Make or Break, Apple TV+’s surfing competition series, brings its second season to a close this week, concluding this saga of the World Surfing League’s championship.
In the final four episodes, we check in on major international players and see what shakes out as they near the end of the competition season. Though the surfers’ stories all boil down to their positions in the finals, the stakes ramp up as we near the end — and the drama on the waves becomes most exciting.
Make or Break recap: Season two, part two
Season 2, episodes 5 through 8: As we check back in on our world-class surfers, we’re closer to the top five championship knockout events. Tensions are running high.
American Kelly Slater, as usual, looms large in the background of all of these stories of the hunger for surfing glory. He has a bad showing and might lose his top-five position. Brazilian Italo Ferreira dreams of finally winning a title and letting people know he’s a serious contender. But he’s having trouble because his dark horse opponent (and countryman) Gabriel Medina is suddenly making an incredible showing for himself.
Medina became a minor celebrity in the surfing world after a messy divorce. And his retreat from the spotlight to deal with the fallout drew whispers throughout the surfing world. Family man Filipe Toledo, also from Brazil, feels the strain on his personal life after being away from surfing for so long. So it’s very cathartic and nice to see him succeed.
Friends, feuds and paranoia
California friends Kanoa Igarashi and Griffin Colapinto recently became rivals, complicating a lifetime acquaintanceship. Igarashi frames the match-up as a class issue as well, since his hometown is less affluent than Colapinto’s. Colapinto doesn’t cut a very gallant figure. He begins to imagine the judges and fans have turned against him, and hires a bodyguard because he thinks the other surfer’s fans might attack him. He also actively roots against Igarashi at a viewing party, and mostly complains all the time about everything going wrong.
After Ferreira loses a big contest to Australian Jack Robinson, he nearly destroys the locker room. He also tries to have it out with the judges, making him look volatile and unprofessional. A lot of documentary footage about Ferreira’s rise to the top softens that image a touch, and you believe his emotional reaction to getting to the top only to falter. A horrific injury further hampers his chances at the top spot, just in time for an important qualifying event.
When Australian Stephanie Gilmore and Brazilian American Tatiana Weston-Webb face off in the women’s championship, their sportsmanlike competition proves quite ingratiating and exciting. Gilmore pulls off an incredibly difficult tight-turning maneuver that cinches it, and that is genuinely exciting stuff.
Becoming the No. 1 surfer in the world
Photo: Apple TV+
These last four episodes of Make or Break‘s second season have much more bite than the previous four, in which too little is learned that has much impact on the things this surfing docuseries is ostensibly about. Part of that is because when you’re documenting world-class athletes, you can’t exactly be choosy about whose personalities and trials are most interesting.
The show’s creative team spent time with Colapinto, so they must edit something out of that footage — even if it’s not interesting and Colapinto himself exhibits so little charisma.
It’s cool to see even the least-interesting people performing feats of impossible strength and dexterity, of course. And heaven knows I can’t do what these people do. But there’s a fundamental imbalance on Make or Break between what’s happening and why. The directors and editors never found a way to make this interesting to non-surfers. So you have little choice but to just ride it out, but then it’s also my job to watch this. I can’t imagine a lot of folks are going to become surfing fans based on this show.
The competition might hook you, but will you stay hooked?
I’ll admit that by the end of second two, I was definitely wrapped up in the top five matches. I wanted to see what happened. I didn’t like any of the surfers more than any of the rest, so I wasn’t rooting for anyone in particular. Still, it proved gripping enough waiting to see who does win.
This all boils down to the nature of competition. Eventually, you’ll get pulled in if you’re paying attention. Still, it’s not like I’ll be following the career of Italo Ferreira or anything now that I’ve seen his performance here. It’s just not anything I feel that invested in, though I was routinely blown away by what I saw.
Make or Break has a long way to go to make great TV out of these competitors and their sport. One of the biggest challenges is finding a much better approach to filming the actual surfing. It should not look so monotonous, considering how rarefied the skill on display is. Ultimately, every docuseries team needs to craft a show as interesting as its subjects. Your stars deserve at least that much consideration.
★★★☆☆
Watch Make or Break on Apple TV+
You can now watch the first second season of Make or Break on Apple TV+.
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.
