Review of VIP Thailand / VIP รักซ่อนชู้

Before we get too deep into this review and summary, I have a major confession to make: before now, I had never seen a Thai drama before.

Despite having had a Viki subscription on and off for a while, and having a Netflix account and adding all of the Southeast Asian dramas and movies to my watch list, I have never actually managed to get myself to watch a Thai show until now.

This is a bit odd since I went through a phase where I randomly wanted to learn Thai when I was in middle school.

So you’re probably thinking at this point: why VIP Thailand? And to be frank, I had never heard of this show before pressing play.

I had just finished watching a different Korean drama on Viki went I went onto my home page, and they suggested this show right smack dab at the top. I don’t know if my watching habits were trending towards this genre or something, but I was intrigued enough to read the synopsis.

The synopsis is what made me nod and decide to give the show a chance. And y’all, I found this show painful to get through, but I watched every single episode without fail. I deserve a pat on the back for that.

Let’s get into the review before I ramble too much!

A woman with a perfect life and career finds everything unraveled after getting a text saying her husband is cheating on her.

Rin is the epitome of perfect. She works for a VIP client team at a major company, leading her subordinates to make some of Bangkok’s most wealthy clients happy with their purchases.

Everyone loves Rin personally and the work she does, and her husband, another high ranking professional at the company, seems to be the perfect fit for her. But one night, everything is about to change for Rin.

She gets a text message from a random number telling her that her husband is cheating on her, and this is the driving force behind the rest of the series. Throughout the course of the first chunk of episodes, Rin goes around suspecting a lot of different people, but then she realizes the culprit is within her own team.

Almost every single episode features Rin screaming and crying, whether by herself or with one of her subordinates, thinking they might be involved.

As it turns out, everyone on her team is also going through major problems. One girl is dealing with her mother coming back into her life and coming from a background where she is seen as faking until she makes it in her current career.

Another team member, who’s married to someone in the IT department (why is everyone married to each other in this company?), finds herself blackmailed and has a strain on her own marriage and kids.

Another team member was plucked from a shop, and isn’t exactly what she seems. As Rin casts her suspicions, we’ll eventually see who exactly is engaging in the affair with her husband, but it creates some major conflicts once it’s out.

There’s some cat fighting over who gets to really be with him, threats to Rin’s career and the thought of transferring her, and then some major plotting going on within the company to figure out who should really be in charge.

That said, I thought that this drama was simply too dramatic. Maybe this is a common thing in Thai dramas, but it felt so formulaic in the way where I began to predict the exact moment an argument was going to happen and Rin was going to burst into tears.

Like girl, it’s totally okay to cry, but as a show it began to feel like a little too much for me. There was also some petty actions going on between all of these characters, and it was hard to believe they were adults in their late twenties and thirties sometimes.

Something that also really felt lacking in this show were the male characters. We were kind of expected to understand Rin’s husband and why he did what he did by the end of the show, garnering some sympathy, but I didn’t find any of this to be cute.

If people had just communicated, a lot of the hurt happening throughout the show could’ve been avoided. He should’ve just come clean to begin with and then not deny everything he did when Rin asked, which, in my opinion, made everything going down so much worse. I was not a fan of him at all.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was such a messy drama, but to be honest it was kind of entertaining outside of the repetitive and more out there parts of the show. It did get kind of annoying seeing the same kinds of scenes over and over again, but I will give it credit: it kind of got its footing towards the later half and broke out of the cycle. Kudos to the writers for realizing that I guess.

But in the end I don’t think I’ll be rewatching this series. It was a bit too much for me, and while it certainly was memorable during the first watch through, I didn’t love it enough to want to watch it ever again. I’ll be checking out other Thai dramas though, for sure, as I have to get use out of this Viki subscription.

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