Game, Set, Watch
How Netflix's Break Point makes tennis more fun and accessible
Tennis is weird.
What other sport emphasizes manners this much?
What other sport’s top tournament demands players wear all white, down to all but one centimeter of their underwear?
What other sport’s athletes are sponsored by preppy brands like Hugo Boss, Original Penguin, and Lacoste?
What other sport requires athletes to travel across six continents year round while competing on three different playing surfaces?
What other sport is simultaneously obsessed with tradition and decorum and full of players furiously smashing their equipment?
I really thought Challengers was exaggerating all of this stuff for dramatic effect. After binging two seasons of Break Point on Netflix, I believe that tennis is stranger than fiction.
Formula One: Drive to Survive made F1 racing irresistible by blending reality TV drama with thrilling race recaps. It used behind-the-scenes access, masterful editing, and character-driven storytelling to demystify F1's quirks and bring the sport to a new audience. After the runaway success of Drive to Survive, creators James Gay-Rees and Paul Martin of Box to Box Films were clearly told: “do that, but for tennis.”
The result was Break Point, which accomplishes their objective with the ferocity and finesse of a Rafa Nadal forehand.
This show cuts through tennis's Byzantine scoring and stuffy British aesthetics to the reveal the fierce competition, jaw-dropping finesse, and captivating storylines undergirding the sport. While the heavily edited tournament recaps may resemble an actual tennis match about as much as a Sour Patch Kid resembles a strawberry, the creators wisely recognize that sometimes we all want candy.
This show doesn’t just give tennis the production value of an NFL Films highlight reel, however. It keeps us engaged by giving us characters to love and hate and storylines to follow over the long run. It also gives tennis newbies like me knowledgeable tour guides to decipher the stakes and lore in the form of Maria Sharapova, Andy Roddick, and Serena Williams’s coach Patrick Mouratoglou.
Each episode focuses on a specific tournament, grounding us in the stakes before following one or two players' arcs through the event. This format works better in some episodes than others, but when it does, it’s as satisfying as sipping sangria outside on a hot day.
How can you not love Ons Jabeur, the Tunisian phenom and the first Arab woman to reach a Grand Slam final, shattering expectations with every match? Her joyful attitude and wholesome relationship with her husband—her athletic trainer and biggest cheerleader—are infectious. By the time she teams up with Serena Williams, you’re ready to thrust a foam finger skyward and yell “ONWARD, ONS!'“ at the top of your lungs.
Similarly, it’s hard to not root for Frances Tiafoe, the son of Sierra Leonean immigrants, who started playing tennis because his father worked maintenance at a tennis center in Maryland. His game is athletic and powerful, and he consistently sports the best outfits of any male player. In a sport often marked by stoic composure, Tiafoe brings emotion, energizes the crowd, and celebrates his wins with unapologetic joy. Unlike many of the male players, Tiafoe doesn’t come across as a selfish brat.
The same can’t be said of Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas, who describes opponent Nick Kyrgios as “more of an NBA-type player” who doesn’t belong a gentlemen’s game like tennis. Cringey comments like this gave me new empathy for the bullshit that Black players like the Williams sisters, Frances Tiafoe, and Coco Gauff have had to face in a sport this white. They also made me wonder how the mens tennis world would react to an athlete who looked, played, and talked trash like Michael Jordan or Draymond Green. Would such an athlete be heralded as a hero revolutionizing the sport or branded as a villain for scuffing its posh, glossy exterior? How careful does Tiafoe have to be about all this?
As I pondered these questions I realized that this show doubles as an anthropological study of tennis players. Few of these people had what you could describe as a normal upbringing. Maria Sakkari, Casper Ruud, and Taylor Fritz, are all children of professional tennis players. Jessica Pegula is the daughter of the billionaire owners of the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bills. Fritz’s great grandmother started what would become Macy’s Department Stores. While tennis matches may be defined by individual brilliance, watching Break Point, makes you wonder if talent alone is ever enough to break into a world as privileged and insular as professional tennis.
Break Point gets you invested in the players on tour, which allows you to appreciate what it takes to win at such a cardio-intensive form of chess. The nuances of the sport allow for countless styles of tennis, with no single strategy guaranteeing victory. One of the show’s most satisfying elements is its exploration of the diverse playstyles shaping modern tennis.
Ons Jabeur’s style is defined by finesse and flair, with drop shots and diabolical slices that leave opponents scrambling. In contrast, Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka plays like a Viking Valkyrie, smashing her opponents into submission with a fiery game that sometimes burns too hot. Both women contrast sharply with Polish phenom Iga Swiatek, whose icy calm under pressure, patience, and strategic savvy give her an edge in tough matches.
For me, no player is a more compelling case study than the mercurial Australian Nick Kyrgios.
Nearly everything about Kyrgios goes against the grain of how a tennis player should look, act, and play. In an oppressively white sport, here is a half-Malaysian kid who wears backward hats and NBA jerseys. Unlike most players who compete year-round, Kyrgios plays part-time.
His height and athleticism let him cover the court with ease. He’s got an unstoppable serve plus a bandolier of cheeky shots—no-looks, tweeners, and lobs—that baffle opponents. He will even mix in an unconventional underarm serve to keep you guessing.
Yet despite his undeniable talent, Kyrgios is also his own worst enemy. His passion makes him volatile and inconsistent. He lashes out at the crowd for talking during his serve, chews out umpires over bad calls, and descends into a racket-smashing fury that leaves his family, manager, and girlfriend trembling.
This is what makes him so eminently watchable—you just never know which Nick Kyrgios you’re going to get. He’s as likely to lose focus or blow up at someone as he is to calmly place the ball where no one could reach it short of teleporting.
In the first episode, he handily wins a first-round match at the Australian Open before falling to Daniil Medvedev’s more disciplined, dispassionate approach to tennis. Then he gets a delightful second act by teaming up with his childhood friend and fellow lanky Aussie-Greek, Thanasi Kokkinakis, to play doubles. Dubbed “The Special K’s” or “The Cereal Killers” by Australian media, Kyrgios and Kokkinakis plow through their competition with height, athleticism, and lobs, drop shots, and booming forehands.
Their Cinderella story run through the Australian Open was one of my favorite sequences. They make tennis fun again, which is the whole point of this show. By knowing what to focus on and what to cut out, you can make a stuffy sport with weird scoring feel like must-see TV.
The secret: focus on the people, not the ball.
What’s fascinating about watching these elite players up close is how even top 10 players feel profoundly inadequate for most of their careers.
“For every Grand Slam winner, there are 127 losers stewing over what could have been,” Miles Surrey writes in The Ringer. Tennis constantly tells players they’re not good enough—even a Grand Slam victory fades under the weight of the next disappointment.
The season is non-stop and exhausting, spanning the entire year and multiple continents. Life on the road is lonely. If you get injured or take time off, a springy 19-year-old phenom will replace you. Your ranking is never safe.
The better you get, the more likely you’ll encounter one of tennis’s “final bosses.” The top men’s players on Break Point are almost guaranteed to face generational talents like Nadal or Djokovic in the semis or finals. Playing one of these titans requires throwing everything you have at them just to survive, let alone win.
Break Point excels at showcasing how individual sports like this are particularly tough psychologically. This is a sport where mental toughness often matters more than physical excellence or strategic brilliance. Players bear all the responsibility for their successes or failures. The pressure is unrelenting and only increases the higher up you climb on the mountain. This likely explains many of the on and off-court meltdowns we see. The longer you watch, the more you see how beneath the prestige of Wimbledon and the opulence of Indian Wells, tennis remains a remarkably cruel and isolating sport.
Despite the luxurious editing and glossy production value, this series is far from perfect.
The first season is stronger than the abridged second one, which devotes nearly an entire episode to basking in its impact on tennis before belaboring the “Netflix curse”—the reality that some players from season one were bound to get injured or miss tournaments.
Some episodes hype up the “this will be my year” ambitions of a young upstart, only to pivot when they’re quickly dismantled by Rafa Nadal, who the camera captures shadow boxing and warming up behind his opponent with the gravity of a circling Great White Shark. Despite not being one of the dozen players profiled, Nadal shines here as the Maximus of the tennis coliseum, sliding across clay courts and winning over the crowd with tenacity and topspin.
Break Point is also clearly targeted at newbies to the tennis world, not hard-core fans. Such fans objected to a season 1 episode focusing on Taylor Fritz’s ankle injury at Indian Wells but leaving out Rafael Nadal’s rib stress fracture, which he sustained in the semis against Carlos Alcaraz before losing to Fritz in the final.
Even bandwagon fans like me spat out their La Croix when the show casually reveals that Taylor Fritz had a child at 19 with another tennis player. Why wasn’t this baby mama drama mentioned before his showdown with Nadal at Indian Wells? It’s the same reason why they didn’t mention Ajla Tomljanović dating Nick Kyrgios before her onscreen romance with Euro-bro Matteo Berrettini: documentaries must carve away a lot of ice to reveal the swan beneath.
Despite its flaws, this is a very satisfying sports docuseries to watch because of how well it sets up the gravity of this world. Both the players profiled and the greats featured indirectly like Nadal, Williams, and Djokavic leave a lasting impression on you as a viewer. It’s also an engrossing snapshot of a moment in the sports’ history, capturing the end of the Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams era alongside the rise of Francis Tiafoe and Coco Gauff, the future of American tennis.
This kind of myth-making matters for any sport, but especially tennis, which needs all the help it can get right now. At Wimbledon this year Novak Djokovic warned that despite being the king of racket sports, tennis must become more affordable and accessible or else risk being replaced by padel and pickleball. This isn’t an empty threat. As of the writing of this article, 10% of the tennis courts in the US have already been converted to pickleball courts.
I might be part of the problem there. But I’m also in a racket sports-curious phase, as evidenced by my infatuation with Challengers and now this show. In that spirit I’m happy to report that Break Point smashes tennis stereotypes as effectively as Nick Kyrgios smashes tennis rackets.
So I was saddened to learn that Netflix did not renew this fun series for a third season. This news made me realize that if I want to watch more high-level tennis it might have to be in person, maybe when the Laver Cup comes to the Chase Center next year. That I’m even considering seeking out live tennis speaks volumes and is the real triumph of Break Point: turning tennis from a curious spectacle into something worth rooting for.
Tennis really is weird, but I think it’s my kind of weird.