You’ve just achieved your lifelong dream. Now what?
This is Naomi Osaka’s dilemma, and she’s only 23. Though she has broken professional tennis records and started important conversations about identity, it is difficult to say she’s content.
This eponymous three-part series dives into this discomfort, and is equal parts talent show and coming-of-age tale. Or put another way, bingeworthy.
Part 1, “Rise”, introduces our soft-spoken, dutiful superstar. We learn about her childhood apart; her desire to win for family and home-country of Japan; her extraordinary prowess on the court—and her inability to deal with fame. Home movies, grainy and muted, set the tone from the start. This life is crisp, but soft; this life is not automatic movement, but focused motion.
Part 1 has us feeling sympathy for our young champion. Surprisingly vulnerable narration shares the pressure she feels to do right by just about everyone. And lucky for everyone, Part 2, “ Championship Mentality”, provides breathing room. Naomi talks about her talents beyond tennis. Fashion? Well, she has sketched clothing for years, dreaming about wearing something other than sports clothing all the time . . . In this part, we see Naomi step off the court to reconnect with her curiosity and her family—and in her doing so, we see radiating positivity.
This of course thickens the plot. Watching Naomi realize that fulfillment may exist outside of tennis is as haunting and exciting to us as it is to her. And not only does this make it easier to root for her, it makes it painful to watch how others glom onto her fame at the cost of her discomfort. The series does not hide these moments.
As you’d guess, Part 3, the “New Blueprint”, shows Naomi exploring this tension and following her inclinations. We learn about her Haitian father and Japanese mother; about her upbringing; about her desire to create conversations about identity, race, nationality, and more in a world that continues to navigate its own type of conversations.
Watching Naomi crush (or fail) at tennis is enveloping enough, but this series shines at stepping on and off the court at just the right times. In contextualizing the success of a young, still-active, still-maturing superstar, it is a special story. If this series has shown us anything, it has shown us how there are molds yet to be broken, and difficulties to be surmounted, if only one considers the possibility of doing it.