We Watched Make Or Break Season 2 So You May Or May Not Have To

Make Or Break’s winning formula of unfettered access to the world’s top surfers combined with a non-endemic storytelling bent was always going make for compelling coverage of the 2022 Championship Tour season, the most dramatic in recent memory. 

After the first season followed the Covid-clipped, largely Australia-based 2021 Tour, 2022’s full schedule gave us the first-ever identical women’s and men’s stops, the mid-season cut, the return of Portugal, J-Bay and Tahiti after a brief hiatus, and the return of G-Land after a much longer one. 

As Stab commenter Swampdad remarked last year in a nice mix of anachronism and swears on Buck’s review of Season 1: “It’s a shame they have to start with Season 1. Between Kelly at Pipe, the mid-year-kerfuffle, and Gabby’s Return, Season 2 is going to be pretty hard to fuck up.”

Ep 1 opens with Kelly’s win at the Billabong Pipeline Pro, which felt a bit like it happened in a separate season, or a stand-alone major like tennis or golf. For all the physiological improbabilities, what stands out just how staggeringly beautiful the surf looked. As moments of wild chance are matched by displays of incredible skill, we’re rendered more emotional than any victory in surf history. We follow Kelly home. For how unrelatable perfect Pipe is, his beachfront house seems very… suburban. He ponders whether to have a sauna now and a smoothie later, or other way around? The kitchen units are incredibly modest, almost as if an error by the set designer. Kelly’s insights pose almost as many questions as they answer. How can you prove to yourself that you don’t need to prove anything to yourself? Is being an anomaly, an outlier, actually good? We’ve been twitching at clues he might not be around much longer for well over a decade. He may not look or surf his 50 years, but his self-appraisals grow ever more rueful. Later in the series, he wonders, “I don’t know if part of my brain thinks I should have quit after Pipe.”  

Make Or Break maintains its candid focus on the athletes and their relationships throughout. We don’t learn much about the locations, and are privy to very little insight, if any, as to how each wave should be surfed. There’s precious little on heat tactics or technical surfing specifics. Therein lie the strengths of Box To Box’s brand of storytelling: not letting the sport get in the way of the sports documentary, knowing what to leave out. We get the full gore of the sausage being made, without having to actually eat it. Meanwhile, the in-heat action is lightly lubed, scoring simplified in the edit, often by the surfer falling on a last turn. Sound design cranks spray noises on big turns, there’s a board airing to flats effect, even a bogged rail/wipeout noise, a tight commentator overdub.

As with Season 1, we don’t get much Carissa. Is she too nice for compelling content? Not up for the full scrutiny of a fly-on-the-wall crew? We can but speculate, but if Tati was wounded by 2021’s Finals day defeat, as examined in Ep 2, Carissa’s 2022 capitulation from the no.1 spot would presumably require much more reconciliation. The men feature more as storylines, partly due to outnumbering the women, and partly due to the women’s tour appearing shorter on major rivalries, or maybe the women being less keen to go on record about them. Or both. Weston-Webb’s episode deals with her recovery from the trauma of the previous season’s Finals defeat, a bit of background on the drop in beef with Moana Jones-Wong. Her rivals are slightly coded in praising her ‘grit’ or ‘intensity’, rather than her surfing. If not quite damning her with faint praise, the punches still feel a bit pulled. 

For Ep 3 we follow the Wrights at Bells for a significant gear change from whether or not an athlete meets this or that goal or how important success is to them, as a fuller picture unfolds. Owen explains the serious health struggles his dad Rob is undergoing, the anguish his mum Fiona experienced during his head injury, which his recovery from has been far from straightforward. Tyler has never rung the Bell before, and we trace her quest for victory, supported by her partner Lilli, following up from her season 1 travails. A long family history with Bells — the clan living in their camper in the car park as groms — anchors their story, with Rob central to their surfing ascent. Owen’s struggles to make the cut offer a different texture, a narrative foil for the triumphs and scaling of heights — the question of how to manage the decline. It’s a close run thing, and at the moment of defeat at Margaret’s when his warm words to Matt McGillivray, whom he was ultimately up against for the chop, demonstrate his class. 

In ep 5, Jack Robinson feels like the most unusual surfer seen on tour for a while, an entirely different animal. There’s something endearing in the way his voice register occasionally undulates to high pitched, enhancing his sense of earnestness. He seems unguarded as he offers something genuinely insightful, even profound, rather than a soundbite that’s been rehearsed. He seems open to meeting most topics with a straight answer, explaining that he’s asked his dad to stay away from events. He senses this is his time. “Brazilians have had their run for a while, but it’s a changing of the guard, it’s about me.” It somehow doesn’t seem conceited. His G-Land success, notably the close judging call over Medina in the final, ratchets up the tension for the post-cut back end of the season.   

Who knew the OC Derby was such a cauldron of sporting hostility? As Ep 6 delves into the highly entertaining Colapinto/Igarashi rivalry, Kanoa explains the difference between HB and San Clemente: “They drive golf carts, we ride skateboards.” It probably wouldn’t make for the scariest of stadium chants. But there really is little love lost between the pair, making for a fascinating dynamic with coach to both, Tom Whitaker, literally in the middle. A tidy bit of camerawork pulls the shot wider from a frame of Tom and Griff, to the full awkward threesome with Kanoa at his other flank. When the pair surf against each other, Whits somehow manages to maintain sympathy to opposing causes simultaneously; an emotional pliability that presumably could only ever work on the basis of total trust. The Griff Kanoa dynamic gives some of the most enjoyable moments of the entire series, much closer to overt dislike or hostility than simple sporting beef. It’s not quite “Crush his perfect little world” AI/Kelly levels, but there are some great one-liners. Kanoa: “I guess I’ve always been one step ahead of him.” Griff: “He would always beat me… but now I’m a better surfer than him.” Yes please.

Brief but relatively frequent visits to the judging tower reveal who wields ultimate power on tour. 2022’s controversies are narrated by the real-time surfers’ reactions to them. Generally, it’s Brazilians feeling ripped off after close calls in the dying seconds of heats, notably the G-Land and El Salvador finals, that could easily have gone the other way. As Italo is knocked by Jack at Bells by a fraction of a point, the camera follows him from a locker room board venting all the way as he runs up the judges. Not quite the restaurant steadycam scene from Goodfellas, but it is a delicious bit of voyeurism. “Shall we do this without the media circus?” says head judge Pritamo Ahrendt underlining just how rare a glimpse inside the inner sanctum this is. 

Ep 7 frames Italo’s attempts to recapture his 2019 mojo and brings us the brilliant Marcos Casteluber, surely the busiest man in showbiz. In Marcos’ breathlessly hectic brief as manager/filmer/coach/confidant, whatever he gets paid, he’s surely worth every cent. A Championship Tour Swiss Army knife, we see him peeling spuds at J-Bay, fluffing rice in California, filming heats, coaching, on the phone to Italo’s mum outside a hospital. At Trestles, he’s holding off the crowd scrum with his elbows, releases to quickly snap a couple on his phone, before re-establishing the protective ring. But for all the frantic, frenetic energy, it’s a rare moment of quiet that reveals the most; as Italo lies prostrate with back pain inside the medical room at J-Bay, a moment of tenderness as Marcos gives him a soft kiss on the back of the head. Strip back the money, fame, jewellery, those twin imposters victory and defeat, and the only meaningful measure of success surely comes down to the richness of real human relationships. Make Or Break delivers them in spades.

As the Finals day climax goes behind Gilmore’s historic 8th World Title, and Filipe’s first, we get Steph more candid than we’ve ever seen her. “She’s just a competitive bitch,” chuckles partner Harry as he grinds coffee beans before the showdown. “I can’t wait to see the looks on the other girls’ faces as she steamrolls them.” Her Finals days heroics are the performance of the entire year, not in the epic surf of Slater’s Pipe win, but for the relentlessness. Her surfing was on an entirely different level from any of the other finalists. And while we learn Kelly’s win may have brought him closer to calling it a day, Steph reflects that she’s found something new to spur herself on, that the fire is far from out. “I’d be stoked if she won 11… or 12,” offers Slater, with a straight face. Meanwhile, Filipe’s coronation is made just slightly easier by Italo seemingly expending too much of his emotional self settling a pointless pre-cut Bells score with Jack, before the actual business of surfing for the world title comes about. If Tour can be this entertaining without major Medina/Florence participation, and generally less than epic surf (aside from Pipe and J-Bay), you can’t help but get more than a bit excited for what 2023 has in store. On which count, Make Or Break, once again, has more than delivered.