The first season of Surviving Summer, the Netflix Original YA series created by Josh Mapleston and Joanna Werner, began as a fun summer romp with teens balancing romance and competitive surfing. Summer Torres (Sky Katz) was sent to live in Australia after being kicked out of school in the U.S. where she made close friends and fell in love with surfing and Ari (Kai Lewins). But now that summer’s come again, Surviving Summer Season 2 buckles under the weight of multiple mediocre love triangles and too little surfing.
Summer returns to Australia to surprise her friends Bhodi (Savannah La Rain), Marlon (João Marinho), Poppi (Lilliana Bowrey), and Ari by trying out for the state surfing team and winning Ari’s heart over again, but when she gets there, the first thing she finds is Wren (Annabel Wolfe), Ari’s new girlfriend. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that Summer has been quite derelict in keeping up with her friends over the past year. Of course, Wren is completely jealous of and intimidated by Summer, so they clash instantaneously. Meanwhile, her brooding brother Bax (Josh Macqueen) is also vying for a spot on the team, which is coached by their older sister, Elo (Olympia Valance). The other members of the group are all vying for spots on the surfing team and for each others’ hearts the whole season long.
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This is all pretty standard fare for a teen drama, but in Surviving Summer Season 2, the weight of too many characters burdens the show. The eight 30-minute episodes are the perfect length for the show, but with eight friends, a coach, multiple sets of parents and siblings, and a host of one-off characters, the plotlines are many, and none of them are as deep as the previous season. Non-romantic relationships between characters were just as important as the romantic ones in the first season, and the second season makes some of those characters feel abrasively superfluous with how little screen time they get and how quickly their plots have to be rushed through when they do appear.
The sheer number of characters and issues they’re dealing with also means that it’s difficult to forge a connection to any given relationship for most of the way through. There are some relationships among the main characters that are easy to root for, but mostly because they stand in contrast to some of the more annoying and problematic relationships, rather than because there is any kind of emotional depth or romantic bond forged on-screen all season-long. The side characters’ plots are more straightforward and easy to enjoy, but get lost in the sheer number of things going on, especially in the middle of the season.
You obviously come to a teen drama for the romance and mess, but you would hope a show about surfers would spend more time showing them surfing. The first season conditioned its audience to expect a surf competition nearly every episode, or at least scenes of the crew practicing or learning. More episodes in Surviving Summer Season 2 seem to skip over the surfing than not, or at least only show surfing for a brief scene. It’s not nearly as full of exciting surf moments or even drama revolving around the surfing side of the plot as the show has the capacity for. Where the first season may have gone too heavy on showing the same surfing moves over and over in competitions, this season feels like an over-correction where it could have used just a little more surfing during the middle episodes.
Fortunately, Surviving Summer Season 2 emerges from its middle-episode morass in the final stretch, as the surfing returns and all of the plots and relationships get to play out at the same time. This is by far the most exciting part of the season. It’s a shame this level of excitement and connection couldn’t go on throughout the whole season. By the end, the enthusiasm for this show was right back to Season 1 levels.
While some of the relationship stuff is middling throughout the bulk of the season, the show emerges as one of few teen dramas that don’t attempt to hit queerness over the head with a hammer. It also addresses how teens confront racism, as well as how several different characters own up to their mistakes on a regular basis. Their level of communication as a group is far more mature than average and makes the final episodes of the season quite endearing compared to the middle stages.
While the middle of Surviving Summer Season 2 is weighed down by too many characters and too little surfing, there’s enough drama to keep things going until it all comes together in the end.
Surviving Summer Season 2 is streaming on Netflix September 15th.
