Make It Or Break It Extended Edition DVD
Make It or Break It Volume 1 is the ABC Family series which looks at Olympic gymnastic hopefuls who’s lives revolve around their shot at Olympic gold.
Film making 18/25
Video 19/25
Audio 19/25
Bonus Features 5/25
Total 61/100
What a show and what a way to start out a series, I can certainly see why the show has done as well as it has in the first season. Newcomer gymnast Emily Kmetko starts her shot at the Nationals at a new gymnastics training center, the Rocky Mountain, but things do not start out well.
When Emily knocks one of the top three girls, Lauren Tanner out of her spot her father, Steve Tanner uses a private investigators findings to drag the coach and ten of the top twenty girls away from the training center. Without a coach the team turns to one of the other fathers who is a retired baseball player for guidance.
Before the team can worry too much about their problems Lauren’s father does a double take and returns to the gym with a new coach, gold medalist Sasha Beloff. The other families don’t exactly welcome him back with open arms but bringing an Olympic gold medalist as their new coach does help warm up their reception.
Emilie’s family is the oddball of the group being a more low income one but Paysons’ also has money problems with Lauren and Kaylie’s the ones who have no money problems at all. Payson’s family took a risk and her father took a lower paying job for Payson to work out at the top gymnastic center but things also do not work out well for them.
When the new coach Sasha Beloff needs help at the gym he asks Payson’s mother whom you should recognize as Roz Doyle actress Peri Gilpen from Frazier. Lauren is the stuck up bitch of the group and does so much back stabbing but has her own moments of weakness and need for a shoulder to cry on.
Kaylie has a boyfriend which is against the rules of the gymnastics training center and is the daughter of the baseball player. Emily ends up as the team’s captain when they go to nationals by the end of the season and the episodes have plenty of drama leading up to the final extended episode.
Other drama, passionate love for gymnastics and friendship with rivalries fill up each episode with more interaction than gymnastics. One thing that does make the show more enjoyable and filled with all that drama is the outside the gym antics of the four girls and their families.
If the show was about four real girls heading toward the Olympics the show would probably be boring but as it is Make It Or Break It does contain enough drama and emotional happenings to be entertaining. It just should be more about the competition and more in the gym stuff than what really does happen in the series so much of it is more of a soap opera than a show about going for the Olympic gold.
Make It Or Break It is filled with the teenage love interests, passionate love of a sport and the usual rivalry of those teens but with an Olympic size to it all. These are young adults with an all consuming desire toward winning or even competing at the Olympics so there is going to be drama of greater proportions.
The video in Make It Or Break It is well done and about as good as your going to get for a DVD release with good color and no technical problems throughout all the 10 episodes. The show does not take place mostly in the gym so you have a big mix of indoor locations and outside shots that all turn out well.
The audio is also well done with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound with Spanish and French subtitles in 1:78:1 widescreen enhanced for 16x9 televisions. The audio is well done but heavy on the front and center speakers as you would expect for a show that is not an action or adventure series.
Extra features include a making of feature called Making IT and deleted scenes which amounts to very little bonus content. The Making It feature is a 9 minute look at the show from the writer creator director Holly Sorenson that talks about casting, the series in general and has some quick actor interviews.
The deleted scenes is a really quick look at parts of the series that did not make the final shows and is not all that much for extra content. In all the bonus content is really only worth a look once but is not much more than a try to get some kind of bonus content in the box.
Make It Or Break It is a pretty good series that is family friendly but it does concentrate more on the out of the gym drama of the four teens heading toward the Olympics. Only time will tell how good the show does with the end of the season and the surprise the writers threw in right at the end of this ten episode volume.