Olivia finds herself at a partner-swapping retreat on Serenity Island.
Unbeknownst to her, her husband Ryan and best friend Mia have been having an affair. The retreat is their dastardly plan to paint Olivia as an adulterer, maximise Ryan’s divorce settlement and run off together with her money.
As they enter the lavish hotel, Mia’s third husband Jake arrives by helicopter. He is out-of-this-world good-looking and immediately declared the ultimate prize by all the women (and most of the men) .
During the first game, which takes place in the dark ballroom, Ryan and Mia slink into the shadows while Olivia is left fending for herself on the dance floor.
Fortunately, Jake grabs Olivia’s arm and spins her around the room in a sensuous dance. When the lights come on, she is horrified to discover she’s been dancing with her best friend’s husband.
Then she spots Ryan and Mia looking a little too intimate.
Things are not going well for Olivia.
Fast forward and Olivia is forced to share a suite, and a giant bed, with Jake.
But Jake is not who he appears to be.
He is, in fact, billionaire Damian Cross, owner of Serenity Island, who has orchestrated the entire retreat.
How did he manage to impersonate Mia’s husband, you ask?
Well, Damian is Jake’s long-lost identical twin brother. Separated when they were eight after their parents divorced, Damian has spent more than 20 years searching for him. Despite possessing billions of dollars and presumably access to exceptional tracking and intelligence capabilities (and a helicopter), he has been unable to locate Jake until the night he discovers him moments from death.
With his dying breath, Jake reveals that Mia has poisoned him for the insurance money.
With a healthy dose of suspended disbelief, we overlook the fact that Mia doesn’t appear remotely surprised when her supposedly murdered husband arrives at the retreat.
Anyway, Damian has come for revenge.
And to save Olivia.
Who he is developing feelings for.
Jake-Damian looks like a descendant of a Roman god. Tall, muscular, with olive skin, dark blue eyes and permanent designer stubble. He is all hot masculine energy.
Olivia is the sweet, faithful heiress.
Eventually, Jake-Damian tells Olivia, in a deep throaty voice, that she is in danger. They decide to join forces to thwart Mia and Ryan’s dastardly plan.
This obviously requires an extraordinary number of sexually charged encounters involving intense eye contact, walking out of steamy showers half naked, tripping and falling into each other’s arms, some sexy ice cubes and buckets of unresolved passion.
Ryan, seeing Jake-Damian all over Olivia, starts having second thoughts.
Mia isn’t having a bar of that. She kidnaps Olivia.
At this point we are treated to Mia’s backstory. Her mother abandoned her at a petrol station when she was little, forcing her to fend for herself and develop an understandable but ultimately irrational resentment towards people with happy childhoods and substantial inherited wealth.
Olivia is all class. She has an impressive collection of demure yet sexy outfits. Mia favours extremely short dresses with strategic cutouts. We are left in no doubt about which woman deserves happiness.
Jake-Damian finds Olivia seconds before Mia is about to stab her and throw her over a cliff. He shoots Mia in the arm. Mia and Ryan are arrested.
Jake-Damian comforts a distraught Olivia and finally reveals that he is Damian. Olivia is shaken, angry, but beneath it all she is terribly sad.
Ryan wanted her money. Mia wanted her life. Jake-Damian came for revenge.
She needs time and space to find herself. A little girl power to compensate for the preceding avalanche of hypermasculinity. Damian understands and tells her he will wait so she can get to know the real him.
Ryan and Mia go to prison.
Olivia takes over her father’s investment firm as CEO, a position she had previously allowed Ryan to occupy while she was busy being a dutiful housewife.
Despite having been out of the corporate world for five years, she doubles the company’s profits in six months and closes the Portland deal, generating a further 30 per cent increase. As one does.
Then an invitation arrives for a charity gala.
Olivia enters the ballroom wearing a crystal-encrusted gown that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Damian is there.
He’s wearing black on black with a diamond rose lapel pin that reflects the deep blue pools of his eyes.
They are both gorgeous, stunning, beautiful people who have finally met at the right time.
They fall deeply in love.
Cut to a charming breakfast scene in Olivia’s penthouse. She gently places a key in Damian’s hand.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“No more your place. No more my place. It’s our place.”
Their foreheads knock together as they laugh.
And I sigh….
Love is a Dangerous Game is a microdrama available through DramaBox. I haven't been able to establish exactly how much artificial intelligence was involved in its production.
It’s my favourite.
I’ve watched it at least 30 times.
For several weeks, meta served me teasers. Eventually I’d seen approximately two thirds of the entire production, although never in the correct order.
I finally paid for a subscription. Money well spent.
And there are hundreds more just like it.
My social media feed has become a parade of billionaires, betrayed wives, secret heiresses, mafia bosses, evil sisters and astonishingly incompetent families.
I’ve become something of a connoisseur.
There is, for example, the manipulative sister. She is usually sickly, occasionally adopted and almost always a pathological liar. Her principal objective is to take everything belonging to her sister (the biological daughter who has perceived advantages the scheming sister doesn’t as a result of her birthright).
This includes taking - the boyfriend. The job. The wedding. The precious heirloom bestowed by their grandmother (which she will eventually break of course). And her bedroom. For some reason, they really love taking over their sisters’ bedrooms.
The scheming sister is spectacularly annoying. She has perfected the art of turning every conversation to her advantage, deploying cloying tears on demand and occasionally throwing herself to the floor so she can accuse her sister of pushing her. Naturally, the entire family believes her.
Our heroine can be lying on the pavement with multiple fractures, internal bleeding and an urgent need for open-heart surgery, but if the manipulative sister has a paper cut, the entire family will rush to her bedside.
Our heroine must make her own way to hospital. Possibly by bus. Occasionally she will be assaulted by bad men on the way.
Eventually, after 47 episodes of increasingly outrageous injustice, she finally walks away. Within six months she has become the CEO of a multinational corporation, won the Nobel Prize, invented a revolutionary medical treatment and possibly flown a rocket to the moon. She will also have had a major glow-up.
Her family, suddenly bereft of the person they have spent years systematically humiliating, realise their terrible mistake.
Too late.
Sweet, sweet justice.
Sometimes the villain is a boyfriend or husband who insists their relationship remain secret. This enables him to carry on with a manipulative, morally repulsive woman who somehow manages to commandeer every important occasion in our heroine’s life.
Including the passenger seat of the car. This is apparently a particularly significant humiliation.
There is also a remarkable amount of legal jeopardy.
Our heroine will eventually decide she’s had enough of her dreadful husband and seek a divorce. Unfortunately, he is usually too busy entertaining his mistress to attend to such mundane matters.
Fortunately, this turns out to be an advantage. She simply slips the divorce papers into a pile of business documents and presents them for his signature.
He signs without looking. Sometimes while kissing his mistress.
I have some questions about the legal validity of these arrangements, but the divorce is invariably granted and our heroine is free.
The husband, naturally, doesn’t discover he’s divorced until several episodes later. Usually at the same time he discovers his ex-wife holds the patents for the technology his huge business is based on.
Then there are the supposedly body-positive stories.
Our heroine is a larger curvy young woman who is secretly in love with the star quarterback. He loves her in secret but invariably abandons her for a beautiful but mean cheerleader. Fortunately, our heroine loses 30 kilograms in what appears to be a fortnight, becomes a supermodel and returns to her school reunion looking spectacular.
Sometimes our heroine marries a mafia boss as part of a political arrangement. The Don is called away on urgent mafia business before they can consummate the marriage. Upon his return, his wife has lost 30 kilograms, the children adore her and she’s transformed the household into a model of domestic efficiency.
Naturally, he falls deeply in love (and lust) for her.
I have some questions about the nutritional programmes being offered in these households. But that’s another essay.
I realise I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time describing these stories without making any meaningful contribution to our understanding of innovation, artificial intelligence or the future of humanity.
This is unusual for me.
Normally I can find a connection between almost anything and the importance of imagination, human flourishing or systems change.
But I seem to have become distracted by Jake-Damian.
And the fists.
Because there is one thing I’ve noticed about these productions. Everyone clenches their fists. Constantly.
When they’re angry, they clench their fists.
When they’re humiliated, they clench their fists.
When they discover their husband is having an affair with their sister, they clench their fists.
When someone steals their bedroom, their wedding dress or their rightful inheritance, they clench their fists.
The camera zooms in.
The fingers curl slowly towards the palm.
The knuckles turn white.
Sometimes, when the emotion is particularly intense, the fist actually bleeds.
I have no idea how much pressure one must apply to one’s own hand to draw blood, but apparently it happens quite frequently among the extraordinarily wealthy.
And then there are the slaps. So many slaps.
Slaps at weddings. Slaps at family dinners. Slaps in corporate boardrooms. Occasionally someone gets slapped, turns around and is immediately slapped by somebody else.
Except this is where my enjoyment starts to become a little uncomfortable. Because for all their ridiculous charm, these stories have some deeply questionable ideas about how people should treat one another.
Men slap women. Parents slap their daughters. Wealthy men exercise extraordinary power over the women in their lives, often under the guise of protecting them. Humiliation is practically a recreational activity.
And violence is routinely presented as an acceptable expression of anger, authority or wounded pride.
It’s not.
The gender roles are equally extraordinary. The men are powerful, muscular, fabulously wealthy and emotionally unavailable until the right woman comes along. The women are beautiful, virtuous, long-suffering and remarkably forgiving.
Unless they’re villains, in which case they’re manipulative, scantily dressed and morally bankrupt.
And apparently there is no problem in a woman’s life that cannot be improved by losing 30 kilograms.
For stories that occasionally advertise themselves as body positive, they have a rather peculiar understanding of the concept.
I find myself having little conversations with myself while watching. That’s not okay. You don’t have to be thin to be loved. He doesn’t get to slap her. Why on earth is she still talking to these people?
And then I watch another episode.
I am, apparently, capable of holding two entirely contradictory positions at once.
Perhaps that's what discernment looks like. Not refusing to enjoy something imperfect but knowing which parts of it we choose to take with us.
I can recognise that a story is reinforcing ideas I fundamentally disagree with while simultaneously being desperate to see the manipulative sister finally get what’s coming to her.
It’s a curious thing.
Beneath all the misogyny, the hypermasculinity, the miraculous weight loss and the deeply suspect divorce proceedings, there is another story unfolding.
Our heroine is learning to choose herself.
After being betrayed by her husband, humiliated by her family, abandoned in hospital, slapped across the face and deprived of her bedroom, she finally decides she’s had enough.
She stops explaining herself. Stops begging to be believed. Stops trying to win the affection of people who have demonstrated, repeatedly and enthusiastically, that they don’t deserve her.
She walks away.
And that is the moment I find most satisfying.
Not when the mafia boss realises there is no one left to fetch his stomach medicine (this is another peculiar recurring theme). Not when the evil sister is exposed. Not even when the heroine doubles the company’s profits in six months, although I do admire her productivity.
It’s when she decides that she deserves better.
Of course, the stories rarely leave it there.
Having discovered her independence, our heroine invariably finds herself in the arms of an even wealthier, more handsome and considerably more attentive man. Sometimes before the ink is dry on her divorce papers. Apparently self-determination is all very well, but a billionaire husband super male model is still the ultimate prize.
So what is it about these stories that keeps me coming back?
They are astonishingly repetitive. The plots are preposterous. The morality is questionable and the characters are often little more than collections of desirable physical attributes and appalling personality traits.
Yet they deliver something extraordinarily satisfying. Certainty.
The villains are unequivocally evil. The heroines are impossibly good. Injustice is relentless, but justice is inevitable. We know exactly whom to hate, whom to love and when to celebrate.
There is something rather comforting and entertaining about that.
In real life, people are complicated.
But not here. Here, every betrayal is eventually exposed. Every injustice is corrected.
Sweet, sweet justice.
We don’t always want to be challenged. Sometimes we want to feel something familiar. To experience the delicious anticipation of a story whose ending we already know. Which might also explain why I paid for a subscription after meta had already shown me most of the plot.
I wasn’t paying to find out what happened.
I was paying to enjoy watching it happen.
There is something fascinating about this new world of entertainment, where ancient storytelling formulas meet artificial intelligence, social media algorithms and an apparently insatiable appetite for beautiful characters behaving badly.
There are intellectual property questions. Who owns these stories? What existing works might have been used to create them? And at what point does inspiration become imitation, or outright infringement?
Jake-Damian bears a suspicious resemblance to an extraordinarily handsome Italian model I now follow on Instagram. Purely for research purposes, of course.
Except I’ve just discovered the Italian model might be AI-generated too.
I have so many questions. But we’ll save those for another essay.
AI offers the possibility of producing and varying these stories at extraordinary speed. Social media delivers them directly into our feeds. And somewhere in the process, our oldest emotional triggers are being packaged into tiny, irresistible episodes.
Betrayal. Humiliation. Revenge. Redemption. Love.
And clenched fists. Lots of clenched fists.
I’m not entirely convinced that the appeal lies in the technology.
After all, these stories have been with us forever. Fairy tales, soap operas, romance novels and melodramas have been serving up variations of the same emotional ingredients for centuries. The machines are finding new ways to give us something we’ve always enjoyed. And they are getting very good at it.
Which brings me back to Olivia and Damian.
After everything she’s endured, Olivia doesn’t immediately fall into the arms of her impossibly handsome billionaire.
She asks for time.
She rebuilds her life. Takes control of her father’s company. Rediscovers her confidence and decides what she wants.
And when she finally gives Damian the key to her penthouse, it’s her choice.
Their foreheads knock together as they laugh in the kitchen.
A scene never revealed in the teasers.
I honestly melted.
Human flourishing isn’t always about learning, growing, innovating or becoming a better version of ourselves.
Sometimes it’s about pleasure. Finding delight in something gloriously silly, while retaining enough judgement to recognise its flaws.
And sometimes, after a long day navigating the complexities of actual human beings, I just want to watch two ridiculously beautiful people fall in love.
Again.
For the 31st time.
