Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Break Point’ Season 2 on Netflix, Where Top Tennis Pros Deal With “The Netflix Curse”

Last year, Netflix adapted the wildly-successful Drive To Survive formula to professional tennis, bringing us into the lives and drives of some of the sport’s rising stars. Break Point is back for a second season, and it’s looking to build on the success of the first. Some of Season 1’s top stars return, but there’s some fresh faces in the mix for Season 2.

BREAK POINT SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A sweeping shot of empty seats in a large tennis stadium. Stirring music with a thumping beat. A montage of players preparing to compete. “This is where stars are born,” a voice intones, “where you’re playing for tennis immortality.” Quick-cuts display the globe-spanning venues that players will visit on tour. Players each speak of their singular drive to be the world’s best. It’s a hype reel, and it’s a good one. We then jump into a fourth-wall-breaking scene, with some of Season 1’s participants attending a Netflix press event for that season’s release.

The Gist: Much like Season 1, Break Point is set to follow the 2023 season, with a mixture of in-match footage and off-the-court portrayals of a varied set of big names from the tennis world–top players like Nick Kyrgios, Coco Gauff, Frances Tiafoe and Aryna Sabalenka, along with rising stars like Holger Rune. We’ll see the now-completed season as it unfolds, getting to know the players as they fight to be the world’s best.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Well, if you’ve seen Season 1 of Break Point, nothing’s changing here. If you haven’t, it’s very purposefully a re-skin of Drive To Survive, Netflix’s goliath Formula One racing reality show.

Our Take: It can be hard to make the cameras disappear when filming a reality show–to make the viewer feel like they’re witnessing real life as it happens without acknowledging the fact that a show is being made. In the first episode of Break Point’s second season–titled “the Curse”–the filmmakers smash right through that fourth wall, acknowledging the added pressures that the show has introduced into the already-heavily pressured lives of these top-flight athletes.

This “curse” talk begins with the 2023 Australian Open, an event where several of the participants in Break Point Season 1 were bounced unexpectedly early, and others didn’t even make it to Melbourne on account of injuries. We see top players like Casper Ruud and Ons Jabeur suffer upset losses, and a montage of chatter from commentators about “the Netflix Curse”. After some of the early failures by fellow players, Greek player Maria Sakkari seems baffled when pressed by the media about the potential for a curse, brushing it off. “If you let these thoughts and this energy affect you, that’s when bad luck comes.”

Still, it seems to weigh on players.

“If you’re one of the players who was in Season 1,” tennis broadcaster and former player Prakash Amritraj notes, “and all of a sudden all of the others are losing, and everyone’s in your ear about the Netflix Curse, the Netflix Curse, it could subconsciously get into your head.”

The show doesn’t shy away from the onus of having cursed the players it features–in fact, it heartily embraces it, seeing it as a fresh storyline to kick off the second season. It’s a bit cheeky of the filmmakers to do so, but it’s admittedly effective. At the top levels of sport, an athlete’s mental state is everything, and it’s not a huge stretch to imagine the creeping suggestion of a curse affecting them.

Contrasted against this is the steely cool of Aryna Sabalenka, who struggled through a personally-difficult 2022 season that included the death of her father. Every point she loses in the Australian Open offers a chance for curse talk to enter the equation, but she closes it all out and wins the women’s side of the tournament, her first major singles title. It’s a clever framing–the show teases a curse, then focuses hard on the athlete who openly defies it, and sets her up to be one of the biggest stars of Season 2.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: A significant portion of the back end of the first episode of the season focuses on Sabalenka’s Australian Open final win over Russia Elena Rybakina, a solid chunk of well-edited highlights that makes clear this show isn’t letting the on-court action take a back seat to off-court drama. Sabalenka prevails, and sobs in a phone call with her mother before celebrating with her trainers. As the episode ends, she hoists the Australian Open trophy and muses to the camera, “what fucking Netflix Curse?”

Sleeper Star: Much as in the first season, the brash Kyrgios plays a major role in Season 2. Aryna Sabalenka’s storyline is uniquely compelling, as the 25-year-old Belarusian player came under increasing pressure during the season to address geopolitical issues, eventually denouncing her country’s role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine despite purported close ties to the Belarusian president Lukashenko. Really, the whole point of Break Point is to make new stars–a “what if we made the whole plane out of the black box?” of sleeper stars.

Most Pilot-y Line: “There is rarely a group more superstitious than athletes,” one commentator notes during the disastrous-for-Break-Point-participants Australian Open, “but perhaps in this instance that superstition is justified.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re a diehard tennis fan, Break Point has plenty of behind-the-scenes action to offer. If you’re a newbie to the sport, it’s the perfect introduction.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.