Break Point Part 2 review: Netflix show is sweet, inspiring but also contrived

3/5

Story:

The first five episodes of the inaugural season on Break Point (released in January 2023) chronicled the journeys of new-gen Tennis stars such as Nick Kyrgios, Taylor Fritz, Paul Bedosa and Ons Jabeur during the Australian Open and the following clay court season in focus. The second half of the show lays focus on the remaining two Grand Slams of the year 2022 - Wimbledon and the US Open - with Kyrgios, Fritz, Jabeur and a few others returning as protagonists. The new set of five episodes forays further into the minds and many conundrums that top league players encounter as they face off against not only the biggest names of the sport but also the hopes and expectations of millions. 

Review:

The very first episode of Netflix's Break Point has an expert voice declaring Tennis players as self-centred. It goes on to allude and slowly reveal that, unlike a team sport, Tennis is all about individual goals. At best, you could have one other teammate in the form of a doubles partner but it's the Singles format that always brings in the crowds. The nationality of a player, on most occasions, is rendered irrelevant which means that every accolade earned, or every brickbat received, rests with the player alone. You are the master of your fate, so to speak. Players tend to expose a bit too much of themselves in a culture such as this, which often results in a clash of not only talents but also personalities and ideologies.

And perhaps that is why, the first episode of the new collection (episode 6 of the overall season) places the Wimbledon 2022 match between Aussie Nick Kyrgios and Greece's Stefanos Tsitsipas as its marquee event. The former, a self-appointed radical who is known to squander his boundless talent. The latter, a similarly enterprising young athlete who has failed to win a slam because of an attitude adjustment he warrants. Both reach the third round of the tournament with different kinds of expectations weighing on them - the Greek is the #5 seed who is meant to take on the mantle carried so far by the triumvirate of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, and Kyrgios, as ever, is posed with the challenge of living up to the promise that he has actually never wittingly made.

The show, however, chooses the Australian as the protagonist and the reason is simple. Nick Kyrgios is a treasure trove of dramatic material and is both charmingly & alarmingly candid, natural in front of the camera. More importantly, he serves as the best case study for what the show is trying to explore - the psychological makeup of a modern-day Tennis star. In fact, the whole season is dedicated to this survey, if you can call it one. You could also call it a hunt. The hunt for the next talisman of the post-Federer/Serena/Nadal/Djokovic generation and Kyrgios and Tsitsipas and all others are the prospects.

The hunt is on for the players themselves. Ons Jabeur, the highest-ranked Tunisian player, is touted as the renaissance woman for all of the Arab world and her home continent of Africa, and she carries the baggage with both pride and fear. For Taylor Fritz, the pressure surfaces in the form of delivering in front of his home crowd when he reaches Flushing Meadows for the US Open as the #1 ranked American. Having beaten Rafael Nadal earlier that year to lift the Indiana Wells trophy, Fritz was billed quite high but, much to everyone's shock, he would exit the tournament in the first round.

The hopes for the US crowd are then shifted to Frances Tiafoe, the son of immigrants from Sierra Leone who escaped the civil war in the 1990s. Tiafoe's father was the maintenance man at the club which made him fall in love with the sport so his life up till that point, where all of the United States rallied behind him to win the trophy, is best described as the American Dream.

Iga Świątek, the current World No. 1 in women's Tennis, has a completely contrasting 2022 in which she wins not only the French Open but also the US Open, making it the consummate season that every other player on the show is looking for. 

The most compelling of the lot, though, is the Australian Ajla Tomljanovic and her endearing relationship with her father, former Croatian pro-handball player Ratko Tomljanovic. Ajla isn't only struggling on the court but also off it because of her recent break-up with fellow player Matteo Berrettini. Having reached the quarter-finals the previous year at Wimbledon - her best Grand Slam result so far - a lot's at stake for the 29-year-old and her father's got her back the entire, through thick and thin - from booking hotel rooms to sharing anecdotes from his own sporting life, Ratka emerges as arguably the most memorable character of the season.

Break Point has all the makings of a sports drama - the highs, the lows, the jubilance, the rise to the summits and the plummets to the absolute rock bottoms. It takes a tender look at these players who more often than not find themselves lonely and desolate on a tennis court, when the whole world's watching them. 

The problem, however, surfaces when the show finds itself too engrossed in building a narrative and less in letting these intense journeys do their own talking. The reason could be the template that a major streamer like Netflix is stuck to (the show is produced by the same team that created the Formula 1 chronicler Drive To Survive) which makes the camera abruptly cut away from a moment of candour to a more aesthetic slo-mo shot of a player in action, often meddling with the natural flow of conversations or emotions among players and their respective teams. The reason could also be that the showrunners lack clarity about the amount of focus they want to shell out for each player and as a result, chunks of part 2 of the season feel contrived and disjointed.