Reaching the Breaking Point
Should you make a tennis show for fans of tennis or fans of Netflix?
Break Point, the glossy new tennis docuseries from Box To Box Films, creators of the hit Formula 1 doc Drive To Survive, has been quietly renewed for a second season by Netflix. And the filmmakers have wasted no time hitting the courts for a second year.
On the ground and behind the scenes at Indian Wells, and the US Open, and other events throughout the tennis calendar, their familiar Very Nice Cameras have been out and about. The rig they carry is different than all the other media guys. It’s nicer. No dusty dented rented parts from a random camera house in Burbank or Long Island City. 8k and 16k and ARRI Alexas. Prime lenses. Carbon fiber shoulder rigs, too — why not? They were even allowed access to areas that the usual tennis media weren’t. Different colors on their little credential badges.
Because it was a big deal that this was happening. To the leagues and associations that help run the sport, to the fans that wish their colossally large sport was even larger (especially in America), this represented an opportunity. A chance to convey what we all know and love about tennis to a captive audience of Netflix users bored between installments of Too Hot To Handle and Is It Cake?
I felt a not-insignificant sense of pride that our sport was chosen over every other sport (aside from golf, but we don’t need to talk about that) to be given what could be considered the golden treatment of sports documentary media. After Drive To Survive was universally lauded and credited with creating thousands upon thousands of new fans of Formula 1 racing, it was fair to stake hopes that the same could be done for tennis, especially in America.
I also unironically felt a strange misplaced sense of responsibility when the show started to air. I feel it every now and then when tennis enters the public eye — an instinct to protect, and shepherd, and package what will be seen by new sets of eyes. So that they may see what I see, and feel what I feel, when I watch tennis.
But therein lies the first bit of dissonance for this project, at least for true tennis die-hards. Who would you rather have tell this story? The people that are the best at dropping into a scenario and documenting it, finding what’s compelling about it on a baseline human level, context be damned? Or the diehards that know every little piece of trivia, and might get mired in the details, but could likely articulate on a far deeper level what it takes to sow years and decades worth of love for something?
The Box To Box camera team is no doubt skilled, but they always look like they don’t quite know what’s going on or where to look. It’s entirely possible they looked just the same on the roadways of the British Championship during Drive To Survive. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it’s part of the charm of their lens.
They were hired to do what they did then — communicate to a likely-unfamiliar audience what’s so compelling and enthralling about a sport like tennis. But ten different people may have ten different answers to that prompt — and they’re not always right. And watching the show, you can feel them navigating that. What little details do you leave in or cut out? What’s imperative? It’s a difficult dance to manage — you can tell they’re testing and refining what was most helpful to show, and trying so hard to avoid that feeling when an infographic comes up and you can hear the audience yawning.
And so, when matches happen in the show, they fall into a rhythm of delivering these kind of cut together, highlight reel, commentator says something to bridge the gap between points, slap-dash sequences. (Even if there’s nothing really there to dash about. The score could be 1–2, on serve, literally nothing has happened yet, and the commentator will say, “he’s really come out firing tonight!!”)
They even brazenly choose to lean on soundbites from our most musical and most over-the-top commentators, like the ever-excitable Robby Koenig. (Who once actually said into a mic, “he’s working the angles like a South African diamond cutter!”)
They want things to pop brightly, and obviously, and early.
It’s funny with Netflix shows — you can actively feel their terror of that one kind of unconvinced viewer with their finger hovering over the “Stop” button on the remote. They’re always guarding against the threat of that person leaving the show two minutes in and killing their analytics.
The Kyrgios issue
And so it’s telling who they chose, of all the players in the world, to be the entry point to Episode 1: Nick Kyrgios.
And as tennis fans, we all understand why.
Us tennis people, we know Kyrgios. We’ve known Kyrgios. All the multitudinous ups and downs, net negatives and positives. Breaking onto the scene out of nowhere. Beating Roger. Beating Rafa. Being a twerp about it. Having light mental breakdowns and clear problems “trying his hardest” on the biggest stages in the world. His crackling personality that breaks through all the static. His world-rattling talent. The deeply sad feeling many of us get watching him as he struggles to make good on his potential. Latest, getting a full back tattoo of 20 of his favorite Pokémon (from the original 151 Kanto collection, of course).
Regardless there are legitimate reasons to follow him as a story. He’s a new breed, as we know. And that leads to compelling television in spurts: watching his doubles partner Kokkinakis not know how to handle when he spouts off, other than pray that he’ll stop. His propensity to swear more than we even knew he did in public forums, thanks to Netflix’s lack of censors. Arguing with the umpire, his opponent, people through the crowd, throughout every match. It’s entertaining.
But we love tennis for the expanse of the tapestry. For how all these storylines interweave with each other, and how dynamics bounce off different backdrops and situations. And for many weeks out of the year, Kyrgios is his own ball of raw energy, fizzling in the corner, getting bounced out of tournaments early, extinguishing himself. Isolated.
For example: even with these cameras following him around, he loses in the second round of the Australian Open. And so the world of the show shrinks as they are forced to follow him into the world of doubles as his consolation act. Despite their efforts to make it feel big, it feels the opposite. (A sequence introducing the concept of doubles to the viewer claims “the stakes are massive” right as images onscreen show a side court with empty stands all around. As if they actually tried to find a better shot and couldn’t.)
Buy why would we fault these guys who just got done filming Formula 1 cars for not knowing any of these subtleties of this country club sport? Can you fault them for flocking to the dude almost-literally peacocking across the grounds?
The Season 2 itch
I was curious to see that the fancy cameramen had popped up at Indian Wells again this year. Even more curiously, they were following Taylor Fritz around…again. Event and player both exceedingly worthy subjects, of course. But I had allowed myself to build an expectation that a new season of Break Point would take on a new color, tracking a new set of players, across entirely different sections of the tennis calendar.
We tennis fans know that the playing season is eleven-and-a-half months long, and features 68 different events, each with their own stunning locales. But what about Prague, Vienna, Toronto, Gstaad, Astana? And what about the players? Across the two tours, there have to be as many as fifty or sixty truly exciting, young, upstart players with stories worth at least breezing past. Every year, 2,000 players in total cycle through the machine.
But Break Point season 2 will be following around the exact eight or nine same people, to the exact same tournaments, as the year before. It’s not entirely hard to understand why. Yes, Berretini and Fritz are young and hot and decently articulate and exciting. And these tournaments were chosen for a reason — for their energy and weight and centrality to the universe of the sport. But there’s just a big wide world out there full of color and quirk.
I’ve tried to field answers from people in tennis media, people close to players, and more casual fans of the sport, how we would best approach that core question: how do we best communicate (or really, advertise) tennis to the rest of the world, and especially Americans?
One thing kept standing out: the storylines. The emotional stakes. That’s what sets things apart, invariably.
Losing a match that you thought about for eight months and then taking this solemn trip on the back of a go-cart back to a shower before getting barraged with questions for an hour and then trending online for not being adequately effusive in your responses to those questions.
Being essentially completely alone for that whole process, stuck with the demons inside your head. The weight that can levy on someone. It’s really compelling stuff.
And that’s where that relative sterile, canned answer approach to the coverage really hurts the project the most. We yearn to see those quiet moments in the locker room — those loud moments in privacy where people scream and say plainly, “this is bullshit and I’m PISSED.” Instead, when Berretini finishes a tough match, he allows just one barely plaintive moment, spoken in public, as always: “This sport man. Crazy.” That’s it. And they frame it as if it was the most revealing outburst that they had captured in the entire series. The “Next Episode On Break Point” montage crescendoed effortfully to that line. Like it was something.
Part of the issue is that the tennis world is more private and contained than many sports. And players are masters at playing the media game. They’re well-enough media trained at this point that a sit-down interview, especially one without a communicated specific and special angle is going to read a little flat. They have their lines memorized. They have the beats to hit on. These players, weirdly, almost more than athletes in other sports, are interviewed nearly constantly.
It’s such that the tennis media guys that follow the players around year-round and year-in and year-out, become legitimately good friends with them. You see players doing “sup bro” handshake bro-hugs with tennis media like they would a coach or player. And it was from those tennis media guys that I heard the most insistent criticism — because they know what it’s really like when the cameras are down.
So you can’t approach it like you usually do. Journalistically, these guys may have just stumbled in to their most formidable foe yet — a bunch of media trained, english-as-a-second-language, limelight-burnt young athletes.
And that’s why you can almost feel the Netflix producer sighing relief when someone at ease and dynamic like Tiafoe comes in the room and starts cursing — finally, something, anything that feels real.
Even this moment, which the New York Times smartly picked up on as being illuminating to the struggles of players, still doesn’t quite bridge the gap. It still feels like the loud part was quiet. And that it wasn’t the actual focus of the effort.
More quiet parts loud. More humanity. That makes the difference.
Does it matter?
But maybe this is all over examination. Maybe we’re too close to it. Maybe — this is really most likely the case — this product really isn’t even for us.
And there have been multiple articles about Drive To Survive and everything it got wrong, everything it displayed misleadingly or in apparently bad faith. I’m sure anyone writing or reading those was as annoyingly close to the subject as we are. Grains of salt should be flung freely in every direction.
After all, does any of this really matter?
People are watching this show. A renewal from always-and-newly-stingy Netflix means one thing — decent-to-massive levels of viewership. And at the end of the day that’s all any of us tennis evangelists have to care about, right?
That can only be good for us. A fan coming to the sport by any path is a good thing. And we can stay at peace with the knowledge that there are at least ten seasons worth of storylines that this sport provides. Maybe in year six the players will finally get comfortable and they can show us something really interesting.
