Pretend Lover (2026)

rich boy and poor boy vertical series

Overall: I rated this against other verticals of a similar genre. 50 short episodes. Aired on iQIYI.

Content Warnings: non con kisses, slap, coercion, workplace bullying, manipulation, punch

What I Liked
- chuckled at the push up part
- the dads (except for a couple of lines below)
- avoided the noble idiot trope
- visuals

Room For Improvement
- cliche wannabe wife
- love rival/jealousy
- comedy sound effects/music
- dad said teach your wife a lesson...make her submit
- gay for you trope
- hobbled around the next morning

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Zero budget but lots of heart

This was a fairly basic drama hitting more or less all the tropes you expect to see, and you wouldn’t think it’d be all that memorable. It’s saved, however, by the actors, and for that it gets a solid rating from me.

There is no budget for almost anything so even the story gets ropey in the later parts, but you can forgive it a lot just to watch the two male leads doing their thing. They have a ton of chemistry together and they’re not afraid to go nuts with the intimate scenes. Metha in particular likes to ham it up a LOT and honestly? Give him more work based on that alone because he would be good as a melodramatic villain.

Navin (Nawin?) is less extreme but he plays well off Metha, and the scenes where they’re just sitting around talking feel natural. There’s hints of greatness in here somewhere underneath the vertical drama schlocky-ness that deserve recognition, so I definitely want to see these two again.

The most jarring/annoying part of it were the constant voice-overs of characters’ internal monologues. If they’d somehow reworked the script to take that out while still keeping the plot moving, it would have instantly been a better series, but again: zero budget, so it is what it is.

It’s not the best BL you’ve ever seen, and vertical dramas lean on the side of being cringey, but go into it with the right expectations and it’s absolutely worth it.

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