Break Point, Netflix, review: tennis head or not, you’ll be riveted

The Netflix sporting documentary series Drive to Survive managed to make Formula 1 – to me the most contrived, dull "sport" ever devised – into gripping viewing. The film-makers, a company called Box-to-Box, realised that a good story, sporting or otherwise, depends on good characters. 

As such, Drive to Survive got the drivers and team heads to give frank, extended interviews, which they wove through the season’s races together with behind-the-scenes footage and lots of swearing. It was a podium finish – Drive to Survive has drummed up so much new interest in motor racing that, it’s been said, it has saved F1.

As night follows ratings success therefore, Drive to Survive’s winning blueprint is now being retrofitted to other sports, starting with tennis. Break Point (Netflix), a new 10-part documentary series (five episodes now; five more to come in June) follows a group of top tennis players on and off court across a year on the ATP (men’s) and WTA (women’s) tours. Each episode focusses on a particular player, trailing them as they suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous, fuzzy-balled fortune.

Break Point is, in the main, great, though it takes some time to find its rhythm. There’s the initial problem of where to pitch it – some viewers will be tennis heads, others won’t know their baseline from their tramline. Break Point looks to accommodate them all but this does lead to some egg-sucking grandma explanations. There’s also the inherent snag of trying to create excitement about the outcome of tournaments that have already taken place.

Like a canny tennis player, however, Break Point turns its most obvious weakness in to a strength. For whatever reasons, the biggest stars of the game – Nadal, Djokovic, Federer, Murray, even the new poster-boy Carlos Alcaraz – are featured only in passing. It means that most viewers will begin each episode thinking, "Who’s that?"

Yet by concentrating on players we don’t know – Maria Sakkari, Taylor Fritz, Matteo Berrettini – Break Point has secured extensive access and in addition, it can make nobodies somebodies, painting its character portraits on a blank canvas. After five seasons of Drive to Survive the film-makers know how to paint a character portrait: the editing in Break Point is so accomplished, the links between a player revealing their state of mind and then manifesting that state on court so adroit, that you’ll be rooting for people whose names you couldn’t spell within 20 minutes of having met them.

And they need your support, because my goodness, it’s not easy: hitting a yellow ball for a living turns out to be the most scalding self-reckoning imaginable. Out there on court you’re on your own. For the rest of us armchair GOATs, the drama behind the drama is riveting theatre.