Shows about the intersection of religion and money aren’t new. But in a new Netflix series from Thailand, the focus is on the money-making aspect of a religious organization. The show accomplishes this by inserting three young entrepreneurs into the system, hoping to pay off debts and make some cash by running a struggling Buddhist temple.
Opening Shot: A young man sits across the table from a police detective. The man asks for his lawyer, and is confident that the detective has nothing that would stick as far as charges are concerned.
The Gist: 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’s a game where users play to earn cryptocurrency; the value of the crypto that is generated by the game keeps exploding, and Win calls his partners Game (Pachara Chirathivat) and Dear (Achiraya Nitibhon) with the good news. At the rate its growing, the company can pay off their debt and start raking in profits for all of the stakeholders.
Win goes to sleep in his spare apartment, confident that his hot new game will make him and his partners incredibly wealthy. The next morning, though, he logs in to see that the value of the crypto has tanked overnight. In the office, Win and the staff figure out that someone hacked their servers and put in code that would sell off a lot of the currency, draining it of value. Then other token-holders bailed, depressing the value even further.
Almost as soon as the value hits rock bottom, Game gets a call from the person he borrowed money from. Let’s just say he didn’t get a bank loan or find a venture capitalist for this last round of funding, and the loan shark reminds Game of the extreme terms of the loan. Win comes right out and asks the loan shark, “What if we can prove that you did it?” He’s pretty sure that it was an inside job, perpetrated by the creditor and their fourth partner, Golf, who is nowhere to be found.
The loan shark shows he means business when he sends thugs over to Win’s apartment to trash it and beat the snot out of him, sending video evidence of it to Game and Dear. After that, Win decamps to his parents’ house.
When he goes to temple with his mother, he gets an idea, and calls his partners down to let him know what their next business is: They should start their own temple, with its multiple streams of income and opportunities to make money managing that income. To be more specific, Win thinks they should offer to merge with a struggling temple, rebrand it, and start marketing it towards a younger demographic.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Believers feels a bit like The Righteous Gemstones meets Silicon Valley.
Our Take: Written and directed by Wattanapong Wongwan, The Believers is going to explore the issue of how religion and profit often go hand in hand. But, instead of telling the story from the prospective of clergy or a family who are humble servants of God that fly around in private jets, this story is told from the perspective of three young entrepreneurs who aren’t pretending to be in it for anything but the money.
While the situation that gets Win, Game and Dear into the debt that generates Win’s temple plan is a bit confusing to anyone over the age of about 35, the upshot of it isn’t that confusing: They owe some very bad people a lot of 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 it.
We get a little bit of backstory for the three partners — Win is trying to get beyond his humble rural upbringing, Game hates how his dad and his sister work hard without any kind of recognition for it, and Dear has an American dad whose approval she seems to always be seeking. Their backstories will come into play as they build this temple and try to siphon cash from it, but there’s not much of it to sink your teeth into in the first episode. Given that their downfall and Win’s scheme needed to be set up in this episode, the lack of characterization is somewhat excusable. Of course, this makes the characters a bit one-dimensional at first, but we’re hoping that will change.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: The three pray to their agreement; “I hope Win’s plan will save us from this hell,” says one of them.
Sleeper Star: The first episode revolves so much around the three partners, that no one else really stood out.
Most Pilot-y Line: Despite the fact that we said that the result of the partners’ company tanking is really what matters, we wish we would have gotten some more explanation about the game and how the crypto tokens increase and decrease in value. We may be saying that because we’re still getting used to using Venmo, but we don’t think many people really understand NFTs and crypto enough to make it a central plot point of a show without much detail around it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of The Believers is all exposition and setup, but the premise is intriguing enough to keep us watching, especially seeing how the trio of entrepreneurs get in and out of hot water for their money-making scheme.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
