Stream It Or Skip It?

The stakes are higher and the competition is tougher in Surf Girls: International, a new docuseries now streaming on Prime Video. While Eweleiula Wong is a holdover from 2023’s Surf Girls: Hawai’i, the new season will also profile surfers from Brazil, Portugal, South Africa, and Peru. And no matter where they’re from, each of these young women are hitting the waves with one goal: a coveted spot on the World Surf League’s 2025 Championship Tour. Executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Rea at Hello Sunshine, in partnership with women’s sports media company TOGETHXR, all five episodes of Surf Girls: International hit Prime at once.

Opening Shot: “I love surfing,” Eweleiula Wong, 19, says over action shots of her on a wave. “It’s my life, and it’s my favorite thing in the world.” 

The Gist: Surfing became an Olympic event for the first time at the Tokyo Games in 2020, and the World Surf League has increased its profile year by year since it standardized pro-level competition. But for someone like Ewe Wong, who grew up in Oahu, Hawaii, taking her talents from the free surfing realm to the points and ranking systems of competitive surfing is proving to be a challenge. “I felt good about my surfing,” Wong says of the first two stops on the WSL’s Women’s Challenger Series. “But results-wise it wasn’t the best, and you can only drop two events.” 

Episodes of Surf Girls: International will follow the Challenger Series as it travels from two opening dates in Australia to Ballito, South Africa, Huntington Beach in California for the US Open, and onward to Ericeira, Portugal and the finals in Saquarema, Brazil. And while each of the surfers profiled in the docuseries are professionally ranked, none are in the sport’s top tier. As 22-year-old Jessie Van Niekerk of South Africa says, in surfing, “you lose more than you win.” The challenge is to balance skill sets with the mental piece, and be ready when the right wave hits. 

For this season of Surf Girls, Wong and Van Niekerk are also joined by Sophia Medina, 19, whose older brother Gabriel is a three-peat world champion surfer. (Sophia on being a legacy: “I just wanna write my own history.”) 21-year-old Francisca “Kika” Veselko of Portugal won a title at the Women’s World Juniors. And Sol Aguirre, 21, joins Surf Girls after competing at the Olympics for her native Peru.

The pressure is pretty crazy as the heats at Ballito begin. As Wong says, of the six stops on Challenger, only the four best scores are counted, and in the earlier rounds, the numbers haven’t been kind to the surfers. As we catch shots of the competition at Ballito, complete with surf jargon-laced audio from onsite WSL announcers – “Sophia Medina will just climb up into the lip, and keep that score card turning over” – it’s clear how hard the women profiled are working. But it’s also clear how crucial these contests are to their professional development. Who has what it takes to be at their best when it matters most?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Emmy-winning 100 Foot Wave, which recently dropped its third season into the pipe, takes deeper stabs at philosophy and the all-in nature of surfing, despite the risks to life and limb. And we thought The Ultimate Surfer was pretty cool with its bespoke wave pool competition, reality-style overtones, and the participation of pro surfing all-timer Kelly Slater, but it only lasted one season. Watching Surf Girls: International also had us comparing it to the recent Hulu docuseries Not Her First Rodeo, which profiles a group of women professional bullriders. Whether for competition on a board or on a bull, some of their sport-specific lateral movement workout moves look the same!

Our Take: The editing and pace is a little choppy in the early going of Surf Girls: International – it keeps repeating basic facts about the individuals profiled, feels staged in certain off-wave sections, and really overdoes it with the accompanying music, which falls into that reality lifestyle programming bucket of “Vaguely Empowering Pop Song That Sounds Mostly Like An A-List Artist You Actually Know.” But that stuff can even out as the series progresses, and we really like the energy and thoughtfulness of Eweleiula Wong, Sophia Medina, and Jessie Van Niekerk as they describe their journeys to Challenger and the WSL. To us, surfing looks both lighter than air and ludicrously difficult, so it’s cool to hear the perspective of people who are awesome at it. It’s a discipline they both love dearly and sort of hate sometimes, especially when their natural ability and hours of training only manages a substandard points result. We’re also interested in this push-pull between free surfing and the structured demands of World Surf League competition, and where the individuals profiled will position themselves as the stops on Challenger tick off the international map.

Sex and Skin: None. The look here is either wetsuits and sunshirts in the water or hoodies and surf brand tees on the sand. 

Parting Shot: “Everything in surfing is such a fine line,” Jessie Van Niekerk says over scenes from upcoming episodes. “Like, don’t overthink it, be instinctive. But then also, like, you need to be focused and use your brain.” 

Sleeper Star: As the lone carryover from Surf Girls: Hawai’i, Ewe Wong’s story is the one we know best, and we like how open she is with where she’s at in her development as a pro surfer. “I get performance anxiety when I’m chasing scores,” Wong says. “Surfing is such an individual sport that every decision you make comes with a lot of pressure. If I’m going to have a future in professional surfing, I need to overcome that anxiety. The biggest challenge that I face this year is just getting out of my own head.”  

Most Pilot-y Line: Throughout Surf Girls: International, Wong also speaks ōlelo Hawai’i, the endangered native language of the Hawaiian people. “Being Hawaiian, it’s part of my identity. I’m pursuing surfing as a cultural practice. My goal is to make the world tour, and also represent Hawaii.”

Our Call: Stream It. Surf Girls: International carries forth from Surf Girls: Hawai’i with new faces and a host of new professional pressures. Surfing already looked crazy difficult. Add in the demands of making it a career, and the surging waves just got more real.  

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.