Drill it!

Both Alicia and I went into the premier episode of Make It Or Break It (Mondays at 9 pm eastern on ABC Family) expecting a full-on campfest, Stick It: The Series. We were expecting pretty much every one of our criteria: asshole boyfriends for all; unsupportive parents ("Your father and I forbid you to do even one more damn gymnastic!"); and a few throwaway training montages set to the Ting Tings.

What we didn't expect was the Friday Night Lights of competitive gymnastics television shows.

Make It Or Break It follows four teenage aspiring Olympic gymnasts as they train to qualify for Nationals. The show is set in Boulder, Colorado, a town where it's apparently a total drag to be a young person.

I can't wait to win all the Olympics so I can get out of this one-horse town.

There is Lauren (seen above), an uber-rich, bulimic c-word-in-training who believes herself to be the top of the heap, when in fact she is only fair. Her bulimia is presented as a simple matter of fact, which was the first indication that this show wasn't going to be the lighthearted teen competition romp we had thought. You just hear her yakking in the bathroom, and then one of her teammates informs her that doing that is super-bad for her electrolytes.

Then there are the two secondary (for now) characters of Paysworth and Whatsherface.

They are both well-meaning and very pretty. Paysley is the top gymnast in the group, and Whatsherface's current claim to notoriety is her secret boyfriend (because no one should ever date a gymnast). Apparently, they, with Lauren, round out the BFF triumfeminate of the Rocky Mountain Gym, the premier gymnastics training center in the Boulder area. But uh oh, here comes trouble (gorgeous, slinky, sexy trouble):

EMILY KMETKO. She's a firestorm of gymnastic power, she's got a troubled past, a mom who looks like Tila Tequila ten years from now, a crippled little brother, and an indeterminate ethnicity. She is unassuming at first, with her Goodwill leotard and unkempt hair, but she soon proves a formidable rival to the conniving Lauren in every field but Lauren's specialty, the beam.

They're all working under the aegis of this handsome coach:

Whose name I can't remember, so for the purposes of this recap, we're just going to call him Coach Stern But Fair.

And now, the plot: Lauren's father, a rich and influential man who has donated a ton of money to The Rock(y Mountain Gymnastics Training Center), wants his daughter to have a promised place at Nationals, but Emily's unbelievable talent has threatened that dream. It looks like this is going to be the main plot contrivance of the series. As long as it doesn't turn into some kind of gymnastics-based Spy Vs. Spy, it should be pretty compelling.

In this episode, Emily was hit hard by both Lauren and her father. From the moment Emily steps into the gym and proves herself to be the coolest dude, Lauren takes a break from vomiting and generally being stank to instruct her two henchwomen to give the new girl the coldest of shoulders. Lo gets some good rich-bitchy insults in, but her friends seem reluctant to get too invested in the rivalry.

This culminates at the climactic tryouts before Nationals, when, at an opportune moment, Lauren pencils in a change for Emily in the distance from the springboard to the vault, placing it five inches further away. It turns out to be some true Million Dollar Baby shit when Emily leaps from the springboard, flips, and fucking smashes her kidneys against the vault. Oh my fucking God, dude, I may have stifled a cry of, "NO!" (But, you know, not stifled it very well.)

However, like every kid with big dreams, not even the promise of shitting blood can keep Emily Kmetko down. She returns to the competition just before Lauren is crowned Queen of The Olympics and asks to redo her vault, this time with the correct springboard distance. They allow it. She's awesome. Lauren goes back to being Queen of the Mediocre County Fair and Parade.

However, Emily's little stunt cost the others dearly. After hiring a private detective, Lauren's dad digs up some undisclosed terrible information on Coach Stern But Fair, forcing him to leave the Rock and work at a facility where he will keep his promise of getting Lauren a guaranteed shot at the Olympics. No one knows what the information is! Cliffhanger!

We're going to do our best to recap this show every week (better than this, with more gifs and shit), because this is honestly an awesome show with a lot of potential, but we're not going to rate it with the criteria, because that would be too much work.