Netflix made a show for teens. Surfing dads can’t get enough of it

By Karl Quinn

The young cast of Surviving Summer: (l-r) Joao Gabriel Marinho as Marlon Sousa, Savannah La Rain as Bodhi Mercer, Sky Katz as Summer Torres, Kai Lewins as Ari Gibson, and Lilliana Bowrey as Poppy Tetanui. Credit: Netflix

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A few days ago, Mark Watkins was standing on the front doorstep of his Dundas Street milk bar overlooking the back beach at Rye, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, surveying the scene as he often does. “And some of the local kids had a day off school, they’re all around 15 or 16 and some of them compete in surfing at state level,” he recalls. “And I looked down and I thought, ‘Wow, that is that TV show right there. A good-looking bunch of young kids, fit, healthy, surfing – that is exactly it’.”

The show he was thinking of was Surviving Summer, the second season of which dropped this week on Netflix. It follows a group of aspiring pro surfers in their mid-teens as they battle with their ambitions, their emotions, their raging hormones, and of course rival surfers, while striving to be the best they can.

But it’s their battles with the surf itself that have helped win over an audience well beyond the young adults the show’s makers had in mind – middle-aged surfing dads.

“Most surfing shows, you’ll have some good-looking person standing on some beach, and then they’ll go to some random beach hundreds of kilometres away and show them pretend to be surfing, and it just doesn’t look authentic,” says Watkins, a 60-year-old grandfather who has been surfing since he was about 10. “Whereas what they’ve done in this show seems to be pretty good. You go, ‘Oh, I know that spot’. And it looks like all the actors can surf a little bit too, which helps, it makes it seem a bit more seamless.”

Mark Watkins, who runs the Dundas Street milk bar in Rye and rates Surviving Summer for its depiction of surf culture.Credit: Joe Armao

Leading man Kai Lewins does a lot of his own board work, and Liliana Bowrey does all of hers, while young Brazilian actor Joao Gabriel Marinho is thoroughly convincing as a representative of the brash and talented crop of South Americans who have put their own mark on the sport over the past decade.

“Obviously, they get some pros to do some of the surfing,” notes Watkins, and he’s correct, “but it’s pretty seamless, it’s pretty authentic. That’s our local beach, that’s some locals surfing, and it’s the local surf break.”

Surviving Summer centres on the kids of Shorehaven, a fictional town on the Australian coast. To eagle-eyed habitués of the Great Ocean Road west of Melbourne, some of the locations might be immediately recognisable: Fairhaven, Anglesea, Torquay, Bell’s Beach, Airey’s Inlet, Lorne. But in season two, the action takes the young cast further afield, as far north as Byron Bay, as the level of competition steps up.

The show was created by producer Jo Werner – who counts The Newsreader, Secret City and Clickbait among her other credits – and writer Joshua Mapleston.

“We had worked together on Dance Academy and another tween show, Ready For This, both really great aspirational kids’ shows,” says Mapleston. “We were looking for another project to work on together and Jo had the initial germ of an idea of an American girl (played by Sky Katz) landing in a small Aussie surfing town, and the conversation kind of spiralled from there.”

By late 2019, Mapleston had the bones of a pilot, and Netflix had expressed interest. He had been living in Los Angeles, but COVID sent him, his wife and their young daughter back home to develop the project.

“I was working mostly from my wife’s childhood bedroom in a house in Dromana,” he says. “We were within the ring of steel, so we barely left the house in 2020. We could just see a glimpse of ocean from the window, but we couldn’t see any waves because we’re on the bay side. For a show about the great outdoors and being in the ocean and hanging out with your best friends, it was not perhaps the most conducive environment.”

From the outset, though, he was determined that the show have the ring of authenticity. Before he began writing in earnest, he started talking “to a lot of young, up-and-coming surfers, professional surfers who’d kind of been through the wringer, and started collecting those stories. And the more we talked to people, the more I was really conscious of honouring surf culture, and getting it right. That was always front of mind – we have to get the surfing right, we have to do this properly.”

For Russ Logan, a bricklayer from Flinders who has surfed all around Australia and in Indonesia – “I was never professional,” he hastens to add, “that’s a whole other level” – the series represents a welcome recasting of surf culture that stands in contrast to other screen versions such as Puberty Blues and Barons.

“I just think in general surfing is a pretty good lifestyle,” he says. “The cliched side of it is the drugs, girls, partying sort of thing.” It can be that too, of course. But, he adds, “if you want to stay away from all that sort of ‘bad’ stuff and just lead a good healthy lifestyle, getting out in the water, it’s good, it’s healthy for you.”

Poppy Tetanui (Lilliana Bowrey) and Marlon Sousa (Joao Gabriel Marinho) do their own surfing in the show.Credit: Netflix

That’s the version of surf culture Surviving Summer presents. Its young protagonists all have ambitions to turn pro, to make a living or develop a social media following out of the thing they love and have grown up doing. Sure, they like to party too, but that has to fit around the training, the diet, the early morning rides, the long drives to competitions.

“It has a good mixture of drama and surfing in it,” says Logan. “It shows a pretty good mixture of different things going on with the young kids, a bit of anxiety, a bit of this and a bit of that. But I also think the surfing side of it is really good.”

It’s for others to judge how well the show nails that aspect, says Mapleston, but with around one-third of each 30-minute episode spent in the water, it’s certainly not for lack of trying.

That it seems to have landed as a show that appeals to kids and at least some parents is a bonus, though not entirely accidental, he adds.

“The more we talked to surfers the more it became clear how much families drive surfing culture,” Mapleston says. “Because part of that culture is about passing knowledge and skills on from one generation to another, I really started to think about it as a family show from a fairly early stage. And that’s almost a genre that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Kai Lewins cuts loose in season two.Credit: Netflix

As for the surf dads, he knows it’s struck a chord because of the way they seek him out to talk about it.

“They can’t help but comment on the surf conditions. They’ll say, ‘Why did you shoot those crap waves in episode six?’ And I’m going, ‘Look, we had six weeks to do the show; sorry, but we couldn’t wait six months for the perfect break’.

“When they’re slagging off the surf conditions in certain episodes to me,” he says, “I know they’re taking it seriously.”

Surviving Summer season two is on Netflix now.

Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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