Double is a tour-de-force of acting and writing for the small screen. Chiba Yudai and Nagayama Kento disappear into the roles of two struggling stage actors, a mentor and a mentee. The ten-episode script by Yoshida Erika, a co-writer of Cherry Magic, focuses on a period in the two characters’ weirdly co-dependent relationship when the career of the younger actor begins to eclipse that of his mentor. Chiba plays Takarada Takara, who begs to join a penurious theater company after randomly catching one of their plays on a rainy day. Nagayama plays Kamoshima Yujin, an established actor befuddled by the awkward oddball’s request to upend his life and join the troupe. Eventually seeing in Takara a potential for acting greatness, Yujin agrees to take him on. That summary accounts for the first episode, but the second leaps seven years forward in their relationship. By that time, Yujin has become not only Takara’s mentor, but also his closest companion, defacto manager, and personal warden. Chiba and Nagayama inhabit the inner and outer worlds of their characters, as Yoshida’s deft script plumbs the psyche and pathos of their friendship.

Episodes Two through Seven depict the deep connection between Yujin and Takara following those seven unseen years. Their bond fuses the professional and the personal. The duo block acting roles together. They study filmed works of famous actors. They occupy adjacent rooms in a ramshackle dwelling. Because Takara has some sort of reading impediment, Yujin steers their acting process. Because Takara evinces no interest in household chores, Yujin cooks and launders for both. Because Takara loses track of details, Yujin nannies him to ensure he arrives at his appointments. Mostly symbiotic, the dynamic contains dysfunction. When sent to auditions on his own, Takara becomes easily overwhelmed. To cope, he conjures an imaginary version of Yujin, and the specter proffers advice to fit the circumstances. It’s fair to say that both Yujins—the real one and the avatar—own considerable real estate between Takara’s ears.

Change disrupts the established pattern of their comfortable routine when Takara’s career begins to flourish. He secures flashy acting gigs in TV dramas, in commercials, and, most notably, in an arty film directed by a high-profile auteur. Meanwhile, struggling to survive between acting gigs, Yujin languishes as a short-order cook. Success splits the pair. Famous Director resents the unheralded Yujin (or the conjured specter of Yujin) influencing his actor’s on-film decisions. New colleagues question and undermine their closeness. A fresh, professional management agency whisks Takara away to a new living arrangement. On the strength of these novel outside influences, Takara begins to blossom into both a functioning, independent adult and an actor confident enough to make his own performative choices. He is evicting Yujin from his headspace.

The series’ title references two usages of the word “double” in the acting profession. Both usages allow Yoshida’s script to delve into the mental world of each lead character. In the process, Yoshida offers viewers a veritable seminar in performance studies. First, “doubling” is a rehearsal practice in which one actor rehearses their scenes with an actor who won’t actually play the part onstage. The substitute’s job is to double the performance of the absent actor, thereby enabling the scene partner to hone their own portrayal. The technique requires the double to understand the motivations not only of the character, but also of the actor whose performative choices they must emulate. A secondary usage of double, “double-casting”, refers to the practice of having two actors alternate performances in the same role. During their seven years in the theater company, Yujin often employed both senses of doubling as techniques to help teach Takara the craft of acting or to learn his lines in myriad plays. Doubling one another became second-nature by the time outside forces intervened in their dynamic.

Episode Eight features a second time jump, merely six months this time, a period in the pair’s lives when Takara’s success has led to the duo’s near complete estrangement. Having broken her characters apart, Yoshida’s script now must bring them back together ahead of the looming series finale. An instance of doubling, when Yujin fills in for Takara’s co-star in a new theater production, provides the catalyst for the duo’s reunion, both professional and personal. During that rehearsal, the play’s director marked not only Yujin’s own considerable talent as an actor, but also the way his portrayal of the part elevated Takara’s performance. Recognizing that ineffable spark between two performers, the director unceremoniously dumps the actor previously cast. Due to this play’s difficult subject matter, she also seizes Yujin’s addition to the company as an opportunity to reimagine her version of the production. Henceforward, Yujin and Takara will alternate roles. For the characters, the double-casting amounts to regression: having just attained independence, the two will once again become doubles to one another. The final trilogy of episodes explore the repercussions of the director’s double choices. Takara seems to value his fledgling self-sufficiency, and initially he resists the latter’s reinsertion into his life. How he handles the mental crisis created by this development drives the plot in those final three episodes. But is his emotional opposition to Yujin’s casting merely professional anxiety?

The dynamic between Takara and Yujin contains a subtle sexual tension that burbles beneath the surface for the first seven of the ten episodes. Takara’s attraction to Yujin (previously unspoken but implied a few times) erupts into the open in Episode Eight. That verbal outburst proved one-sided, and neither character dwells on the romantic tension in the penultimate episode. The issue ripples through the finale, but primarily as an accent to the character arc, not to flavor the story arc. “I want your everything. Your voice, your eyes, your hand, your foot, everything,” Takara confesses in the Finale. At first blush (and one wants to after hearing the raw, soul-baring need inherent to those words), Takara aims that confession at Yujin. But on consideration, flesh-and-blood Yujin was not there. The confession went to the conjured Yujin in Takara’s head, which means Takara really said that to himself. So it’s an open question whether Takara is asking something of Yujin in absentia or exhorting himself to get his act together. In context, the words come across less as an expression of romantic desire and more as a lost soul’s yearning for connection.

That any sexual attraction arises at all creates a temptation for some viewers to classify the whole series as BL; yet, Double frankly lacks most of that genre’s telltale tics. I cannot fathom the series even aspires to be seen as BL.* If Double never reads as BL, it likewise never reads as LGBTQ+. Its mostly-latent queer tensions never drive any story arc. For these reasons, the stunted gay storyline does not represent a betrayal of the queer sexual tension in the story or of the characters themselves. Queerbaiting, this story is not. Double does offer a beguiling exploration into the friendship bond between two men, a product of one’s need to find greatness and the other’s…need. Everything else, including the putative romance, proves incidental to the other business this series aimed to portray.

Yoshida’s strong focus on character makes Double compelling television. Watching Takara and Yujin—or Takara and Specter Yujiin—takes viewers on a journey that nearly fractures reality. While doubling during rehearsals, the actors explain their performative choices to one another and, by extension, to the audience. This recurrent doubling in Double offers ample opportunity for Yoshida to comment upon the theory and psychology of performativity, the psychology of friendship, the psychology of co-dependency, and the psychology of suppressed attraction. Those scenes where Yujin and Takara explain their acting choices to one another offer viewers a window into the characters’ innermost thoughts. This device of having the characters speak aloud what’s on their minds echoes an earlier series on which Yoshida contributed as screenwriter, Cherry Magic. In that series, two characters acquire the ability to read minds, allowing the inner thoughts of other characters to be shared with the audience via dialog spoken aloud. Double dispenses with Cherry Magic’s fantastical whimsy, replacing the wizards’ mind-reading with a masterclass on how actors create their portrayals. In both series, this added insight into how the important characters think during important moments helped make the characters vivid and memorable; their stories, plausible and impactful. Primarily a character study powered by a provocative script, powerhouse acting (especially from Chiba), and competent direction, Double achieves an echelon of thoughtful brilliance few other series can aspire to match.


Easter Egg: In episode 9, a poster for the play reveals the dates and venues for the performances in 2024. Make plans now!

*-- The class of BL fans who consume the genre just to watch a fluffy story wherein two handsome men kiss will want to skip this series. Double does not deliver what they seek. The class of BL fans who enjoy their same-sex romances accompanied by intelligent dialog, adult drama, or insight into the human condition will consider Double a mixed bag. If such fans can overlook the minimal same-sex romancing, then those other attributes will reward their dedication to watching. The class of BL fans who enjoy a quality drama because it's a quality drama will simply be pleased.