Shows about the intersection of religion and money are not new. But in a new Netflix series from Thailand, the focus is on the lucrative aspect of a religious organization. The program achieves this by inserting three young entrepreneurs into the system, hoping to pay off debts and make some money running a struggling Buddhist temple.
BELIEVERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: A young man is sitting across from a police detective. The man asks for his lawyer and trusts that the detective has nothing that can help him regarding the charges.
The essence: Six months earlier, Win (Teeradon Supapunpinyo), the man who was being questioned by the police detective, is in charge of a small company that runs an NFT game called “Pirate’s Hell.” It is a game where users play to earn cryptocurrency; The value of the cryptocurrency generated by the game continues to rise, and Win calls his partners Game (Pachara Chirathivat) and Dear (Achiraya Nitibhon) to tell them the good news. At the rate of growth, the company can pay off its debt and start making profits for all stakeholders.
Win goes to sleep in his spare apartment, confident that his hot new game will make him and his partners incredibly rich. However, the next morning, he logs in and sees that the value of the cryptocurrency has plummeted overnight. At the office, Win and the staff discover that someone hacked into their servers and entered code that would sell much of the currency, taking away its value. Then other token holders pulled out, further depressing the value.
Almost as soon as the stock hits bottom, Game gets a call from the person he borrowed money from. Let’s say he didn’t get a bank loan or find a venture capitalist for this latest round of funding, and the loan shark reminds Game of the extreme terms of the loan. Win comes out and asks the loan shark, “What if we can prove that you did it?” He’s pretty sure it was an inside job, perpetrated by the creditor and his fourth partner, Golf, who is nowhere to be found.
The loan shark proves he means business when he sends thugs to Win’s apartment to vandalize and beat him up, sending video evidence of this to Game and Dear. After that, Win moves to his parents’ house.
When he goes to the temple with his mother, he gets an idea and calls his partners to tell him what their next business is: they should start their own temple, with its multiple streams of income and opportunities to make money by managing that income. . To be more specific, Win believes they should offer to merge with a struggling temple, rename it, and start marketing it toward a younger demographic.
What shows will it remind you of? Believers it feels a little like The right gemstones Satisfies Silicon Valley.
Our opinion: Written and directed by Wattanapong Wongwan, Believers will explore the question of how religion and profit often go hand in hand. But, instead of telling the story from the perspective of a humble clergyman or family serving God who flies on private planes, this story is told from the perspective of three young entrepreneurs who don’t pretend to be involved for anything. but the money.
While the situation that leads Win, Game, and Dear to go into debt and generate Win’s temple plan is a little confusing for anyone over 35, the result isn’t all that confusing: They owe a lot of money to some very bad people. . money, and they need to get it relatively quickly. And in extreme circumstances, people come up with extreme solutions. So, it’ll be interesting to see how quickly this trio can find a temple to run and start turning a profit, and what kind of trouble they’ll run into while doing so.
We get a bit of backstory for the three partners: Win is trying to move beyond his humble rural upbringing, Game hates how his father and sister work hard without any recognition for it, and Dear has an American father whose approval she seems to be always seeking. Their backstories will come into play as they build this temple and try to extract money from it, but there’s not much to sink your teeth into in the first episode. Given that his downfall and Win’s plan were meant to be established in this episode, the lack of characterization is somewhat excusable. Of course, this makes the characters a little one-dimensional at first, but we hope that changes.
Sex and skin: None.
Parting Shot: The three pray to reach their agreement; “I hope Win’s plan saves us from this hell,” says one of them.
Sleeping star: The first episode revolves so much around the three partners that no one else really stood out.
Most pilot line: Even though we said that the outcome of the partners’ company failure is really what matters, we wish we had received more explanations about the game and how crypto tokens rise and fall in value. Maybe we say that because we’re still getting used to using Venmo, but we don’t think many people really understand NFTs and cryptocurrencies enough to make them a central plot point of a show without a lot of details about it.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. The first episode of Believers It’s all exposition and setup, but the premise is intriguing enough to keep us watching, especially watching the trio of entrepreneurs get in and out of trouble for their money-making scheme.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
