There was definitely a moment where I thought the Thai mafia show KinnPorsche was never going to exist.
To be fair, the show took an extremely long time to come out. They dropped their first trailer in early 2021, before they had even shot the show. It was 9 minutes long and absolutely insane. Mafias! Who are gay! Violence! Sex! Exquisite shots! Intrigue! People were down.
Then there was silence. More trailers. More trailers? A release date that was pushed back, first because of COVID, then because the show producers broke ranks with their original network and re-shot the entire show for a new network. When it premiered in April 2022, I was convinced it was going to be a total trash fire.
What it is, in fact, is one of the best shows I have ever seen in my life. And I have seen a lot of shows.
Maybe it's because they shot it twice. We are getting a more-than-second draft, which is rarely true for any show, let alone a queer one made by queer creators. They also had a real budget for it, so it is beautifully shot on movie film with an incredibly talented ensemble cast.
It is also a gay mafia show that is really not about being gay or being mafia.
Instead, it is a show about male trauma, specifically the kind of trauma that is enacted by the prison of masculinity over generations. It is about sexual violence, and physical violence, and verbal abuse, and psychological abuse: all the types of violence that a culture does to men who do not conform to its expectations.
This all sounds very heavy. It is, in some moments, extremely heavy. (It is also, surprisingly, often laugh-out-loud funny. But I digress.) The plot centers initially around the enemies-to-lovers romance between a mafia don and the bodyguard he coerces into his service. The power dynamics are unhealthy from the get-go, and they only get worse. And that is even before the secondary romance kicks in around episode 9, which…whew.
Without spoilers - because this is a show that benefits from being seen spoiler-free - I think what I can say about KinnPorsche is that it gets some very essential aspects of what it means to be traumatized extremely right: that it is a thing you are taught to hide at all costs; that you will never find a way out of it unless you seek it yourself; that avoidance will not heal you; that you can heal; that it is forever.
This show enacts trauma on the male body, and this is significant. I do not think I could watch it otherwise, because I have seen trauma enacted on female and queer bodies already, far too often. What KinnPorsche does is show predominantly what happens when men inflict their wounds on each other rather than the female-identified people in their lives, and in the sausage fest that is mafia culture, this seems fairly believable. The fact that that some of them are also fucking is fairly incidental. Despite the previews, which leaned hard into the idea that the show was NC-rated, the sex scenes are few and far between. Though they are technically explicit, they are also quite tasteful. This is not a show that seeks to fetishize anyone, no matter what their sexuality is.
So what you have, instead of the hilariously campy mafia fuckfest I imagined from the previews, is a show that seeks answers to the problem of how men treat each other: What they expect from each other, what they hide, what they are capable of giving each other, and how the culture of toxic masculinity limits them from truly taking care of each other.
Credit is due to the show's cast, many of whom have never been in a series before but who give their entire selves over to roles that are demanding and punishing. Credit is also due to the show's writers and producers, who wrote and re-wrote the original source material (a webnovel) in order to solve problems related to issues of consent and kink and to give characters more agency in their own healing.
The final product is not flawless but it is close. The plot is intricate and ridiculous, but the emotional trajectory of the characters feels absolutely on point. No scene is wasted. It is rare to see any show spend this much time on how men feel about anything, especially in the context of a world defined by guns and bravado.
It goes without saying that most of the people watching this show are women, because the ultimate kink for women is men expressing their feelings. Also, everyone in the cast is hot. Women are allowed to be superficial too. It is also undeniable that the show will be silo'd specifically because its audience is primarily women and queer people. Unlike The Sopranos, which had substantial male backing, a show like KinnPorsche will be diminished the same way we diminish boybands and romance novels. If women like things, they must be lesser than.
I don't always like the things that women are "supposed to" like. In fact I often don't. I also don't identify entirely as a woman. But I do know that KinnPorsche has made me think deeply about the way we put men in boxes, and I thought I was done caring about any of that. The reason I can watch it on KinnPorsche is that it is not a show that lets men off the hook just because they have been traumatized or mistreated. Instead it brings them to heel, shows them the ways they are broken, and forces them to confront their wrongs.
Perhaps I spoke too soon - there may be no greater fantasy than that.
Despite its darkness and cynicism, however, KinnPorsche also embraces a kind of cheesy sentimentality that rivals something you might see on Lifetime. That means that it wants happy endings for its characters, even the ones who are perhaps difficult to want happy endings for. If the show only wanted to punish and victimize, it would be no different than the many shows that offer basically torture porn, usually aimed at women. Instead it poses the question: What would happen if men truly allowed themselves to love each other without fearing judgment? How would the world change? And what parts of toxic masculinity can be deconstructed when its poison is pushed out?