Amazon’s New Soccer Series, ‘The Kicks’, Is A Winner

As a ten-year-old girl, my daughter is the target audience for The Kicks, a new show now streaming on Amazon. (We liked the pilot when it debuted last year.) So, I decided to preview the first season while she was at home. She was playing Minecraft when I started watching, but it wasn’t long before she was caught up in the story of soccer fanatic Devin Burke learning to make her way in a new school and on a new team. Which is to say that the writing is solid enough to distract my kid from killing sheep or building a maximum-security penitentiary or whatever the hell she was doing when I turned on the TV. It was also strong enough to keep this forty-something mom engaged, entertained, and even impressed.

The basic premise is a mélange of classic tropes. Devin, her parents, and her little brother, have just relocated from Connecticut to Southern California, and anyone familiar with the travails of the Walsh family understands just how rough such a move can be. And our young heroine—who hopes to go the Olympics—is devastated to discover that the school soccer team isn’t second (2) in the league, but twelfth (12) in the league. (The article she read online had an unfortunate typo.) So, she’s the superstar who has to turn a ragtag bunch of misfits into a winning team. This is not to suggest that the narrative or character-building is facile. The writers working on this show are clearly smart enough and sensitive enough to know how to make familiar themes fresh. Devin a nice kid who’s passionate about her sport, but she’s not perfect—on the field or off. Her social and emotional setbacks and mistakes will resonate with any tween, not just athletes. And I like that the show gives some attention to the other members of Devin’s family, too; we get to see that they’re all making difficult adjustments, and we get to see them doing working through it all together. None of the characters is forced to conform to an easy type. The mean girl is capable of kindness. The geekiest girl has a lot of friends. Devin’s little brother Bailey, is a dork, but not the insufferable kind.

After watching a few episodes, I realized that I wasn’t trying to love it because it’s a show about girls that isn’t about girls talking about and fighting over boys. I wasn’t just excited about a protagonist who’s a girl and a leader. I just enjoyed watching it because it’s well-written, well-produced, and well-acted. Those other things, while laudable, aren’t the whole point of the show—or, at least, it doesn’t feel like they’re the whole point of the show. But, as long as I’m talking about parental selling points, there’s also this: The Kicks is based on a series of novels by the same name, written by professional athlete and Olympian Alex Morgan. If you’ve got a reluctant reader on your hands, this show might inspire her to pick up a book.

Back to my daughter: In asking her to sum up her thoughts about what she’d just seen, I asked her to suggest a show that this one reminded her of. She came up with Kickin’ It. This is something she watched at a friend’s house, so I had to check it out. Fran is absolutely right that there are thematic similarities, but it took me exactly five seconds to get that, in every other way, The Kicks is the exact opposite of Kickin’ It. And, to me, that’s beautiful.

[Watch The Kicks on Amazon Prime Video]

Jessica Jernigan is a writer, editor, and mom-about-town in a mid-sized Midwestern city. You can find her professional website here, but Instagram is where the cat photos are.