Boyfriend on Demand review: Jisoo and Seo-In Guk’s virtual romance drama fails to live up to its potential!

While the drama is built on a promising premise, it simply fails to connect and give us a feel-good love story that we expect out of this one!

Boyfriend on Demand review: Apart from being a successful K-pop Idol, Jisoo’s acting career has equally garnered eyeballs over the years. With her previous K-drama, Snowdrop with Jung Hae-In that had us all sobbing by the end of it, Boyfriend on Demand came as a much needed breath of fresh air. But what felt like a feel-good rom-com, quickly fell flat as a story that could not hold its grip and felt like it was trying too hard to tick multiple tropes and genres. 

The story revolves around Seo Mi-Rae (Jisoo), a webtoon producer who works day and night to the point that she is burnt out. Just like any corporate slave, she spends all her free time by herself rejuvenating at home. Hence there’s little to no time for love and the loneliness starts to kick in. The story till here feels relatable as a 20 something year old girl myself who barely has any time or interest to put myself out there and yes, that does come with some sort of loneliness when you belong to a generation that’s knee deep into hook ups and dating apps. Seo Mi-Rae is then introduced to a virtual reality experience at work called ‘Boyfriend on Demand’ where she gets to virtually meet characters from popular webtoons she has worked on with a writer. The experience feels so real that it blurs the lines between an actual and a parasocial relationship.

Also Read: Spring Fever review: Ahn Bo-Hyun and Lee Joo-Been’s rom-com is a sweet escape from reality on weekdays!

She constantly craves getting into the experience every night and going on dates with multiple different men from the webtoon, who all come from different worlds. From dating a chaebol, a doctor, a secret agent or a senior in college, she has her very own Singles Inferno experience. In the process of that, we also get cameos from popular K-drama heroes like Lee Jae-Wook, Wi Ha-Jun and even Jay Park! It’s fun to see all these men getting wrapped around her finger and Mi-Rae also realizes her potential in the dating pool. Until she is actually proposed to by a co-worker, Park Kyeong-Nam (Seo In-Guk), a fellow webtoon producer who she can’t stand the sight of because of office politics. But to see him warm up to her is when things start getting real for her and in the story as well!

But that’s all there is to Boyfriend on Demand! The frivolousness of it all takes away from taking this story seriously at all. With more than half of the story in and no serious prospects for Mi-Rae starts testing your patience and takes away from giving Kyeong-Nam finally getting his chance to woo her. The story indulges in themes of falling in love with AI and we have seen movies like Her starring Joaquin Phoenix which deals with a storyline like this rather well, portraying the consequences and dangers of what loneliness and being heavily reliant on AI can do to you. But Boyfriend on Demand chooses to be privy to that and keep things on the lighter side which eventually does not work in the bigger scheme of things or connect with you as an audience.

All episodes of Boyfriend on Demand are currently streaming on Netflix! 

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