“Bad Guy My Boss” started off as an interesting and provocative watch, however, as it progressed, it became quite monotonous and resulted in a tedious show that lost me as the audience. While the story of a situation-ship between a boss and their subordinate is titillating, and the progression of the relationship dynamic can be interesting, the way in which the show tackles the relationship and the characters was subpar, and with little to no character growth, the story seemed to be stuck on the first half of the series, and the relationships did not grow organically, but the growth was moved by outside factors pertaining to the business, instead of internal factors affecting the relationship.

Despite Pat (Kad Ploysupa) knowing that his boss Mr. Elyes (James Hayward Prescott) is a closed off player, whose life revolves around casual hook-ups, Pat becomes involved with Mr. Elyse beyond the scope of his work and becomes one of his hook-ups. While the relationship is seemingly skewed towards Mr. Elyes having all the power, Pat is also in control because he manages Mr. Elyes’ whole life, and Elyes has become dependent on Pat. The two are co-dependent, and before long, Pat finds himself in love with Elyes, despite constantly seeing him with Khim (Zax Nattapat Suthisawan), his favorite hook-up.

Mr. Elyes is extremely possessive of Pat, and every time he threatens to leave the company, he tries to keep him from doing so. This is because Pat is a good employee and helps him avoid sabotage from his cousin Thiranai (Kin Anakin Nontiprasit), who is disgruntled because Mr. Elyes took over the company from his family. Pat intervenes when Mr. Thiranai recruits a mole into the company to work alongside Mr. Elyes and steal information for a project. When Mr. Elyes’ archenemy Fei Long (Nick Steiner Gaksch) and his ex-boyfriend Run (Fam Thanuphat Poungsuwan) try to sabotage him as well, Pat helps all the parties to resolve their disputes. Every time there is an issue in the business, this is used to draw Pat and Elyes together in the story, which is a cop-out from actually developing these characters beyond the work dynamic.

The relationship dynamics throughout the series involve a boss (Elyes, Fei Long and Thiranai) having undue control over their subordinates (Pat, Run and Thiti) and they manipulate them to do their bidding, and a kind of Stockholm syndrome develops in the relationship. While I won’t comment on the morality of the story outside of the story itself, the build-up of the story, as a romance, felt very flat, because Elyes gets away with a lot without any real pushback from Pat. The push back he gets the most is an unanswered text, which will quickly be resolved because a work emergency came up. Sure, he takes care of Pat when he gets sick, but that is his whole play on Pat, not actual romantic contrition.

The story could have focused more on developing the relationship between Pat and Elyes, and even the side characters, including Elyes’s relationship with Khim which was actually not superficial and there seemed to be more to explore there. The introduction of business sabotage to add to the drama was unnecessary and the writers could have found better ways to have the characters connect instead of the tangent they went on, introducing multiple instances of business sabotage, which were tedious and did not tell us anything more we needed to know about the characters.

The first half of the show was interesting and entertaining; however, the second half became so exhausting. Even the acting of the cast became questionable, I don’t even know if they are good actors or not. Sure, there is an outcry for BLs to me more plot-based instead of sappy, but this show, with the number of intimate scenes there were, could have used more sappiness and cliché writing instead of going on the tangent the writers went on. I like to review shows on what they are and not what they could have been or what I wish they had been, however, with this show, it’s incredibly difficult not to judge it on what it could have been.

Rating- 2 out of 5

Streaming on- Gagaoolala