Partners Pickleball Documentary Review – Episodes 4-6 (Spoilers)

Gabriel Tardio (L) and Hayden Patriqun (R) are partners on the court for the MLP St. Louis Shock and best buddies off the court, as the documentary shows to great humor.

MLP

Note! This article contains spoilers for the last three episodes of the Partners Documentary! Do not read further unless you have watched the last three episodes or you don’t mind having the episodes spoiled!

The excellent new documentary series Partners dropped all six of its episodes this week. Hopefully by now Friday 5/8/26, you’ve had enough time to watch all six episodes.

Here’s a review of the last three episodes (click here for my review of the first three episodes).

In full disclosure before you read onwards, I was interviewed in July 2025 for this documentary, and I’m featured somewhat regularly throughout the first three episodes and periodically in the last three episodes. If you’re a cynic and believe this skews my opinion and recap of the show, I completely understand and feel free to move on from my review below. I received no payment for the interviews I gave, and I have no compensation or ownership stake in the film.

Episode three kind of ends without any real indication of where the series is going. It’s a natural break in the action, and most of the content we get in the next three episodes is not directly related to the first three.

Click here for Episode 4:

In episode four we get introduced to Kate Fahey, with her well-publicized head-paddle slam and a nice look into her home life at the time (she was just a few weeks away from getting married in mid 2025). Showrunner Dan Bradley named the Fahey story as his favorite of the documentary series. “There’s something really special with Fahey story. It is amazing how well she’s done with ALW, the most dominant athlete in the sport.”

We also get a nice little look at an exhibition event that the pros did with some adaptive athletes, a brief glimpse into the accessibility capabilities of the sport (I have a family member who is one of the top wheelchair pickleball players in the world in Zach Wentz, and he’s coming off a gold medal at the US Open).

After watching so much footage about the Bright/Rohrabacher breakup, we do get some insight into the Ben/Collin breakup as well, and his pivot to Gabe Tardio. We get a Ben Johns interview (Collin does not appear in this documentary as he chose not to participate). The tour pivots to the 2025 Cincinnati Showcase, held on the grounds of Lindner Family Tennis Center, and much of the back half of Episode four features court action from this event. This event was memorable because Waters and Bright lost in the semis (the Kawamoto sisters eventually won) after having also lost two weeks prior in Vegas, and cynics wondered if Waters was going to drop Bright the same way she suddenly dropped Parenteau. Spoiler alert: the pair has not lost since, at least as of this writing in late April 2026.

Episode 4 is absent of any “behind the scenes” stuff about the tour, and we barely see the likes of Odhwani or Pardoe or even yours truly. This may be because the well-publicized contract pivot push that the PPA tour was forcing in mid 2025 more or less fizzled out when a slew of the tour’s marquee players (including the two GOATs Johns and Waters) refused to sign the new contract structure. As of this writing, there was never any follow-up on the contract modification proposals floated to players in the first two episodes, and the tour seems set to let the remaining contracts play themselves out through 2026. An interesting topic for a possible season two of this show would be to talk about the impact on the players who are set to lose the most with this contract shift, though it would require more transparency than we normally get about salary structures and prize money in these events.

Click here for Episode 5:

In episode five, we get a hilarious look into what “the boys” do off-the court, and it seems generally to be “say the F-word while playing golf and trash talking each other.” This seems to be par for the course; pickleball players who primarily reside in Florida and who have lots of money and downtime are likely for frequent golf outings, and their hand-eye skills make them natural golfers as well. We also get a huge deep-dive into a couple of the tour’s youngest and best male players in Gabriel Tardio and Hayden Patriquin, roommates off the court (at least at the time) and MLP partners on the court with the St. Louis shock.

Side note: there is zero coverage of MLP in this series. We do get some interview time with MLP commissioner Samin Odhwani, but he is speaking from his PPA role as Chief Strategy Officer and not his MLP role. This is purposeful; for those on the outside of the pro pickleball world, it is difficult to explain what exactly MLP is, how the draft works, why the players don’t get any of the auction fees, and what exactly is at stake. I wonder though, if the excitement inherent to MLP and the new/different partnerships may end up being more interesting to cover at some future point. Says Executive Producer Mark Infante about the lack of MLP inclusion, “It was indeed a conscious decision. We had to lay the PPA league groundwork, and it would have been too difficult to add in another league and have the show make sense.”

Yours truly gets some additional screen time, including a hilarious anecdote I relayed about how a mom on tour listed “Hayden and Gabe” as the tour players she’d least recommend as baby sitters (I cannot at this juncture remember which player I was interviewing who gave me that line). This line is immediately followed by the two knuckleheads in a sand buggy outside of (presumably) Vegas tearing around and having fun. I’m sure their parents will be either cringing or shaking their heads (or both) when they see this segment. The best part of the “Gabe and Hayden” show in these episodes is Tardio being chided by Jessie Irvine (who he’s played a lot of Mixed doubles with and who may or may not be his girlfriend) for the amount of screen time he’s logging on his phone, even on match days. She grabs the phone to lookup his screen time and he’s north of 8 hours for the day … during which he also played multiple tournament matches. For screen-time conscious parents such as us, this made us cringe even more.

The directors do a very nice deep dive into Matt Wright, O.G. right side pro, and his split life between pickleball and the law. Surprisingly, given the “reality TV” nature of the show, we get no insight into the well-publicized break-up of Wright and Newman, which happened in June 2023. Perhaps it’s just old news at this point. I really enjoyed the insight into Wright’s home life with Lucy Kovalova, their dog “Dink,” and his thoughtful discussions on his place in the game. Kovalova told me a bit about the experience ahead of the documentary release; “We were honored and thankful that they and the PPA thought we were important enough to feature.”

In this section, I get a return to the screen with a bit of discussion on “left-side” players versus “right-side” players, when discussing Wright’s role and the rise of the more aggressive right-siders like Tardio and Patriquin. It ends up being essentially the last time I’m on screen as the focus of the second half of the series was clearly a deep dive into the players and less about the tour operations itself.

Click here for Episode 6:

Episode six was almost entirely on-court action as film series finishes with the 2026 Masters Slam and yet another Triple Crown for Anna Leigh. We get some insight into the Fed-Hayden partnership which started out so promising in mid-to-late 2025, and we end the first season with champions crowned in Palm Springs. The behind the scenes and “reality TV” angles mostly abated for the final episode and we got a very action-heavy finish to the season.

Amazingly, the filming finished in mid January but the six-episode series was ready for release in mid April, a very fast turnaround. The team knows just how fast the Pickleball world moves, and turned around the final product more quickly than they normally would as a result. Says Bradley, “Most of these things come out one year after. We were already editing in May last year, starting to work through
storylines with months of filming to go.” Adds Infante, “we saved some wiggle room in case something crazy happened in early 2026, but this is how we were able to release so quickly.”

Interestingly, as I finished the sixth episode, I found myself thinking about the 150+ players on tour and took note of some of the “characters” who were notably absent. Tyson McGuffin, Riley Newman, Lea Jansen in particular. They did not interview any of the “famous ex-tennis” players who committed to the tour (Sock, Querrey, Bouchard, and Young), instead keeping the focus on the top pickleball-only stars. The producers discussed who would be compelling going forward, and explained that these players just did not fit into the season 1 personality storylines as well as those who did appear extensively.

There are also a slew of names who would make for awesome content, but who are not nearly as relevant on tour as they used to be (players like Julian Arnold, Ryan Sherry, James Ignatowich, and Rafa Hewitt in particular). I wonder if their time for a show like this in the year 2026 is just too late; were this 2023 we’d likely be having a different conversation.

The sixth episode teases a second season with interviews with the likes of Lea Jansen, Allyce Jones, and Hurricane Tyra Black, and we’re set up for a new season that follows the tour’s spring 2026 season. Even though the end of the documentary makes it seem like Season 2 is imminent, there is nothing officially in the works right now. Says Infante, “We are not filming now, but we are thinking about it. If enough people love the first season, we’ll have a season 2. We feel there’s a lot of people we could meet in the future and we are excited to do something in the future.”

So, a if you’re a fan of this film, the answer for a Season 2 will be ratings; make sure all your friends and family tune in and watch.

Conclusion: as I mentioned in the first review, I think the footage of the ball action is awesome and captures views we don’t normally see. The coverage of the off-the-court personalities was a great starting point, and I think there’s a rich set of players to expand to in 2026. They got nearly a whole episode from the Duong termination; imagine what they could get from the Ignatowich situation? James is out there, is a character, and is more than willing to talk about what went down.

I hope we get another season, and the bigger the sport gets, the more likely it is we get one sooner than later.