After a promising beginning with two likeable and engaging leads, what was billed as a romance devolved into a 9 episode paean to the Miss Grand Thailand (MGT) pageant. The upside is I learned a lot about MGT, the downside is I'm not particularly interested in MGT, and that isn't what I tuned in for.
The two mostly inexperienced actresses, Charlotte Austin and Engfa Wahara, did a credible job of slogging through the script. Of course, they excelled at the pageant portions of the series, an accomplishment that was largely lost on me. Aside from the focus on pageant life dragging the plot to a near standstill, the creators of this series exhibited a profound aversion to the characters being even remotely physically intimate, including kissing, to the point of employing thoroughly ridiculous avoidance mechanisms up until the final episodes, resulting in the considerable chemistry between Austin and Wahara being largely squandered.
Any popularity of Show Me Love is a testament to said chemistry and how starved for content the GL public is. The bar, it seems, is very low, and SML tripped over it anyway.