TV Review: Fifteen-Love is the show of the summer — and Ella Lily Hyland is a revelation 

Ella Lily Hyland in Fifteen Love

The best shows move the viewer around like a good tennis player. Fifteen-Love (Amazon Prime Video, Friday, July 21) does plenty of that in the opening episode.

The action revolves around teenage-sensation tennis player Justine Pearce and her coach Glenn Lapthorn, played by Irish actors Ella Lily Hyland and Aidan Turner. 

If you like pacey drama that shifts through the gears, with ambiguous characters that make you wonder who’s the bad guy, then this is the show for you.

It starts with Pearce winning a Grand Slam semi-final in Paris before collapsing to the ground with an injured wrist. 

It shoots forward five years to her downing shots in a bar and arriving hungover the next day at an exclusive tennis academy where she now works as a physio. That’s the first ‘what happened’?

The second one is the relationship between her and her coach. There are hints that it went beyond tennis in the opening scenes, and this drives the plot later on.

This plot moves around in time a bit but it’s handled well and doesn’t feel clunky, unlike some other recent shows where they feel the need to open with a climax and work their way back.

The real revelation here is Ella Lily Hyland. She glides effortlessly from mood to mood with Justine Pearce — the ferocious competitor, the fun-loving everywoman, the vulnerable lover, the coy date, they’re all there in the kind of 3D character you don’t get much these days. 

She’s so good at moving her moods around that the other characters look a bit pale and wooden in comparison.

Aidan Turner and Ella Lily Hyland in Fifteen Love

That works because a lot of the story here is about a superstar who falls back to earth. But it makes some of the others look like they are in soap-opera while she would be at home in a serious drama like Big Little Lies.

This is particularly true of Turner’s Glenn Lapthorn. He’s just not convincing as an elite tennis coach. 

He has all the menace of Tony Blair, when surely the first rule of top level sport is that you must be afraid of the person handing out the orders. 

Lapthorn is jaunty and a bit shifty, but that might change when the truth about his relationship with Pearce emerges in later episodes.

For now, Fifteen-Love is a winner. There are enough unanswered questions in the opening episode to keep you guessing — the state of Lapthorn’s marriage, what’s going on with Justine’s friend Renee, is her colleague Steve really the good guy, why did she give up playing? 

Plenty to chew on there.

But the real pleasure is trying to figure out Justine herself. 

Is she a breezy confident likeable woman or something darker? The plot and Hyland’s performance leave us guessing. 

I’m looking forward to finding out. Give Fifteen-Love a watch, it’s the show of the summer so far.