds of bias, and shows like We Are or My Love Mix-Up Thailand have actually generated criticism for being too out of touch from the oft-difficult realities of being queer.
I think it's extremely important for us, as a small fandom in the huge world of Asian dramas, to think about what we want to see out of the shows we prefer. I had no prior expectation before I tuned into The Miracle of Teddy Bear, not at all expecting such a thorough and rich commentary into the realities of being a queer Thai man.
I feel that The Miracle of Teddy Bear has given me such a broader insight into the kind of parenting that many young queer Thais likely experienced in their childhood. It's given me a larger holistic view of the issues I need to be aware of when I interact with any of my queer friends. And I think this holistic education into a queer experience should, frankly, be on the list of anyone who considers themselves a fan of queer media, so as to be better educated about the realities of bias that our friends and family may face.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is, The Miracle of Teddy Bear is so brilliant, that we as a fandom need to work on giving it the broader reputation it deserves. It deserves an important spot on the OGMMTVC syllabus as a must-watch, critical exploration of society vis à vis sexuality. For me, it's in my top three with He's Coming To Me and Bad Buddy as my favorite Thai queer dramas, if I'm broadening my criteria out of BLs, and also lands up in non-BL-land for me with the movies The Love of Siam and Dew.
If any of us out there think that we understand the culture of Thai queerness, or even of the trauma that being queer could cause to a child -- check yourself (as I did), watch The Miracle of Teddy Bear, and prepare for a rich and artful education into issues and themes that you may not have even thought of.
[Aaaahhh, I have been waiting for MONTHS to pen this tribute to Miracle, and I'm glad it's out of my system! It's long, but it's absolutely a must-watch.
Speaking of must-watches! My next post in this series is not a part of The Lakorn Corner sub-series, we'll take a quick break from that. I have been waiting, also, for MONTHS to revere over Triage (TRIIIIAAAAGGGEEEE!), the best medical BL ever, ever, ever. I'm just gonna gush in my piece, I hope that's okay with y'all.
I'm watching 2022's Khun Chai at the moment, and I'll review that after Triage, and then I'll take a look at the start of the GL era in Series Y territory with GAP and some preceding shows. My School President is on the horizon!
Here's the latest OGMMTVC playlist for yer pleasure!
1) The Love of Siam (2007) (movie) (review here) 2) My Bromance (2014) (movie) (review here) 3) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 4) Love Songs Love Stories: Pae Jai (2015) (Thailand’s first serialized GL) (to be reviewed with GAP the Series) 5) Gay OK Bangkok Season 1 (2016) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 6) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 7) SOTUS (2016-2017) (review here) 8) Gay OK Bangkok Season 2 (2017) (a non-BL queer series directed by Jojo Tichakorn and written by Aof Noppharnach) (review here) 9) Make It Right 2 (2017) (review here) 10) Together With Me (2017) (review here)
11) SOTUS S/Our Skyy x SOTUS (2017-2018) (review here) 12) Love By Chance (2018) (review here) 13) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) (no review) 14) He’s Coming To Me (2019) (review here) 15) The Fallen Leaf (2019) (not a BL; adjacent to the project as Thailand’s first lakorn featuring a queer/transgender main character) (review here) 16) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) and Our Skyy x Kiss Me Again (2018) (review here) 17) TharnType (2019-2020) (review here) 18) Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (OffGun BL cuts) (2016 and 2017) (no review) 19) Theory of Love (2019) (review here) 20) 3 Will Be Free (2019) (a non-BL and an important harbinger of things to come in 2019 and beyond re: Jojo Tichakorn pushing queer content at GMMTV) (review here)
21) Dew the Movie (2019) (review here) 22) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) (review here) (and notes on my UWMA rewatch here) 23) 2gether (2020) and Still 2gether (2020) (review here) 24) I Told Sunset About You (2020) (review here) 25) YYY (2020, out of chronological order) (review here) 26) Manner of Death (2020-2021) (review here) 27) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 28) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For The Sake Of Rewatching Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (re-review here) 29) Lovely Writer (2021) (review here) 30) Last Twilight in Phuket (2021) (the mini-special before IPYTM) (review here)
31) I Promised You the Moon (2021) (review here) 32) Not Me (2021-2022) (review here) 33) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 34) 55:15 Never Too Late (2021-2022) (not a BL, but a GMMTV drama that features a macro BL storyline about shipper culture and the BL industry) (review here) 35) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) and Our Skyy 2 x BBS x ATOTS (2023) OGMMTVC Rewatch (Links to the BBS OGMMTVC Meta Series are here: preamble here, part 1, part 2, part 3a, part 3b, and part 4) 36) Secret Crush On You (2022) (review here) 37) The Miracle of Teddy Bear (2022) 38) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here) 39) KinnPorsche (2022) OGMMTVC Fastest Rewatch Known To Humankind For the Sake of Re-Analyzing the KP Cultural Zeitgeist (part 1 and part 2) 40) Triage (2022) (review coming)
41) Honorable Mention: War of Y (2022) (for the sake of an attempt to provide meta BL commentary within a BL in the modern BL era), with a complementary watch of Aam Anusorn’s documentary, BL: Broken Fantasy (2020) (thoughts here) 42) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 43) The Eclipse OGMMTVC Rewatch to Reexamine "Genre BLs," Along With a Critical Take on Branded Ships (review here) 44) Khun Chai/To Sir, With Love (2022) (watching) 45) Love of Secret (2022) (a GL that preceded GAP) (I will not be watching this, but it's on the list to precede GAP) 46) GAP (2022-2023) (Thailand’s first GL with a branded pair and ship) (review coming) 47) My School President (2022-2023) and Our Skyy 2 x My School President (2023), Coupled with a Speed-Watch of My Love Mix-Up Thailand (2024) to Comment on GMMTV Trying to Make Magic Happen Twice 48) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here) 49) Bed Friend (2023) (tag here) 50) La Pluie (2023) (review coming)
51) Be My Favorite (2023) (tag here) (I’m including this for BMF’s sophisticated commentary on Krist’s career past as a BL icon) 52) Wedding Plan (2023) (Recommended as an important trajectory in the course of MAME’s work and influence from TharnType) 53) Only Friends (2023) (tag here) (not technically a BL, but it certainly became one in the end) 54) Last Twilight (2023-24) (tag here) (on the list as Thailand’s first major BL to center disability, successfully or otherwise) 55) Cherry Magic Thailand (2023-24) (tag here) (on the list as the first major Japanese-to-Thai drama adaptation, featuring the comeback of TayNew) 56) Ossan’s Love Returns (Japan, 2024) (adding for the EarthMix cameo and the eventual Thai remake) 57) 23.5 (2024) (GMMTV’s first GL) (thoughts here) (I am not finished with this show; I will finish it when I get to it on this list) 58) Spare Me Your Mercy (2024) (thoughts here) (added as the finale of Sammon's medical trilogy in Manner of Death and Triage, and as a major lakorn starring two of Thailand's biggest actors in Tor Thanapob and Jaylerr)]
