Fifteen-Love

Wow. Aidan Turner expertly pulls off the most accurate depiction of how a narcissist manipulates and controls their victims. The writing and acting was spot on to perfectly display the many layers of this personality disorder: the love bombing, controlling, facade of gentleness, caring and protectiveness. Plus the underlying immense insecurities and self-loathing that these people feel which culminates into their own self-destruction.

Excellent, heartfelt and gut wrenching acting by the young stars in this show as well. Bravo to the writers, the cast, and to Prime for making this important show.

This is very much a lightweight series despite the serious storyline. Unfortunately there really aren't many likeable characters, if any.

However, the biggest issue is the tennis. It's simply not feasible to try to make a TV show or movie about players competing in 'grand slam' tennis tournaments when you don't have the rights to use the real tournament names. It just totally takes you out of the moment. Worst still, there was absolutely no reason to try to do this as they could have made up some big tournaments and the story wouldn't have been affected.

In addition, they should have found some actors who could actually hit a tennis ball correctly - they are supposed to be elite stars. This especially applies to the main male player.

If you watch pro tennis this series is supposed to be for you I guess but it will bug the hell out of you.

Overall it's OK but absolutely nothing special.

I'm a huge tennis fan and I expected this to be full of in accuracies and take liberties in the name of making good TV. And it was utterly inaccurate in just about everything about tennis.

That would be fine if the show itself was good. Unfortunately after a semi decent start it falls of a proverbial cliff in terms of well.. pretty much everything.

Let me list a few of the worst things: Horrible acting from most of the cast, the directing, pacing, script and story are all over the place. You get endless repetitive scenes of the coach talking in a ridiculous voice saying pretty much the same lines.

By episode 3-4 it seems like they're out of ideas or trying to fill time because they reach for pretty much every TV trope you can think of.

The main actress is actually pretty good. Especially for an unknown.

Why use Wimbledon and Roland Garros in a story and you can't even mention it them by name? There are plenty of other big tournaments? Why is the main character acting like she's broke when she would have won nearly £1million from the French Open? Why is the grass completely worn out down to mud on DAY 1 of Wimbledon? Oh and news flash for the writers... tennis players regularly rant and scream at their coaches in front of millions of people - no one cares, it's not the dramatic moment you think it is.

I'm mystified how stuff like this gets made.

Despite being slow at parts, the characters, the acting, the story is so incredibly captivating. They've shone a light on a difficult topic that needs to be brought into the public conscious and you can really tell that the cast were passionate about doing this story right.

I'm looking forward to seeing more from Ella (Justine) and Maria (Luisa) in the future. They captured their character's vulnerability, fear, hope and a whole rollercoaster of emotions so well, even during some particularly difficult scenes - I hope there was mental health support available on and off set! Aiden Turner was also fantastic as always - menacing in his role as Glenn.

I'll admit I only started watching this because it had Aidan Turner in it - and as actor I admire his talent.

No offence to him or to Ella Lily Hyland (or any of the other actors) because it's not their ability as actors that ruin this.

I get that this is important issue, and that the plot in itself was topical. But what on earth happened from its inception to the final production?

It's just dire. I don't know if I'm even going to bother watching the last 3 episodes because I just find it so incredibly predictable, boring and mind numbing. It could have been so much better. That's my word count reached so I'll leave it there.