A high-budget snooze fest
I believe The Next Prince is the prime example of how a show can have the most gorgeous settings, costumes and overall atmosphere while in the end still being a generic, boring, half-cooked mess.
While the premise of the show is promising (being Khanin trying to adapt to his new role of prince while also trying to find out what happened to his adoptive father), the whole thing is basically abandoned after two episodes. Four or five different plots are introduced, without giving any of them enough time to properly develop. On the other hand, the romance is particularly bland: Khanin is an uninteresting character, too perfect in every aspect and overall just irritating; Charan is your typical broody BL guy, but besides that and being in love with Khanin, he doesn't really have any other remarkable characteristics, he is basically "just there". Ramil and Paytay are definitely more interesting, but have so little screen time that you can't even understand how their story ends. Calvin and Jay, finally, are just superfluous: I don't even know why the show bothered to give them space, since they have no actual development on screen and just take away precious time for other plot points to be explored.
All the plot points that the shows tries to tackle are dealt with rushed resolutions, while also wasting time on frustratingly long useless scenes ("Oh my gosh, Khanin is going to the market, let's spend 20 minutes on this in two separate occasions") and utterly boring, long-as-hell and derogatorily Wattpad-y sex scenes: the first one is almost 20 minutes long, were the writers out of their mind? The finale is the epitome of an unnecessarily long episode: if you asked me what happened in almost 2 hours, I would not be able to answer because, basically, it's just spiceless nothing.
If you want to give this show a try, go on, but I'm suggesting to not set your expectations too high: maybe that's the key to enjoy this yawn-inducing mess.
While the premise of the show is promising (being Khanin trying to adapt to his new role of prince while also trying to find out what happened to his adoptive father), the whole thing is basically abandoned after two episodes. Four or five different plots are introduced, without giving any of them enough time to properly develop. On the other hand, the romance is particularly bland: Khanin is an uninteresting character, too perfect in every aspect and overall just irritating; Charan is your typical broody BL guy, but besides that and being in love with Khanin, he doesn't really have any other remarkable characteristics, he is basically "just there". Ramil and Paytay are definitely more interesting, but have so little screen time that you can't even understand how their story ends. Calvin and Jay, finally, are just superfluous: I don't even know why the show bothered to give them space, since they have no actual development on screen and just take away precious time for other plot points to be explored.
All the plot points that the shows tries to tackle are dealt with rushed resolutions, while also wasting time on frustratingly long useless scenes ("Oh my gosh, Khanin is going to the market, let's spend 20 minutes on this in two separate occasions") and utterly boring, long-as-hell and derogatorily Wattpad-y sex scenes: the first one is almost 20 minutes long, were the writers out of their mind? The finale is the epitome of an unnecessarily long episode: if you asked me what happened in almost 2 hours, I would not be able to answer because, basically, it's just spiceless nothing.
If you want to give this show a try, go on, but I'm suggesting to not set your expectations too high: maybe that's the key to enjoy this yawn-inducing mess.
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