Stranger’s Kiss: The Series

Terrifyingly realistic, with some glimpses of hope

Some of the best and most successful BL-series of 2020 have come from the Philippines. To name two of my favourites: 'Gameboys' is a huge international success, having been acquired by Netflix in the meantime, mostly due to its main actors, Elijah Canlas, who has won international prizes for his outstanding acting as an AIDS-infected boy in the movie 'Kalel, 15', and Kokoy de Santos, who also starred in a full movie ('Fuccbois') before. 'Gaya sa pelikula' is regarded by many as one of the most beautiful BL-series, due to the great chemistry of the two leads, Ian and Paolo Pangilinan, convincing script and cinematography.

The commercial success of those series (and some more, like 'Hello Stranger' or 'Quaranthings') has triggered a boom of Pinoy web-series, some of which started promising, like 'Amore' or 'Lakan', but ended in a mess: 'Amore' seems to have run out of money, 'Lakan', which was intended to show the culture clash of a tribal young man who meets a young professional from the capital, was forced to change the script after the setting was destroyed by a typhoon.

Dozens of other series the titles of which I'd rather not mention suffered from a low budget, poor acting, terrible filming, unbearable sound, and a non-existing script.

'Stranger's Kiss' seemed to fall into this category, I thought, after watching the first episode, and so I skipped it. After five episodes had been released, I was surprised to see that the episodes gained up to a quarter million viewers, many of them international, which is quite a lot for a series like that. So I got curious and gave it a second chance, and honestly, the script has some flaws, the sound is sometimes awful, and cinematography poor at times.

But: in contrast to all those Thai 'student coming out' stories focussing on the internal troubles of sons from well-off families, this series displays the struggle of lgbt people at the lowest end of the social...