June 1, 2025

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If the first time I tried something, I had to be rescued by my nation’s coast guard, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t do that thing again. This is one of the many differences between me and the big wave surfers on HBO’s 100 Foot Wave.

The show’s first season chronicles professional surfer Garrett McNamara’s arrival in Nazaré, Portugal, where he hopes to finally find and ride the titular 100 foot wave. The second season grapples with the aftermath of Nazaré becoming a premier surf spot, introduces us to the bigger cast of characters who have since congregated there, and, incidentally, captures a fascinating time capsule of COVID world in 2020 and 2021 and how it intersected with people who, psychologically and economically, could not stop flying around the world even for a month.¹ Season three, which concluded this week, revolves around the question of when is it time to move on, and if you can trust yourself to recognize it when it arrives.

Big wave surfing is perilous in every way, from the physical danger the athletes accept to the financial precarity they endure. It takes a very particular kind of person to sign up for such a life, and most of them constantly question whether the adrenaline highs, athletic achievements, and close-knit professional community are worth what they choose to give up in stability, safety, and the people who can’t or won’t come with them every time they take off after a swell. They also keep doing it, and luckily for us, they must keep filming it to continually prove their worth to sponsors who could stop supporting them at any time. Watching this show made me wonder what it would be like to undertake something extraordinary enough to convince someone to film it from a helicopter. It also made me glad I’ll never really know.

Garrett, in particular, is a challenging character. He mentors a whole generation of big-wave surfers at Nazaré, but he also bullies them when he’s feeling insecure, which is often. He loves his family but expects their lives to revolve around his career—which is waning by the third season and arguably verging into hobby territory, making his continuing eagerness to risk horrific accidents, (further) brain injury, and even death seem less and less justified, if it ever was. For Garrett, the next trip is always the one he’s been waiting for, hoping for, counting on. Fulfillment is always deferred. This frustrates Nicole, his manager and wife, who has turned her obviously formidable talents toward making sure he can catch the wave of his dreams, which makes her dream of having a husband who’s at peace with himself increasingly impossible.

By setting out to capture a world of extremes and the people who inhabit it, 100 Foot Wave ends up in a realm of ambiguities and contradictions it doesn’t try to resolve. Sometimes I wished for more detail, such as how exactly the surfers’ sponsorships work and how financial pressures do or don’t factor into their risk-taking. But mostly I was glad for the show’s light touch, a masterclass in why even-handedness and understatement are still such powerful journalistic tools.

Further reading

At Vulture, Roxana Hadadi wrote insightful reviews of seasons two and three, which seems likely to be the show’s last. (Can we please get a making-of documentary next, Planet Earth style? I need more about the world of surfing cinematographers.)