The Warm Naive Glow of Netflix's "The Boyfriend"
How a bittersweet gay Japanese reality show reminds us of an innocence we still hope we can get back. Were we ever so young?
We used to break it together (oh-oh, oh-oh)
We used to dive in our highest feelings
Are we growing older together? (Oh-oh, oh-oh)
I don't wanna miss anything when I'm dreaming
— Glen Check, “Dazed and Confused” (the theme song of Netflix dating show “The Boyfriend”)
Maybe you, like me, have become cynical. A couple decades of dating, 20 years of triumphs and failures, a road ahead that looks treacherous. You might be desperate to remember how it felt before you fumbled so many times. You might be starting to see the little age lines that form around your eyes when you summon a smile. You might be too bored to bother opening up Hinge anymore. And, you might be searching for something you lost — that cliche innocence we always hear about — if only to keep you going, hunting, searching, looking. You find fading, nostalgic glimpses of your youth in certain songs and movies. You want to experience again the magic of inexperienced affection. You just barely remember a time when you could fall for someone without worrying for one second whether it would fail or succeed — that it happened was enough.
If any of this sounds familiar, The Boyfriend, a new Netflix reality show centered around the romantic tug-of-war between young Japanese gay men, is a balm. We have come to see dating shows — and, perhaps, dating in real life — as some sort of competition, a survival-of-the-hottest that pits us against one another for the ultimate prize: wedded bliss, a healthy relationship, an end to the alone-ness. But The Boyfriend is up to something else. It evokes a mood more than a message, and the mood is this: looking for love is still a valiant, honest, purposeful pursuit, one that involves knowing one’s self and being brave enough to show that self to someone you could end up deeply caring about. Here, romance is still romantic, and emotions are worth emoting, even if you don’t ultimately succeed — in this show, we can temporarily access what we read about in gushy young adult novels, a world filled with blushing and bashfulness and a hyperbole of feeling. But this world never feels false or phony, like so many YA-oriented artifacts do. The Boyfriend is reality TV that is exaggerated and uncanny but that somehow still feels realer than real.
A group of guys temporarily move into a small house dubbed the Green Room in a sleepy Japanese beach town. Their ages range from about 20 all the way up to around 40. They’ve never met before (except Alan and Dai, who had a prior physical relationship that they are both shy to discuss) and they’re all looking for companionship. During the month or so that they’ll spend in the house, they will also be in charge of running a small business together — a coffee truck that parks at various sunset vistas around the coast. They will sleep in small bare little rooms and they will be asked, by some unseeable corporate TV force that sends them instructions every morning through an iPad, to play little games between one another to see who is compatible with whom.
This is a fishbowl show. There is no intermediary (except that iPad) between us and them — carefully placed cameras just follow the guys as they interact and live within the house. We sometimes zoom out to a panel of commentators who are watching the action along with us, and, at key moments, provide some narrative context. But mostly, it’s just the boys, plodding barefoot around this sweet little surf shack — flirting with one another, cooking dinner, getting in water gun fights by the pool, putting on moisturized face masks at night, and having deep one-on-one discussions about what they want out of their lives. It’s as if they are all college freshmen, thrown together in a dormitory away from home for the first time, bursting with new things to say that their parents and friends back in high school never would’ve understood.
The honesty here is naive, but not unknowing. These boys are almost too earnest in what they’re looking for, but they’re also aware of the things that get in the way. I found myself particularly moved by Usak, a go-go dancer in Japanese gay clubs that intimidates the other boys with his good looks and muscles. He eats a protein diet of only chicken to maintain his physique, and is often shown isolated away from the other guys with his AirPods in lifting weights to stay in shape. But while at first, his distance seems slightly dismissive, as the show progresses, it becomes clear that his pursuit of perfection is, of course, a smoke screen. “I’m just nothing but ordinary,” says the extraordinary-looking hearthrob. “Im starting to wonder if I’m needed in this house. I’m wondering if I fit in.” He has difficulty in opening up and exposing himself to others, and admits that this has made it hard for him to find love. He thinks by looking perfect he can hide that he’s petrified, but he learns through one particularly climactic episode that being vulnerable is the only path. When he finally breaks down and cries, we (or, at least, I) do too, as though his realization is our realization. Maybe it is!
At every moment of shared introspection, the other boys cheer each other on. When one boy likes another, he tells them so. If it is shared, they go on cute little dates to the aquarium or the hot spring to see if there is potential. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fizzles. If one is rejected, the rejectee honors the rejector for being honest even if they’re disappointed, and then they go on living together, the bond unbroken if still unfulfilled. There’s no anger. There’s no regret. There’s no bitterness. They all share each other’s life experiences to communicate what traumas or truths have made dating so difficult. Shun discusses his childhood in an orphanage. When we see him play push-and-pull with one of the other boys, pouting his way through emotional vulnerability, we understand why, and we wish the best for him.
The Boyfriend reminds us that the point of all of this is to reveal something about ourselves and hope another person loves us for it. To risk sounding sentimental, there is hope in this show. Dating in real life is not tender. Not in 2024. But The Boyfriend seems to ask: what if it was? We cannot become 23 year olds again. It might never have been this sweet anyway. But we can still find fading, fleeting evocations of who we once were. And when we’re alone on a Friday night, ignoring the notifications on whatever dating app we sometimes use, we can watch The Boyfriend from the safety of our own home, warm in the wish of caring about someone again.
It’s a show that stands in for the bravery we worry we no longer have — the bravery to face the possibility of disappointment for the chance at something worthwhile. The glow of the screen becomes both escape and encouragement. The tear that crawls down our cheek catharsis. Though The Boyfriend is not real life — it is “reality” — something makes us feel that we could claw ourselves back here, if just because it’s the only way forward.
The emotional drama of the show, of course, eventually ends. The TV turns off. The glow is gone. And then, we’re left alone in the dark, with the inevitable, uncomfortable question that all of us face at some point or another, and which can’t be entirely answered by a streaming service: how — where — do we get it all back? “Spend your the rest of your time with no regrets,” Gensei says to one of the other boys. And we try to remember how.