Los Angeles, CA – As far as bingeable YA dramas go, Crew Girl is probably good enough. Following an elite teenage rower, Teagan (Miku Martineau), who joins the varsity boys’ crew team at a new school, Vivian Lin and Morwyn Brebner’s new Netflix series hits all the expected marks—filthy-rich mean kids, intrafamily feuds, an angsty love triangle, and many pretty shots of lakes—breezily enough to consume over a weekend. But as Teagan and her ultra-competitive teammates know, “good enough” is far from the same thing as “elite.”
Unlike some sports shows, the series treats athletics as the very sun around which its universe revolves. The premiere shows the inside of an Easton Prep classroom for the first and last time, explaining that since the recently coed institution has no girls’ rowing program, Teagan’s only way on a boat is to serve as coxswain for the boys. The love triangle that forms between Teagan and Josh (Sam Braun), the stereotypical wealthy asshole, and Cam (Kyle Clark), the stereotypical working-class townie, is standard-issue stuff on paper and not much more interesting in execution. The scripts struggle to express why any of these people might be attracted to each other beyond the fact that teen-drama formulas dictate it.
It’s in trying to build out the world outside of crew that Crew Girl stumbles. When I say everything in this series comes back to competitive rowing, I mean everything: the bitter Succession-lite infighting, Cam’s family’s financial struggles, and Baloo’s eventual romance. Any plot element not directly involved with crew is sidelined or outright ignored.
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This narrow focus does a disservice to intriguing subplots like that revolving around Teagan’s mother Ella (Jessica Paré), who is forced to start from rock bottom after being abandoned by her wealthy but criminal husband. Paré is quite good when she’s onscreen, but her growing confidence as a single working mom plays out in broad, irregular beats with little room for nuance. It’s a fantasy, I guess, to be the girl who gets to be one of the boys and the subject of all their adoration at the same time. Either way, Crew Girl goes over about as smoothly as a shell slicing through a silver lake on a breezeless morning. It also leaves behind about as many lasting ripples.
