General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

The Mafia's Obsession

The Mafia's Obsession (also known as Gangster Obsessed with Me) is a 2024 British short-form boys' love (BL) drama released on the vertical-drama platform DramaBox, consisting of 58 episodes of roughly two minutes each in a 9:16 vertical format made for phone viewing¹^•². It began streaming on October 30, 2024¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Format	58 vertical episodes of about 2 minutes each, 9:16 aspect ratio, one season¹
First aired	October 30–31, 2024, on DramaBox¹^•³
Origin	British production; production company Onset Octopus; directed by Dan Löwenstein¹^•⁴
Source	Adapted from the novel The Mafioso's Obsession by jojo0609²
Main cast	Elliott Eason as Pietro, Lucas Wilson as Augusto Castro, Katrina Todd as Alice⁴
Reception	IMDb rating of 7.6/10 from 498 votes¹

Spoilers

Plot

The story begins with a marriage pact made 15 years earlier: one mafia boss takes over another's business and spares his life on the condition that his son Pietro marries the man's daughter, Alice. Augusto Castro, Alice's brother, cannot accept the arrangement and finds a loophole in the contract, offering himself in his sister's place as the bride of the notorious mob boss Pietro. What Augusto does not know is that Pietro has liked him since childhood and deliberately altered the contract to create that loophole, so the marriage is a love trap set by Pietro³^•⁵.

The marriage provokes the wider mafia community, which does not accept a gay relationship. The series follows Pietro's effort to convince Augusto that his love is genuine, while Augusto, whom Pietro's team considers a softie, trains to prove himself worthy of the mafia organization and must pass tests set by Pietro's father before being fully indoctrinated into the family business. The two clash frequently, and both fathers eventually accept the relationship⁵.

Production and format

The series belongs to the vertical-drama format popularized by apps such as DramaBox: episodes of one to three minutes, each a single scene ending on a cliffhanger, with the full run adding up to roughly the length of a feature film⁶. All 58 episodes carry an air date of October 31, 2024⁷. According to an IMDb trivia note, the actors received the complete script 24 hours before filming began and worked 12 to 14 hours a day⁸.

A reviewer at the BL blog Corner Café described it as the second English-language short-form BL series on DramaBox, after the American slapstick series My Secret Agent Husband, and judged it a more serious action drama with better casting than Thai mafia BL series, since the actor playing the young mafia boss looks the part². The Gay Reels review rated it 6/10, calling it a polished guilty pleasure with shirtless and sexual scenes but few kisses⁵.

Source novel and related titles

Corner Café states the series is adapted from the novel The Mafioso's Obsession by jojo0609². The title is unrelated to the 2016 romance novel Mafia's Obsession by Mahita Varma, a 344-page Kindle edition about a teenage girl who catches the eye of the king of the underworld⁹, or to the Inkitt web novel of the same name by DeLucaVowsink, in which Gianna is forced to marry Matteo De Luca to clear her father's syndicate debt¹⁰.

Availability

The series streams on DramaBox, and aggregator listings note availability through third-party sites such as DramaDünyam and DramaFlix, where the first episodes are free and later ones require a membership¹^•⁶^•¹¹. Plex lists the show but shows no streaming locations for it¹².

Country of origin

Sources disagree on the series' origin. IMDb lists the country of origin as the United Kingdom¹, and the Corner Café review calls it a British series², while TheTVDB lists the original country as the United States of America³.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › LGBT-related web series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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