Australia is made up of convicts, sent here when other countries didn’t know what to do with their delinquents: Summer, a bratty New York teenager, is just one of our more modern criminal imports.
Netflix’s new coming-of-age series Surviving Summer drops on the service this June 3, starring America’s Got Talent competitor Sky Katz as Summer Torres. She’s been kicked out of multiple exclusive private schools, and is even kinda proud of it in the trailer below.
To straighten her out, her family ships her off to Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, where a dorkily optimistic host family welcomes her at the dinky airport. She’s not into surfing at first, which her new adoptive sister says is “all anyone talks about in this town”.
Whether it’s the empowering, grounding feeling of taking to the waves or just the topless young guys that attracts Summer to her new fave sport, she soon finds a community, and begins to love her new home. “Let’s smoke ’em”, one wetsuit-wearing lad says to cheer on the gang of grommets.
Watching some of the boys battle in the sand, Summer asks her new friend Poppy (Lilliana Bowrey) whether this is “some mystical surf ritual I don’t know about, or a stupid boy fight?” The answer is the latter.
Surviving Summer should keep tweens and teens entertained with its sunny setting and inter-continental relationship drama, especially appealing to any young surfers looking for role models out on the waves.
It’s always exciting to see a new show making the most of Australia’s gorgeous coastal settings. For a slightly more adult alternative, we can recommend the ABC’s retro series Barons, reviewed here by Travis Johnson.
