Mar de fondo

Being Belgian, I had received several notifications about 'Knokke off' (original title) so I ultimately decided to give it a shot with ep1.

I was thoroughly surprised...good acting, good camera work and a nice story based more or less on real life (it is well known here in Belgium the seaside city of 'Knokke' indeed has many rich posh people).

So yea, I binged the show in 2 evenings....it is well written (thanks to Luc Wyns), good character.development.

I did not like the last episode as everything got a bit too rushed....and apparently a semi-open ending (which I hate) is popular nowadays.

3/10 just for the scenery, the vibe and the directing.

This is the 3rd TV show I watched in a row where it's glorifying cheating on husbands/boyfriends and breaking off marriages or relationships.

Obviously it's just a show, and obviously there are plenty of movies out there where men cheat on wives/girlfriends, and in those movies/shows, men are portrayed as evil or horrible, and at the end of the movie, he ends up in a bad shape. HOWEVER, in these last 3 shows I watched (all filmed in 2023), women cheated on their husbands/boyfriends and were portrayed as romantic, beautiful or "finding herself", and not even show a little empathy towards the husband/boyfriend.

What happened to the morals? Are we just normalizing women cheating and not taking accountability? I'm surprised that no one is outraged by this.

The problem with Knokke Off (High Tides) season 2 is that too little is continued from season 1. New characters are more focused than some of the youths (Matti, Victor and Margaux), despite there are some unresolved issues among those three in this season which would have been a lot more interesting to watch being dwelled into, than scenes of Tennis being played, or paint thrown around.

The cruelty and carelessness of the characters also seems too over the top to be believable. Viviane de Muynck has the matriarch role down to the teeth the way she plays it. Unfortunately though the writers have not dedicated as much time researching law issues as coming up with scenes to put Willem de Schryver's naked butt on display, as a consequence a rather moronic situation occur, where apparantly the CEO of a company don't have the faintest idea who the major, and controlling, shareholder of the company is.

There also are some episodes where too many stages have been ommitted for the remaining scenes to correspond well to each other. Must be careful not to spoil too much, but what happen is in one scene a character angrily hit another - next we see them they are best of friends, but how that happened we don't get to see. In the first season there also was revealed one of the characters had a secret gay lover. That gay lover is apparently gone, and now replaced with another. Over 8 episodes we see the two together as a couple twice, once in a car, and once under a duvet in a bed.

Extending length of episodes, or moving focus from the new characters and developments to the core youth, would have improved both storylines and character development.

Season 2 is not bad, it is just not the quality the cast could have delivered, had the storylines and character developments been as solid as many of them are. Kes Bakker as Matti is very convincing, pity he hasn't got more scenes - especially interactions with Victor, Margaux and Alex. Dries Vanhegen as John is a character that could have become a father figure for Alex, similar to Jaques with Daen in the first season. But unfortunately Willem de Schryver and Dries Vanhegen have too few, and too different, scenes together to show such a development. Which makes John's presence in one scene in particular hard to understand.

Again the problem is scenes not corresponding well with each other, because those develments that could have bridged the two scenes, have been completely ommitted.

I had hoped season 2 would have brought more nuance, and help us viewers better understand and relate to key characters. That didn't happen, they are the same as they were in season 1. There has been announced a third and final season. Maybe they will develop and grow more emotionally in that one? Fingers crossed.

Throw Elite and Outer Banks in a bowl, mix it together and then you'll have Knokke Off. It's a surprisingly good show and the actors are way better than I had expected. It's the perfect summer show where sex, drugs and murder are the main subjects resulting in an interesting and entertaining story. It does have quite some things that are similar to the first season of the Spanish Netflix show Elite but not in a way that it's too obvious. I actually thought it was a clever way to base a new show off of such a massive success such as Elite, without it being a knock off (pun intended). Definitely looking forward to a possible season 2!

First of all Alex and Louise were portrayed really well by their actors. Their actingskills are actually very impressive, and consequently carried the whole series.

Aside from the good acting, the filmography and the location were very pleasing to the eye.

The only thing this series lacks is a unique storyline. There are so many soap series that follow use a similar storyline, especially the Belgium/Dutch ones. Still, I hope there will be a second season, with a better storyline preferably. I am also curious what other projects these actors will star in in the future, they will definitely be able to achieve big things actingcareer.