Boyfriend on Demand is a romance series about young women and their search for perfect love and perfect romance, but with a twist. This is a 10 episode Netflix limited series from South Korea.

Boyfriend on Demand stars Kim Jisoo as Seo Mi-rae. Mi-rae works as a producer of webtoons. She works in a company with several popular web series. She gets along well with all her colleagues, except she is annoyed by Park Kyeong-nam (Seo In-guk). He’s her competition for best web producer. You know the romance series tropes well enough to know that the guy she can’t stand in the beginning will be who she ends up with in the end, but this series takes you on a different journey to get you there.

Mi-rae is doing great as a producer. She’s asked to manage a very difficult author named Yoon Song (Gong Min-jung). She’s good at this, too. Her success gets her approached by a man with a new virtual reality app called “Boyfriend on Demand.” He asks her to use a free subscription for a month and give him a review of the app. Boyfriend on Demand is about to go public.

Mi-rae falls for the first virtual boyfriend she meets. When her time with him is up, she wants another boyfriend. She pays the subscription price to keep using the device. After each new boyfriend puts her through a perfect romance, she opts for the next plan, even more expensive. There are 900 men in the app and every one of them is handsome, polite, kind, thoughtful–the perfect boyfriend. She’s addicted to virtual love.

Like any addiction, it consumes more and more of her time and money. The series shows her women friends become equally enthralled by Boyfriend on Demand. She hears talk about it at work and on the streets and learns that her current digital boyfriend uses the same lines and moves on all 12,000 women he’s currently dating in the app.

Mi-rae starts to see the cracks in the perfect world of romance she’s let take over her life. But she isn’t ready to stop yet. She pays an extra premium price for a perfect guy she designs herself by answering over 2000 questions about her perfect man.

Guess what? Her perfect man looks exactly like her real co-worker Kyeong-nam.

Mi-rae still refuses to accept the idea that Kyeong-nam might be her real life perfect man. She dates the virtual guy she designed, who actually offers her good advice about love in real life and about opening her heart and not being afraid.

Then Kyeong-nam comes right out and tells Mi-rae that he likes her. It scares her. She’s afraid of feeling hurt in the real world and letting herself fall in love for real frightens her. However, this is a romance so you can expect a happy ending.

Korean romances are so chaste and slow. If you’re used to American romances where they just get on with it, you have to adjust for K-drama. There’s a lot of eye contact, the occasional touching of hands, but not much more.

This series brings new depth to our addiction to our digital devices by bringing the dangers of virtual reality into the discussion. Framing it around the quest for love and romance makes it seem innocent at first. Reality is hard. Are we going to deal with it, or are we going to bury our heads in a digital paradise?

You can see this one on Netflix.