#Rotten tomatoes point break 2015 professional
#Rotten tomatoes point break 2015 series

They discuss their support systems, the years of emotional baggage from youthful pressures and the impact of personal relationships, with many featured spouses and partners. Players like Kyrgios or Paula Badosa or Maria Sakkari are excellent at breaking down the challenges that have nothing to do with how fast you serve or how proficiently you slide on a clay court.

#Rotten tomatoes point break 2015 series

The series is actually at its best when it begins delving into the challenging terrain of mental health in tennis - a sport in which most players have to deal with losing, very publicly, on a weekly basis under a media glare in which there’s nobody else to take take blame or responsibility. The actual tennis is, finally, only a small corner of what Break Point is trying to cover. The filmmakers didn’t get every burgeoning tennis personality from the year - Carlos Alcaraz’s absence is definitely felt - but they did pretty well. If you follow the sport more than casually, you can already look at some of those names and know where their storylines are going in both the first and second halves of the series - just as you can look at some of the players who are only fleetingly on-camera in these five episodes and know that, for example, Tomljanovic and Frances Tiafoe are about to become really important when we eventually get around to the U.S. With the first five episodes of the season focused on the Australian and French Opens, as well as key lead-in tournaments in Indian Wells and Madrid, there are also storylines built around the likes of Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime, a former prodigy now coached by Rafael Nadal’s uncle Italian Matteo Berrettini and his then-girlfriend Ajla Tomljanovic and compulsively polite Norwegian Casper Ruud. In the latter category, you’d put somebody like Nick Kyrgios, a love-him-or-hate-him bad boy with a questionable commitment to the sport or Ons Jabeur, a Tunisian veteran in an unprecedented position for an African player or maybe even Taylor Fritz, carrying the weight of a decade of struggles for American men. As featured here, they’re rising stars on the cusp, some verging on breaking into the Top 10, some already highly ranked but desperately in need of signature wins and some with clear developing personal narratives, regardless of wins or losses. The players featured in Break Point, then, weren’t the biggest household names when filming began, but several were far closer by the end of the 2022 tour calendar. On the men’s side, the Big Three - Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic - seemed close to possibly losing the supremacy they built up over a decade, without necessarily ceding the spotlight. On the women’s side of the draw, Serena Williams was on the verge of retirement and a new generation of players was rising in visibility to fill the vacuum. The 2022 season was intended to mark a turning point for the sport, a year of transition. The first five episodes will premiere this week - with the second half airing in the summer - and they immediately make a compelling case for why the series and its focus have value for fans.

#Rotten tomatoes point break 2015 professional

But the 10-episode series about the 2022 professional tennis season still has exceptional photography, a carefully curated selection of stars and enough on- and off-court drama to hook those with even casual curiosity. Nobody ever needed to ponder, “Man, I wonder what John McEnroe felt about that point!” Or commented, “Geez, Serena Williams is being so stoic out there.” Competitors are unguarded to an occasionally detrimental extreme, which makes Netflix’s Break Point seem immediately less revelatory than its predecessor. Leaving aside global levels of popularity for the two sports, tennis is a competition in which the players are entirely exposed.

For their follow-up, producers Paul Martin and James Gay-Rees have set a seemingly “easier” task with the world of tennis - or maybe it just feels that way to me, since I’m barely a superficially curious Formula One viewer, while I’m an avid, if far from obsessive, tennis fan.