Stream It Or Skip It?

We are not prudes; we like it when a show on streaming gets daring with sex, especially when it’s part of a well-plotted show with interesting characters. A new series from Spain about young athletes has one of those three things.

OLYMPO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a young woman in training, performing well beyond what she’s done in the past.

The Gist: Nuria Bórges (María Romanillos) is the one who is being monitored by her coach and a doctor, running on a treadmill, spinning on an exercise bike, and being plunged in the water. She’s part of a national synchronized swimming team in Spain with her best friend, Amaia Olaberria (Clara Galle); both train at the Pyrenees High Performance Center.

We then see two women, Zoe Moral (Nira Oshaia) and Yaiza Compes (Mara Lazardo) get recruited for the same HPC by the head of the center, Isabel Duran (Vicenta Ndongo), and the track coach, who wants both of them on the heptathlon team. Yaiza is excited, but Zoe thinks spending all her time at an HPC is what hell looks like. Both are excited to go together, though.

We then see Zoe in a car accident, and then flash to her showing up by herself at the HPC, with her parents almost literally forcing her to stay. Nuria is the first to greet her, and she introduces her to c; Nuria is back after spending a week away for mysterious reasons, something that Amaia is intensely curious about. The more she probes, though, the less Nuria says, leading Amaia to seek another partner as she pushes towards a spot on Spain’s Olympic squad. As she tries out other partners, though, she ends up finding a vial in a teammate’s locker that almost assuredly means she’s doping.

Amaia is dating Cristian Delallave (Nuno Gallego), who just learned that he’s being cut from the HPC’s rugby squad. For his part, though, Cristian still wants to be there for his best friend, Roque Pérez (Agustín Della Corte), who is openly gay but seems to have a hard time getting Diego (Gleb Abrosimov), a fellow swimmer whom he has sex with in a storage room next to the pool, to be out publicly with him.

Representatives from the apparel company Olympo show up; they’re going to give out four sponsorship deals, which are a big boost to any hopefuls for the country’s Olympic team. Amaia is almost assured she’s going to get one, but everyone is shocked and dismayed when Zoe gets one of the sponsorship deals. As Zoe tries to leave the HPC, not happy with how cutthroat everyone is, Nico Furtado (Hugo Teixeira) from Olympo intercepts her and gets her to sign the deal via some very clever blackmail.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Olympo is like Elite but with athletes, and more sex than the average YA drama.

Our Take: If you want to watch people with perfectly-tuned athletic bodies be naked and have sex, then Olympo is your kind of show. If you want a show with well-drawn characters and a coherent plot, you’ll probably be disappointed.

At least in the first episode, what we see feel more like vignettes than actual story. There are some vague undercurrents running through the episode, but they don’t really become apparent until very late, like the beginnings of Amaia’s doping suspicions. As she questions Nuria about why she missed a week of training, we have no idea what she might have in her mind about her friend’s time away, and when we see Nuria with the same Olympo rep that recruited Zoe, everything is still unclear.

At the end of the first episode, when Nuria outperforms even Amaia before collapsing in the pool, there’s a suspicion that both the synchronized swim coach and the Olympo reps are pushing athletes like Nuria to take PEDs. So Amaia’s suspicions are likely going to have pretty wide implications.

Zoe’s story is also semi-interesting. It’s pretty obvious that something happened to Yaiza that wouldn’t allow her to go to the HPC with Zoe — she could be dead or she could be disabled from the accident. The fact that she’s resisting the idea of training for the Olympics and being at the HPC, but Olympo wants them in their clutches anyway, should also have some wide implications.

The rest of the group seems like your typical lightly-sketched characters in a teen/young adult show. Ambitious, horny, and good-looking, but little else.

Sex and Skin: Lots.

Parting Shot: After helping Zoe pull Nuria out of the pool, we see Amaia underwater, staring in shock.

Sleeper Star: Andy Duato plays Zoe’s largely silent roommate Renata Aguilera; we wonder if her character is really mute like Zoe says she is. Laura Moray plays Jennifer Pina, who is an old rival of Zoe’s, but that’s all we know about her.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Cristian grabs Roque’s phone to post the picture of Roque and Diego, the English subtitles literally say, “Yoink!”

Our Call: SKIP IT. Olympo needs to tighten up its plotting in order for it to be more than just scenes of perfect bodies in motion, whether that motion is athletic or sexual.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.