'Crew Girl' Review: Serviceable Teen Drama Is Breezy Fun
When The CW was acquired by Nexstar Media Group in 2022, television lost its primary hub for teen drama of all stripes, from the supernatural (The Vampire Diaries) and the simply soapy (Gossip Girl) to a startlingly strange mix of both (Riverdale). With network TV inundated with procedurals and medical dramas, streamers have been left to pick up the slack.
Prime Video has gleefully thrown itself into programming aimed at teens and young adults, and has reaped the success of soapy recent hits like The Summer I Turned Pretty, We Were Liars, Sterling Point, and Off Campus. Netflix hasn't exactly been a slouch in this department either, thanks to shows like Heartstopper, My Life with the Walter Boys, and The Outer Banks. And it's clearly hoping its latest offering, the YA sports drama, Crew Girl, will help fill a similar void.
A fairly traditional coming-of-age story with a hefty dash of romance and a strictly PG rating, nothing about Crew Girl is reinventing the wheel in this genre or will be particularly surprising to folks who've ever seen a show like this before. Yet, its breezy vibes, gorgeous scenery, and comfortingly familiar plot beats make this a delightfully easy binge. No, it's not going to set the world on fire. (And no matter what the headlines tell you, it has almost nothing in common with Heated Rivalry.) But it's cute and fun, and these days, that counts for a lot.
Crew Girl follows Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau), a talented single sculls rower with big-name college scholarship dreams. Her life is turned upside down when her luxury hotelier father is accused of misappropriating tens of millions of dollars and subsequently disappears. Forced to leave her friends and posh California lifestyle behind, she and her mother move to Ella's (Jessica Paré) quiet hometown of Eagle's Cove, Massachusetts. And she's not exactly immediately thrilled with its small-town vibes or the students at swanky private school Easton Prep. (Her educational trust fund is the only bit of the family's money the FBI didn't confiscate.)
Easton is...pretty much what you'd expect from a school that only started admitting girls two years ago, which is also why it doesn't have a female crew team for Teagan to join. But when she finds herself working off a punishment for breaking into the boathouse to "borrow" a scull to train with, she's thrown into the orbit of the boys' rowing team, and an offhand comment about the (lack of) success of their current group makeup puts her on the coach's (Thomas Cadrot) radar. Soon enough, she's the group's new coxswain, back on the water...but just not in the way she'd hoped.
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Sure, Teagan has zero experience being a coxswain. It makes almost no sense that she should be good at it, let alone as quickly as she is. (I can't imagine all rowing skills are immediately transferable!) But her love for the sport is evident, and the show isn't shy about showing her putting in the work to train and improve right alongside the boys.
The men of the Easton rowing team fit neatly into basic character types. There's Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark), a talented scholarship kid who gets mockingly called FAID ("Financial Aid") by his teammates. Josh Regis (Sam Braun) is a sixth-generation Easton legacy whose family name adorns the boathouse the group trains in.
His cousin Ryder (Connor Paton) has always been stuck in Josh's shadow. Bronson "Baloo" Garner (Jude Wilson) is the lovable workhorse that everyone likes; Perry (Connor Wong) is the team's most flamboyant (and well-dressed) member. Damon (Vincent Muller) is the jokester, and Noah (Riley Davis) is the philosopher. Poor Chris Padmore (Jarrett Carlington) is called "Crab Catcher" because he's the weakest member of the squad and most likely to make the costly mistake that his mocking nickname is derived from.
Throughout the season, the guys on the boat all have their own issues and internal rivalries: Josh and Ryder's lives are an endless competition for their grandfather's approval, while Cam and Josh clash about who should lead the team, and Baloo's trying to hide his hook-up with a member of a rival squad. (They're also shirtless fairly frequently, just so everyone knows.) But most of the boys are defined by their relationships to Teagan — who ultimately becomes something of a youth group-style den mother to the team at large, doling out advice, giving inspirational pep talks, listening to problems, and kicking their butts when they need it.
Is this team possibly a little too accepting and easygoing when it comes to the idea of a young woman crashing their all-male sports party? Probably. (Remember, these are teenage boys.) But their genuine affection for her skills as a leader, her talent as a rower, and just for Teagan as herself is warm and refreshing. There are plenty of shows out there if you want to watch teen boys be awful to their female classmates; I'm here to support one that keeps its "OMG, we're losing to a girl!!" vibes to a minimum.
Still, if this show gets a second season, I'm really going to need Teagan to get some actual female friends. Poor Juliet (Olga Petsa) cannot hold it down for the sisterhood all on her own, and Brittney (Sage Linder) does not count.
Because this is a teen drama, of course there's also a love triangle, and Teagan finds herself drawn to both working-class Cam and rich boy who's finally considering actually working on himself, Josh, but there's nothing cruel or catty about any of their interactions, just accidents of timing and divergent goals. Both boys are presented as viable options for Teagan for different reasons, and it's easy to see why either could ultimately win her heart. (I'm Team Cam, for the record, but to Braun's credit, his performance deftly conveys that there's more to Josh than meets the eye.)
Since the show is called Crew Girl, rowing features prominently and often, from training sessions to gorgeously shot races. Martineau is both believable and likeable as the show's central heroine, and the vibes of Eagle's Cove are quirky without becoming cloying. In the end, Crew Girl isn't the kind of series that's going to stick with you too terribly long after the credits roll. Still, it's pleasantly easy to watch, and makes for a satisfying weekend binge.
Crew Girl is now streaming on Netflix.
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