Did We Start Making TV Shows for Pirated Clips on X?

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I used to be a romantic. Not just in life, but in my craft.

I truly believed that the heart of the Boy's Love (BL) genre was its storytelling. I thought that if you wrote a story that was touching, with characters that were relatable, and a romance that made audiences feel something deep in their souls, you would succeed. I believed fans were drawn to the narrative, to the emotional journey.

I think I was wrong.

Over the last year, I’ve been watching, observing—conducting an informal experiment, you could say. I started to notice a pattern that unsettled me. My long-held belief that fans didn’t need gratuitous sex scenes to love a series was being challenged at every turn. In fact, the opposite seemed to be true. It became painfully obvious that the shows with the most explicit, intense sex scenes were the ones rocketing to the top of social media discussions. The more graphic the intimacy, the more successful the show became.

Watch Till the World Ends

Let me be clear….

I am not against sex scenes. I’m a director, not a puritan. We are telling love stories, and intimacy is a beautiful, essential part of that.

A sex scene should be a culmination of a journey. It should be sensitive, vulnerable, and reveal something profound about the characters and their connection. It should be art.

But that’s not what’s happening now, is it? We’re in an arms race. It’s no longer about what serves the story, but about what will get clipped and shared. The success of a series is being measured by a new, bizarre metric: viral sex scenes on X (formerly Twitter).

How can any creator, actor, or investor feel genuinely proud when the crowning achievement of their work is a 3-million-view pirated clip on a social media app? Yes, you heard me right. Not 3 million views on Netflix. Not on iQIYI or YouTube or any official platform where it contributes to the show's legitimate success. On X.

Did you pour your heart and soul into a 12-episode series, hoping that fans would chop up a two-minute NC scene, post it illegally,

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and that would be your badge of honor?

Is that the new Oscar?

Is that the goal we’re all supposed to be aiming for now?

It makes me question everything. We push actors to be more daring, we write scenes designed to shock, and we tell ourselves it’s "what the fans want." But are we feeding an audience, or are we creating a monster that prioritizes shock value over substance? Have we forgotten that we’re supposed to be making television series, not just a collection of viral moments stitched together by a loose plot?

Maybe I’m the problem.

Maybe I’m the relic who still believes in slow burns, in longing glances, in a love story so powerful that the intimacy is felt long before it’s ever shown. Maybe everyone else—the producers chasing clout, the fans demanding more heat, the actors celebrating the virality of their bodies—is doing it right.

Watch Till the World Ends

And if that’s the case…

OH MY HOSH,

I’m so fucking weird.

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