Replaced by boxing

For decades, the shape of a Thai evening was fixed. The news, and then at 20:30, the lakorn.

Everyone watched. It was the single reliable point in the national day, and if you wanted to know what Thailand was talking about tomorrow, you watched what was on at half past eight tonight.

In January 2023, Channel 7 stopped airing its regular Friday night drama and put on live combat sports instead.

In September 2023 it cut the prime-time drama slot to one hour, 8:30 to 9:30.

That’s the end of an era stated as a scheduling decision, which is generally how eras end.

What happened

By mid-2024 Thai television drama was in open crisis, with viewership falling sharply as audiences moved to the “series” format — shorter, tighter, streamed — and to foreign content, mostly Korean and Chinese, on Netflix and elsewhere.

For scale: Kom Faek, in 2008, reached almost 15 million viewers and remains the record. By 2021 a well-regarded lakorn like Mae Bia was doing ratings around 4.7 and 5.2%.

I don’t want to be glib about the loss. The lakorn was a genuine popular form and it was better than foreigners gave it credit for.

Western viewers encountering one see melodrama — the slapping, the shouting, the villainess with the eyebrows. What they’re actually watching is a moral form with an explicit karmic engine. Good and evil are legible from the first episode, wrongdoing accumulates visibly, and consequence arrives, reliably, before the credits of the final one. Nothing is ambiguous because ambiguity isn’t the point. It is closer to a morality play than to prestige drama, and judging it by prestige drama’s rules is like criticising a hymn for being repetitive.

Thailand had a national storytelling form that ran every night at half past eight for fifty years, and it is now an hour, four nights a week, competing with boxing.

And at exactly the same time

Here’s the reversal, and it’s the reason this isn’t an elegy.

Thai series became a global export.

Boys’ love — BL, or Y-series in Thai usage — went from around 0.7% of Thailand’s entertainment media production value in 2019 to about 3.9% in 2025, growing roughly 17% a year, to a market value over ฿4.9 billion with product revenue projected around US$144 million in 2025.

Thai series are now watched across Asia, Latin America and Europe by audiences that did not previously know Thailand made television.

And it isn’t only BL. How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies took over US$73 million worldwide. A 30% cash rebate brought 162 international productions to Thailand in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

Thailand’s television industry didn’t decline. It changed audience.

The domestic form is contracting and the export business is growing, in the same years, in the same studios, frequently with the same people. Those are not contradictory facts. They’re the same restructuring seen from two directions.

The state noticed, which is the surprise

Now the part that made me want to write this.

In March 2021, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly brought BL into Thailand’s soft power diplomacy. Not tolerated it. Adopted it as an instrument of foreign policy. The Department of International Trade Promotion has approved six initiatives for FY2026 to push Thai Y-series overseas.

Consider how unusual that is against everything else on this site.

Article 61: private companies quietly took over bill payment, food distribution and civic space, and nobody in government described it as an arrangement. Article 73: the private sector drew down the public health system’s staff, and nobody owned the aggregate. Article 79: the temple kept receiving ฿120 billion a year for functions the state had taken over, and nobody reconciled it. Article 84: a $5.1 billion delivery market grew on a worker classification nobody revisited.

The Thai state’s characteristic move, across this entire archive, is not noticing.

And then a genre that grew out of fan culture, with no state involvement, no subsidy and no plan, became large enough to matter — and the state noticed inside a few years and attached itself to it.

I have no idea why this one and not the others. But it’s the only clean counter-example I’ve found in eighty-seven articles, and it deserves recording as one.

The caution, because the numbers are being oversold

Two published figures for Thailand’s entertainment industry revenue in 2025 sit at ฿601 billion and over ฿700 billion. That’s a hundred billion baht of disagreement and I can’t reconcile it, so I’d treat both as directional.

And BL is 3.9% of production value. Which is a remarkable rise from 0.7%, and it also means 96% of the industry is something else. The soft power enthusiasm has run somewhat ahead of the share, as soft power enthusiasm generally does.

A genre growing 17% a year is a genuinely good story. It does not need to be described as an economic pillar to be one.

What I think it actually shows

Thai television’s export success is built on something the lakorn had all along and nobody valued: Thailand can make a great deal of watchable drama, fast, cheaply, with a deep bench of people who know how to do it.

Fifty years of nightly production built that capacity. The industry that is now selling to Latin America is standing on the infrastructure the lakorn paid for, and the fact that the lakorn itself is down to an hour a night is the least interesting thing about it.

Which is, in its way, a hopeful version of a pattern this site usually reports as loss. The thing declined. The capability didn’t.

Common misconceptions

“Thai TV drama is dying.” Domestic lakorn broadcasting has contracted sharply. Thai series production for export is growing.

“Lakorn is just melodrama.” It’s a moral form with a karmic structure, judged by rules it isn’t playing by.

“BL is a huge part of the Thai economy.” It rose from 0.7% to about 3.9% of entertainment media production value — a real and rapid rise, and still a small share.

“The government created the BL industry.” It emerged from fan culture. The state adopted it into soft power policy from around 2021.

“Streaming killed Thai television.” It changed where Thai television makes money. Production capacity grew.