Finding Her Edge

The Weight of the Blade

There’s a very particular quiet in an empty ice rink—a heavy hush that feels like it’s holding its breath, smelling faintly of Freon and old sweat, where every scrape of metal on ice cracks like a match. Netflix’s *Finding Her Edge* seems to live in that hush, even while it dresses itself up as a glossy teen soap opera. Based on Jennifer Iacopelli’s BookTok-famous novel, the show sells itself as a love triangle wrapped in rhinestone-studded skating costumes. But beneath all that algorithm-friendly sheen, it’s really digging into what happens when you carry your family’s unfinished dreams on your shoulders.



The setup is pure YA catnip. Adriana Russo (Madelyn Keys) is a former ice dancer who gave up the sport after her mom died, then gets dragged back into the competitive circuit to keep her family’s financially flailing rink afloat. Her ticket to a pampered sponsorship is a fake-dating deal with Brayden (Cale Ambrozic), a brilliant but irritatingly cocky skater. Then Freddie (Olly Atkins), her old partner and first love, reappears, stirring up the mess. If that sounds like *The Summer I Turned Pretty* on ice, you’d be right. But showrunner Jeff Norton seems oddly uninterested in delivering a standard romance. (I still don’t get why the show keeps pretending Freddie is a fiery love interest when he feels as spirited as a wet paper towel.) Instead, the camera spends more time on the bruised, complicated relationship between Adriana and her sisters.

You really feel where the show is headed in episode two, during what viewers are already calling the “train scene.” Adriana and Brayden are running through an off-ice choreography session. Rather than zeroing in on longing looks, the camera stays glued to their feet, the tension in their shoulders, the half-awkward, half-physical negotiation of two athletes figuring out how to balance together. That sweaty, tactile moment reveals so much more about how they’re building trust than any of the show’s occasionally clunky dialogue ever does.



A lot of that grounded feel rests on Keys. The comparisons to a young Jennifer Lawrence in *Winter’s Bone* aren’t far off. Keys carries a guarded, slightly feral energy. When she’s onscreen, you believe she’s spent her whole life shivering in locker rooms. (It doesn’t hurt that Keys famously sent in a scrappy vlog of her “very average” skating to audition and then trained for months to stay believable on the ice.) Just watch how she reacts when her father (Harmon Walsh) brushes off her opinions about the rink’s finances. Her spine straightens, her jaw tightens, and she slowly folds her arms into herself like a shield. That’s not just posture—it’s someone who knows how to brace for impact.

Where *Finding Her Edge* falters is when it tries to pass for a prestige sports drama without the budget to back it up. The editing around the skating feels choppy, as if it’s trying to hide the gap between the actors and their Olympic-caliber doubles. *Screen Rant*’s Eleane Kuiper hit it on the nose by noting the show “falls flat in the romance department while offering a grounded look at a highly competitive athletic family.” When the series pans out to show sweeping shots of the ice dancing, the illusion slips. You start waiting for them to leave the ice so the real tension can return.



Maybe that’s the point. For Adriana and her older sister Elise (a sharp, simmering Alexandra Beaton), the ice isn’t freedom—it’s a job. It’s a debt they owe to a ghost. By the time the eight-episode season wraps up its predictable fake-dating beats, what sticks is not the question of who Adriana will kiss but the weariness in her eyes the moment she finally takes her skates off. *Finding Her Edge* might be dressed like a breezy winter romance, but it understands something messier: sometimes the hardest part of having a gift is figuring out who you are when you’re not performing anymore.