Make or Break, Apple TV+’s surfing competition series, returns for its second season this week, throwing us right back into the personal lives and challenges facing the greatest wave riders in the world as they prepare for a world championship.
Who will be crowned the best? If that question excites you, you’ll have a fine time with this by-the-numbers surfing docuseries.
Make or Break recap: Season two, part one
Season 2, episodes 1 through 4: If you don’t remember the first season of Make or Break, that’s a paradox. On the one hand, you won’t know any of our players here. But on the other hand, it doesn’t really matter, because everybody basically tells you who they are and what they want.
In every case, it’s about the same thing. These are incredible athletes chasing glory while facing down self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, and fear of aging out of their peak surfing form.
Our heroes are the ubiquitous Kelly Slater, Steph Gilmore, Italo Ferreira, Kanoa Igarashi, Griffin Colapinto, Gabriel Medina, Filipe Toledo, Morgan Cibilic, Jack Robinson, Tatiana Weston-Webb, and Tyler and Owen Wright.
Top surfers face internal and external challenges
We see in these first four episodes Weston-Webb experiencing a truly rough competition season where she messes up, inflames old injuries, and gets down on herself as she threatens to wash out of the championship way early for her.
Kelly Slater turns 50 and is still able to achieve career highs, which is a humbling thing for him.
Owen Wright is recovering from a debilitating injury, which is reflected back to him in the form of his helpless but supportive sister Tyler’s continued success and his father’s dementia diagnosis. Either relative’s story could be his, but he’s stuck between them and his former glory.
And then there’s Robinson and Cibilic trying to make sure they don’t get eliminated when the midseason cut happens, splitting the pool of surfers in half.
Ring my bell
The first season of Make or Break got me used to what the docuseries is and isn’t. It’s not really about the nuts and bolts of surfing; I’m no clearer on the rules and tiers of the World Surfing League’s championship event than I was before I started watching this show. It’s also not really about the spectacle, aesthetic or athletic, of surfing. And it’s not really a competition show, because the stakes are never presented in a clear enough fashion.
In short, if you don’t already know about surfing, you’re bound to be lost, but you won’t necessarily be bored. At least not every episode.
Part of the reason I never got into spectator sports is that stats don’t really do anything for me. So it doesn’t really move me to hear these guys talking about rankings. And I still don’t really get how the scoring works. Also, it’s funny that basically everyone on this show knows each other, which gives the impression that there are really only about 50 pro surfers in the world.
Searching for the human drama of surfing
So with no particular interest in the sport’s rules, or the history of the players’ performances (and the show is stingy at best with flashbacks to catch us up), that leaves us with human drama. And that can be good — at times.
The Kelly Slater episode isn’t very interesting because there’s no arc. He suffers from a sort of anxiety about getting older, but the guy’s in the best shape of his life. It’s not like he’s losing his edge.
Tatiana Weston-Webb’s thing should be interesting because she’s hanging on by the proverbial thread, but the show doles out the details of her losses inconsistently. I didn’t get a clear enough idea of her as a person to truly care if she succeeds.
The Robinson and Cibilic stuff doesn’t move me at all because these guys have been surfing since they were 12 and are only about 25 now. So, other than the usual dangers of surfing, I can’t muster much enthusiasm or sympathy for their plights.
The award for standout episode of this batch goes to …
Photo: Apple TV+
The Tyler and Owen Wright episode is the best of this crop by a comfortable margin. Tyler and Owen give us windows into their family lives, and those things are productive counterpoints to their careers and dreams. Owen is watching his father waste away as he deals with his own traumatic head injury. And that awakens in him all of his anxieties, as he’s also questioning his abilities as an athlete.
His stoicism and comparative quiet on camera also help us understand him more than a lot of the surfers who are able to talk more about their lives. Owen emerges as a guy being pulled apart by stress and the pressure he’s putting on himself. His disappointments register as well as they should.
Tyler, meanwhile, has to be aware that her father is dying and her brother is suffering while she herself is thriving. Her talking about her fiance, and how her father can communicate to her how happy he is for the two of them, and how meaningful that is is to her, proves heartbreaking indeed.
In Make or Break season two, the Wrights come across as the most relatable and human, while also the most tragic and compelling. The series editors and directors don’t seem to have noticed the huge imbalance in the dramatic pull of their various protagonists. We’ll see if they had better luck in the back half of the season, which arrives next week.
★★☆☆☆
Watch Make or Break on Apple TV+
The first four episodes of Make or Break’s eight-episode second season premiere today.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
