Birth of a New Televised Sport or Wipeout?
ABC’s Ultimate Surfer paddles into the mainstream
There comes in modern life when reality TV makes content from what you’d always hoped would by some otherworldly quality elude the small screen. It’s seemingly inevitable, the ever-expanding media process that scours the world looking for novelty, intriguing professions, and subcultures — and now surfing, once again.
While I surf regularly, I’m not a tremendous consumer of surf media other than the clips friends send, the odd surf movie, and the occasional Instagram scan. I’m just happy to get in the water as much as I can but watching the show set me on some questions at the heart of surfing. Could television and technology finally break surfing into the mainstream? And yet, how do you even relate the highly subjective experience of riding a wave to a TV audience?
Most surfers measure it in stoke. That feeling of gliding down and across a wave. It’s a visceral, maddeningly inexplicable that pours through your senses like nothing else. Everyone who’s had it knows exactly what I’m talking about, from the show’s competitors to the WSL Pros they hope to join.
Ultimate Surfer, on ABC and streaming on HULU, is a pretty standard elimination competition. 14 tanned and taut 20-somethings, (although there is a 35-year-old with the spirit of a stoked 15-year-old) ride an artificial wave of near perfection, chasing 100k and a couple of wild card spots on the World Surf League Championship Tour. They’re not really competing to be the ultimate surfer but more for the ultimate ride, a shot at winnings, potential sponsorships, and the hope of riding the best waves on the planet for a living.
It’s filmed Lemoore, CA, 84 nautical miles inland from the Pacific. The nearest surf is a barreling beach break off the pier in Cayucos. It works on summer south swells and offshore in any North wind and usually holds its shape up to 5 to 6 feet, according to my worn copy of Wave-Finder Surf Guide USA-Hawaii
Out amidst the fields of the Central Valley is the WSL Surf Ranch, an artificial wave and proto-stadium for what some fear as surfing’s future. To many purists, the massive pool is not a wave at all but an invasion of technology and artifice into one of the last great pursuits.
Artificial waves were for decades a sort of cold fusion of surfing. They promised a solution to crowded lineups and the variability of the weather. Millions have been spent over the years with the perfect wave pool always just a few years out.
The Surf Ranch has gone and done it. Early attempts simply forced water over an underwater shape that would create a standing wave much like a rapid (river surfing is its own thing entirely.) While there are aspects of riding a natural wave, it’s well short of what they’ve managed in central California.
The Surf Ranch uses a sliding foil that cuts through a massive pool and whips out a hollow, curling, moving wave that except for the chlorine, is on par with its saltwater cousins. The website claims the technology allows for finely tuned and custom waves, consistently and continuously with only 3 to 4-minute intervals as the water settles.
Is the perfect storm of technology, reality TV, and fledgling sports league commercialism set upon surfing — or is this just a repeat?
In the terrific surfing documentary, Riding Giants, Sam George, former tour competitor and surf journalist neatly describes two periods of surfing. The pre- and post-Gidget, era.
Gidget, a portmanteau of girl and midget was the title of a roman a clef written by Frederick Kohner about his daughter Kathy’s experiences surfing and hanging around the crowd at the legendary Malibu surf break, ground zero for the coming surf boom. With the release of a film adaptation in 1959 and the development of cheaper lightweight surfboards, the surfing population of Southern California went from about 5,000 to 2 to 3 million people in the span of 5 years.
From 1960 to 1965, the surfing lifestyle broke over the larger culture with the sounds of The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Dick Dale, among others, a spree of surf-sploitation films like Beach Blanket Bingo, Surf Party, and Ride the Wild Surf, and as a cultural trend even popped on the radar of New Journalist Tom Wolfe who documented the surf scene at Windansea Beach in his piece, “The Pump House Gang.” SoCal still rides this golden mid-century image of the West Coast with retro, throwback fury.
Ever since, the surf industry has grown and evolved in cycles as new technologies expanded the possibility of surfing, wet suits opened up colder waters, lighter and cheaper surfboards arrived, weather models predicted waves where no one had really looked, and now there are reliable, proven artificial waves. No longer limited to the coast has technology finally ended the lore of the search and the endless summer adventure?
Ultimate Surfer is surprisingly watchable. The wave action is well filmed, one of the advantages of the wave pool which offers angles and lighting not typically found on the WSL Tour. The viewer hangs out just over the shoulder of the rider, zooms above, and pulls ahead and down the wave for decent barrel shots. The show manages to capture the sort of close-in video that isn’t logistically possible on tour. It’s a far cry from the telephoto-on-a-tower format common at pro events.
It’s visually arresting even for someone used to watching waves. The consistency is almost hypnotic and I found myself newly compelled and watching in a different way every time. It feels like no small feat after so many years and so many YouTube reels.
As a reality TV show, there are the usual challenges and immunity and other gimmicks that, at times, seem needlessly complicated, but there are multiple hosts and commentators to reduce and recap the action in their best non-regional American English. And, naturally, they have the product and cross-promotional giveaways of lifestyle gear and even a series tie-in with the Bachelor reality TV juggernaut — and yet something strangely persists.
The cast is young, photogenic, and compelling; ranging from surf competition veterans who struck or partied out, semi-pros/part-time models, the promising local giving it one more shot, and even the daughter of a San Clemente surf legend.
There is the usual alliance-building and strategic voting. However, the drama isn’t all the grabbing or even irritating. As if the competitors are too genuinely stoked to ride an arguably perfect wave that few others have; they only put in the most basic improve-my-chances strategy.
Doubtless, the push producer gossiped about and tried to wind everyone up for the dramatic arc they’ve cooked up, hoping for fireworks and only getting self-aware Spicoli impressions from the competitors. It’s subtle if intentional but amusing nonetheless.
As the rest of the competitors watch the individual surf-offs from the lounge, kitted out like a Quiksilver/IKEA limited-collab collection, stuffed with retro board eye candy, the whole chance-of-a-lifetime-fight-of-our-lives focus breaks down. Moments of genuine awe and appreciation slip out when someone lands a sick maneuver or pulls deep into a barrel. It’s an amusingly touching reminder that despite all the intended cutthroat competition, drama, and intensity, it’s still all about the ride.
The show explains the basics of surfing pretty well: maneuvers, the challenges of certain sections of the wave, and other aspects of performance riding. In many ways, it is an interesting departure from the traditional surf media which focuses on sheer perfection rather than the surf reality most know. Forcing the competitors to teach someone how to surf reminded me of my own attempts with an ex-girlfriend. Getting into and up and across a wave takes an insane amount of practice and wipeouts. On tour they rarely fall, on the show, it’s a regular possibility on a wave that behaves like no other.
Surfing lives around a powerful image of itself, one that trades in elusive thrills, adventure, and a trite but true pursuit of a mythic perfect wave. And yet something disappears in the space between the surfing most of us know and the surfing we see posted online in pics and clips.
Surf culture and lore for decades occupied a space most people have only been thrown into in recent years. The only-the-best-edited-to-perfection photos were the stuff of surfing magazines since The Surfer’s Quarterly came out in 1962 thanks to lightweight 35mm cameras and waterproof housings. Decades before Instagram and GoPro, there was a saturation and not just the fear of missing out but proof that you were, long before the internet. Now, social media reminds you every few hours.
It’s the sort of dynamic that’s become too familiar when something quiet and real is grabbed by the demands of media and contorted to other ends. A feeling lost and dragged so far from its origins it becomes something else or even a parody of itself. I suppose it’s the fear people get when they find out television is being made of something dear. And yet, I’m always struck that I can find it again, even if I have to wake up and paddle out at dawn.
Ultimate Surfer could be viewed as a promo for a coming tide of Surf Ranch franchises and prime-time WSL events, wetting the beak of the great American consumer with what was once the preserve of the coasts, but if anything, it’s reminded me that wave riding can’t really be caught by a massive pool or even a camera.
While it’s expected for surfers to complain about yet another wave of commercialism, I watched Ultimate Surfer with an odd sense of amusement, that even in the attempt at making content of something seemingly beyond, hints of that essence, of the never quite captured stoke shone through, as if this thing we all love still eludes one of the better attempts to catch it.
Although, not the late summer runaway hit that perhaps the creators had hoped for, I feel an odd ambivalence. The lukewarm reception of the viewership might keep the lineup free of newly inspired surfers yet this amazing thing that has occupied so much of my life doesn’t even rate.
It remains to be seen if the WSL Surf Ranch and Ultimate Surfer will launch the next wave of mainstream surf popularity, but go ahead and stream it on HULU. You might just find some stoke and paddle out for the first wave of the rest of your life.
