Make It Or Break It: Falling Off the Beam

Make It Or Break It:
"Pilot"

I love gymnastics. I also tend to love ABC Family original shows (The Secret Life of the American Teenager being the glaring exception to that). So, therefore, I should love Make It Or Break It, an ABC Family original show about gymnastics, right? Mmm, not so much. Turns out, I kind of hated it. For both its complete lack of knowledge about gymnastics and its complete lack of the elements (humor, witty dialogue, interesting characters, etc.) that make/made shows like Greek, Kyle XY and (to a lessor extent) Wildfire so enjoyable.

Full disclosure: I've been a fan of Chelsea Hobbs since Beach Girls. I think I mainly like her because she looks like Rachel Melvin from Days Of Our Lives.

There was so much ridiculousness in this episode that I have to do a play-by-play account to document some of it:

• Whoa, the dude on still rings has some seriously floppy hair.
• There's going to be a Sports Illustrated cover on gymnasts before Nationals even happens? Yeah right. Did we learn that lesson after the Kristy Phillips situation?
• Why are they talking about "team order" at Nationals? Since when is gymnastics Nationals a team competition? (Answer: it's not.)
• Why is orange leo (Lauren) so worked up after seeing someone do a couple of back handsprings through to a single tuck on floor? She shouldn't be threatened by that.
• Ok, that 2.5 twist/punch front was a little more impressive.
• Emily watched "the Northern Open"? On TV?! Gymnastics can barely get decent coverage of Nationals on TV most years. Let's be honest here: if she saw this "Northern Open" anywhere, it almost certainly was by tapping into a Dutch television station's feed on the Internet in the middle of the night. (Yes, I'm speaking from experience.)
• Payson just did a brilliant Gainer layout off beam. (Please detect my sarcasm.) Lauren's back tuck dismount was also fantastic (eye roll).
• Oh great, Lauren's already barfing up her breakfast. We're less than 10 minutes in, and someone's already got an eating disorder.
• They're seriously concerned about losing to a girl who is afraid of the vault?
• Does everyone's entire family have to show up and watch every practice? Gymnastics lessons are expensive--don't these people have to go to their jobs?!
• Candace Cameron Bure! Playing someone religious. How surprising. Seriously, though, why's Candace with Lauren's sketchy dad?
• Payson is way over the top. She can't talk to her family because she's needs to "focus" during the car ride home?
• Uh, if "getting caught with a boy" gets you immediately kicked off the team, shouldn't Kaylie and Floppy Hair (Carter) park and make out a little further away from the gym?
• Emily: "How was the new school?"
  Brother: "Different dog, same poop."
• Emily's mom needs to be a little more organized.
• Kaylie: "If he finds out, he was kill you. No seriously, like blood-and-cops-and-teddy-bears and-candles-on-the-sidewalk kill you."
• Ooh, the boy in the pizza shop is cute! A little on the creepy side, however.
• Uh oh, the manager of the pizza shop is a meth-head.
• It also seems kind of unlikely that a gymnastics competition would start that early in the morning. (With the exception of NBC messing up the scheduling of some of the Beijing competitions so that they could be aired live in the U.S.)
• Ok, folks, gymnasts qualify for Nationals as individuals. Each gym does not get to send a team of a certain number of people.
• There's a PA announcer at an inter-gym comp?
• Kaylie was 8th in US at Nationals on uneven bars last year with a whole lot of nothing in her routine and a double tuck dismount?
• At least MIOBI got the flame leotards right. (The Inferno leos went into rotation in 2003, but the flame trend is apparently still alive and kicking.)
• Wow, Lauren did a double front dismount. That's actually a legitimate move.
• Emily also pulls out a (back) double tuck dismount (without pointing her feet).
• Just for the record: The UB scores were Payson 16.075; Kaylie 16.070; Lauren 15.325; Emily 15.100. (Lauren got screwed--she's the only one who did a legit dismount.) For reference, in last year's Olympic All-Around competition, Nastia got 16.65 and Shawn was pulling around 15.275. And they were, you know, actually doing skills.
• After floor: Payson: 31.450; Kaylie: 31.125; Lauren 30.125; Emily 30.050
• The floor tumbling was pretty weak too. You can usually see more impressive tumbling on the results show of So You Think You Can Dance.
• Oh, and NO legitimate competition would ever have people compete bars then floor then beam then vault. Olympic order is vault, bars, beam, floor.
• The Rock gym gets to send 18 people to Nationals?!?! 18!! That's like half the entire field of athletes! What kind of nonsense is this?
• Lauren: flip flop-flip flop-layout stepout (fall) on beam. A skill series rarely seen since 1996. And this is the unbelievable beam routine we've heard so much about?
• If Payton is soooooooooo focused, why is she so intently watching her competitors? Seems like that would be distracting.
• Emily nails her flip-flop, flip-flop, layout stepout like it's 1992. And caps the routine off with a full twisting back tuck dismount!? UGH. (Shawn Johnson did a full twisting double tuck dismount last year, BTW.)
• Payson 46.900; Kaylie 46.375; Emily 46.100; Lauren 43.875
• Why is Lauren "out" if Emily beats her?
• Payson's vault is the hardest in the comp and "has never been landed in competition before." Well, we sure couldn't see much of it, but it looked like a Yurchenko layout (no twists). Hate to break it to you, MIOBI, but girls are landing that vault with an extra 2.5 twists in it.
• I have NO IDEA what vault Emily was just trying to do. She was doing a front flip between her roundoff and touching the vault? What the hell is that? I don't care where the spring board is located, that wasn't going to go well.
• Waaaaaaait. Now they're doing their second vaults?! As in, they got warmed up (actually they didn't, but let's pretend), everyone vaulted, and then they are going to start from the beginning and all vault again after standing around cooling down for however long this process has taken? There better be room for more than one girl in that ambulance, because this is freaking dangerous.
• Kaylie does a Yurchenko pike (or tuck).
• Why does the mom from Fresno have a Southern accent?
• Noooooooooo! Don't let the girl who just fell on her neck go vault! These people are asking for it.
• Ohhhh, Emily was apparently trying to do a Tsukahara entry. She "nails" her Tsuk back tuck this time.
• Final results: Payson 62.250; Kaylie 60.925; Emily 60.800; Lauren 58.050
• I thought the two vault scores were supposedly averaged? There's no way that Emily's score for her second vault averaged with her 0.00 on the first one would allow her to have a higher all-around score than Lauren.
• Because I'm taking this way too seriously, I've compiled everyone's scores on all four events. For reference, I've added Nastia and Shawn's scores in the Beijing all-around. Going by MIOBI standards, I think Shawn has a serious beef with the bars judges. And Nastia needs to complain that she got a lower score on vault than Payson, despite doing the same vault with 1.5 extra twists.

• Wow, Lauren's a peach. Selling out Kaylie to get back in the top three was real classy. Of course, she learned her tactics from her father, who hired a PI to dig up dirt on Emily.
• Not surprisingly, the PI found found more juicy dirt on the head gymnastics coach than he did on the teenage girl.
• Scores of media are now camped out on Payson's front lawn. Uh huh.
• There are no other coaches in this gym? And now there's no electricity either? This place is a disaster.
• Seriously, the girl in the Playtex Sport commercial just did more bona fide gymnastics skills in this 30 second ad than all of the girls in MIOBI did in 60 minutes.

Um, I'm not impressed. If they are going to make this show this gymnastics-centric, they need to do a hell of a lot more research about how things work the world of gymnastics today. If they made the show more of a teen soap, just with some gymnastics in the background, they would have a better chance of pulling this off.

A good example of what I'm talking about is Wildfire. Yes, it was a show about horse racing. A lot of the drama and plot points came from events involved with horse racing. And, yes, Wildfire's depiction of the world of horseracing was probably no more accurate than MIOBI's depiction of gymnastics. But, when Wildfire was at its most entertaining, it was a show about Junior, Kris, Matt, Dani, their parents and the supporting characters (and sometimes the wind turbine) and horse racing just served as the background. After all, if I want to watch a horse race, I'll watch a horse race not a television show on ABC Family. And if I want to watch a gymnastics competition, I'll watch a gymnastics competition (even if I have to get up in the middle of the night and queue up the Dutch channel on the Internet). MIOBI needs to bring something else to the table.

(It occurred to me that this show would have worked soooo much better if they made it about a college gymnastics team. Then all this "team" mumbo jumbo would have made sense. As would having a "scholarship kid." And it would be cool to have some girls on the team be famous former Olympians and other girls be unknowns. But in that scenario, you wouldn't get to have the crazy stage parents, but that's no big loss in my opinion.)

Update:
After watching episode 2, "Where's Marty," I'm feeling a little better about MIOBI, because ep 2 focused more on the drama and less on the actual gymnastics. The show is still nothing to write home about, but I did enjoy Lauren's dad getting all excited about her two-foot half turn on beam. I mean, yeah, it would have been impressive if she were age 2 or 3 at the most. And the girls scaring away the creepy guys via roundoffs and back handsprings was just too ridiculous.

(photo: abcfamily.com)