AMC+’s new series Fifteen-Love opens with tennis star Justine Pearce about to get her big break. It’s the French Open semi-finals, and she’s favored to win, a rising star beloved by fans and the press. Her coach Glenn wraps her wrist in the locker room. She goes to kiss him, and he rebukes her. On the court, Justine is electric but also distracted. She wins but at great cost, her wrist shattering, effectively ending her career. Five years later, she works as a physio at the competitive tennis academy where she was once a star student, partying a lot and no longer playing tennis. When Glenn unexpectedly returns to the academy, she’s suddenly thrown off. At the end of the pilot, Justine goes to the police station to report a history of sexual assault at the hands of Glenn beginning six years prior when he became her coach. The second episode grapples with the aftermath of this decision, including the police talking to her friends, family, and coworkers and an informal tribunal hearing at the academy where she and Glenn both work.
Both episodes are available to stream now on AMC+, and additional episodes will release weekly (and the series already dropped in full on Prime in the UK last year). In these first two episodes, Fifteen-Love is masterful in its storytelling about abuse, power, trauma, and sports. Professional sports are rampant with abuse, especially because young players are treated like and expected to be adults in so many ways. Junior athletes, like Justine who became a pro player at or before 16, have whole careers, brand endorsements, massive responsibilities, fanbases, press tours. They have to act and live like adults. But they’re not adults; they’re teenagers. And it’s easy for the adults in their lives — especially ones in positions of power like coaches — to take advantage of them. Fifteen-Love explores this with an unnerving and complex hand.
Other characters are shocked by Justine’s accusation. Why hadn’t she said something before? Why now? Would she really not tell her best friend and roommate, especially when she trains at the same academy and knows Glenn? Fifteen-Love has no interest in making Justine a pristine portrait of a victim though. She’s messy; she’s unreliable at times — none of that negates abuses of power. In a quietly devastating scene, the two detectives assigned to Justine’s case talk amongst themselves in an attempt to find an angle for the case: Even though Justine was only 16 and 17 when it occurred, if she says the sex was consensual, there’s no criminal case because relationships between a coach and 16+ student weren’t legally prohibited until more recently. It’s made worse by the fact that they aren’t really explaining this to Justine so much as having the conversation around her, Fifteen-Love showing again and again how little the system and its soldiers — including the academy administrator who calls for the tribunal but seemingly only as a tactic to squash accusations against Glenn — gives a shit about Justine and young victims.
As Justine and Glenn, Ella Lily Hyland and Aidan Turner are perfectly cast. Hyland is so good it’s a shock this is her debut role. Turner nails a chilling scene in a car at the end of the second episode, peeling back some of the layers of Glenn’s expert manipulation. He’s television’s most unsettling Bad Man since Alexander Skarsgård’s Perry Wright and, in fact, there are some Big Little Lies vibes to the series so far, as it plays with ideas of perception, memories, and psychological and emotional manipulation. At the end of the second episode, a character close to Justine re-remembers something with a slightly different edge to it. We’re treated to the flashback twice in the episode, and indeed it hits a little differently each time based on the events and emotions happening around it.
Justine also begins a relationship with sports publicist Mikki (Florida-born queer actor Jess Darrow), and while it isn’t explicitly textual in these first two episodes, Justine’s queerness does add another layer of complication to the way she’s perceived by others. Administrators at the academy have a way of talking about Justine, regarding her as unpredictable and dramatic. No doubt her queerness further stigmatizes her in their eyes. Glenn and others try to argue that it was really Justine who made the relationship inappropriate by coming onto him; biphobia indeed often frames bi girls as promiscuous and even predatory. But she was his student. She was a teen. As subsequent episodes unfold, I’ll be curious to see how Justine’s queerness does or does not play into the storytelling.
Fifteen-Love is so far extremely nuanced and even, at times, intentionally uncertain in its portrayal of abuse in lieu of a more cut-and-dry story, and that makes for a much deeper and more complex definition of what abuse in the sports world looks like. Normally, I’d be skeptical of a story being so withholding about what really happened when it comes to assault or abuse, but by sowing doubts among its characters and leaving a lot of questions unanswered for its viewers, Fifteen-Love expertly reveals how assumptions can obscure abuse, how our desire for a clear definition and evidence of harm can hurt victims.
That’s all very heavy stuff, but it’s balanced well by Fifteen-Love, which so far plays out a bit like a sporty psychological thriller akin to The Novice, with shades of Dare Me, Big Little Lies, and The Affair.The tennis scenes are charged and immersive. This is certainly very different from Challengers, but it similarly explores how on-court and off-court dynamics are inextricable from and informative of one another. And it bears repeating: Ella Lily Hyland is an ace. There are several sequences where we’re immersed in Justine’s perspective — especially when she’s panicking or thrust into a past we don’t see play out on-screen but still feel — and it isn’t just the sound and camerawork that harness us there but the small shifts in Hyland’s face and physicality. She brings humor and verve to the role, too. Yes, Justine is unpredictable, but that’s what makes her human. The monsters of Fifteen-Love are the ones who move in predictable ways due to their continuous efforts to control the narrative, whether that’s explicit gaslighting or an NDA slid across a desk. It’s too early in the game to know for sure if Fifteen-Love is going to pull off all this intricate storytelling well, but it sure is quite the start.
