Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Orlando Bloom: To The Edge’ On Peacock, Where The Actor Pushes Himself To Learn Three Dangerous Sports

In Orlando Bloom: To The Edge, the adventure-seeking actor trains in three extreme and dangerous sports: Wingsuiting, free diving and rock climbing. The goal is to push him mentally, emotionally and physically to places that he hasn’t been before. To make these adventures extra challenging, he’ll learn to do these extreme sports in a compressed period of time.

ORLANDO BLOOM: TO THE EDGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from the three episodes of Orlando Bloom: To The Edge, with the actor saying in voice over, says, “My greatest fear is that if I don’t overcome my fear, it’ll consume me.”

The Gist: In the first episode, Bloom learns wingsuitting, something that’s taken up by skydivers with years of experience. Bloom, though, has only jumped out of an airplane once in his life, and that was a tandem jump with an instructor. In two weeks, he not only will jump enough to receive an A license, which happens after 25 jumps, but then he’ll train in a wing suit, which will allow him to glide instead of fall straight down. The goal is that, after two weeks, he’ll be able to use the wing suit to jump over the ocean three miles from the shore and land on the beach.

With the help of Luke Aikins, a veteran skydiver and wingsuiter, Bloom spends the first week of his training doing those first 25 jumps in order to get his A license. The idea is that the A license indicates that a skydiver can jump, deploy his or her chute and navigate their way to the ground without assistance.

Of course, Bloom takes to it, but not without some hiccups; during his seventh jump, he has to let his primary chute go and deploy his secondary chute, something that Aikins says happens “once in a thousand” jumps. After marveling he’s still alive, he calls his partner, Katy Perry, to tell her about it. She asks how many chutes he has; she seems a bit alarmed when he tells her that he only had those two.

The 21st jump is with Bloom’s uncle, Christopher Copeland, who is 80 and has jumped almost 800 times over the last half-century. When he gets his A license, he’s ready for the wing suit. But will Bloom be able to navigate with the suit and get the mileage he needs to make that jump over the Pacific?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Orlando Bloom: To The Edge reminds us a bit of Down To Earth With Zac Efron, but with more of an extreme sports bent.

Our Take: There isn’t really much in the way of twists and turns in Orlando Bloom: To The Edge. Bloom meets the people who are going to train him to do these dangerous sports, he trains, then he accomplishes his goal. In the wing suit episode, it’s that three mile glide over the Pacific. In the free diving episode, it’s diving down 100 feet in one breath, without the help of oxygen. In the rock climbing episode, it’s climbing up a 400-foot cliff.

Your enjoyment of the series is really going to depend on how much you enjoy watching Bloom pushing himself and chanting to himself in order to help alleviate his self-doubt and boost his confidence.

There is some awesome photography, and we can tell that the camera and sound people are with Bloom as he trains and advances towards his goal. And Bloom is humble enough to know that what he’s attempting, and the time frame he’s attempting it in, is insane and definitely dangerous. He seems to acknowledge that the closer he gets to death with these activities, the more clarity he has, and he acknowledges that with Perry and their two kids waiting for him, he wants to go about learning these sports the right way.

But the episodes clock in at close to an hour, and it gets to the point where the training scenes generate diminishing returns. Did we need to see Bloom reacting to the death of Queen Elizabeth during one of the first days of his training? Nope. His discussions with his best friend about how being close to death could be cut right out and wouldn’t be missed. Much of that first week of dives could have been shortened.

The show isn’t as big of an ego stroke as we thought it might be, but it’s not exactly full of actual conflict or scenes where Bloom is in any real danger. Without that, it becomes an hour of a famous person learning to do something most people will never do. If we could put the shrug emoji here, we would.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: Well, given that Bloom is still with us and is healthy, what do you think the last shot of the episode might be? Complete failure and bodily harm?

Sleeper Star: Perry is as sanguine about these challenges as Bloom is, even though she does pay lip service to the fact that the three months he’s shooting the show would be stressful for her and their family. But she chants along with Bloom during their phone calls, and actually comes out to witness one of his jumps. So she’s not the typical worried SO.

Most Pilot-y Line: There were way more exclamations of “Dude!” and “Man!” than a 47-year-old father of two should be saying. Then again, we’re not jumping out of airplanes, so what do we know?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Again, Orlando Bloom: To The Edge isn’t the ego-stroking exercise we thought it would be. The show, which actually has a lot going for it, just needs some tighter editing.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.