Gap: The Series is singlehandedly responsible for the current wave of GL media sweeping the nation of Thailand. It was also my Thai GL gateway drug. It’s easy to nitpick what’s not very good about Gap, which other reviewers have already done. It’s certainly more fun to watch if you embrace its unique brand of campy hilarity, like when Lady Sam goes home to her empty mansion, puts on some funereal violin music, lights a bazillion candles, and takes a sad bath, like a depressed vampire. Or when Nop gets noped into the sprinkler wearing a “No Pain No Gain” t-shirt. Comedy gold, people!

What’s more interesting to me are the things that Gap does well. Whether intentionally or by accident, Gap succeeds in certain areas where recent GLs (*cough* loyalpin *cough*) have struggled. The characterization is surprisingly strong, for example, especially in the first half. Take the sad vampire scene: It’s silly and over-the-top, but it tells us all we need to know about Sam. She’s rich and pretentious, but her wealth and good taste can’t protect her from loneliness. Mon is naive and idealistic, meanwhile, but she’s no doormat; she has a mischievous streak, and calls out Sam constantly on her bs. The power dynamics are uncomfortable, of course, if you stop to think about them for too long, but the script does a pretty good job of making Sam enough of a blundering dork (who is possibly neurodivergent as well) that the playing field seems level-ish.

Gap even has good side characters! Sam’s friends all have distinct personalities, and they are so much fun that I can almost forgive them for being a bunch of self-absorbed nepo babies. Mon’s coworkers have their own charm, too. Even the rival CEO villain, who contributes jack-all to the story, serves so much **** whenever she appears that she justifies the whole pointless subplot. And the male characters, Kirk and Nop, are written with the right amount of nuance—they are obnoxious and entitled, with exquisitely punchable faces, but they’re given the chance to grow without being absolved for their behavior.

I do wish the later episodes, which are noticeably worse than the early ones, wasted less time on the grandmother and tiresome Sam/Mon theatrics, and allowed the side characters more time to shine. It’s especially tragic that we were deprived of Tee/Yuki so that Sam and Mon can have yet another round of break up then make up. To be honest, when I rewatch Gap, I rarely make it past Episode 9—the characters get a bit lost in all the drama toward the end, and there’s not enough camp to make the drama fun.

But there’s a reason I keep rewatching Gap! The romance might be riddled with tropes and clichés, but you know what? The tropes work. It IS cute when the couple meets as kids for the first time, and when they reunite as adults, I DO want to know what happened to Lady Sam to make her change so much. It’s fun to watch a ray of sunshine like Mon melt the heart of an ice princess and make her smile, and it’s fun to watch them try and fail to hide how much they want to make out in the workplace. Gap is a trashy show, yes, based on a trashy book, but as the film critic Pauline Kael once said, “GL is so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have little reason to be interested in it.” (I’m paraphrasing.) I wouldn’t say Gap is always great trash, but it is pretty dang good trash, for the most part, and it paved the way for hopefully even better trash—and, who knows, maybe even some good art—in the future.