Netflix’s ‘Crew Girl’ Isn’t the ‘Summer I Turned Pretty’ Replacement You’re Looking For
The ice isn’t the only arena making streamers horny for storytelling. Between Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, hockey has been mined so thoroughly that the open water is now auditioning for its turn. Crew Girl, Netflix’s newest teen soap, has all the predictable trappings: excessive voiceover narration, quiet luxury, and love interests with abs you could grate Parmesan on. It’s squeezing eight episodes of drama out of a different, though just as niche, school sport, and that’s the action that actually works. Crew Girl is cheesier than its competition, with a weaker love triangle and rougher performances — but, oddly enough, the rowing itself is good. In fact, it might be the only thing keeping the season from completely sinking.
What Is ‘Crew Girl’ About?
Crew Girl follows Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau), a 16-year-old rowing prodigy whose life is dismantled in the pilot’s first 10 minutes. She wins a singles’ sculls race as her parents — Ella (Jessica Paré), a woman who runs exclusively on positive vibes, and David (Byron Lawson), a hotelier embezzling funds from his friend group — cheer from the sidelines. Then, the FBI rushes in to let us all know that Teagan’s dad is about to become a headline. What follows is a familiar spiral into downward mobility, complete with a move to mom’s dumpy coastal hometown of Eagle’s Cove, and a dilapidated house in desperate need of an exorcism.
Eagle’s Cove exists somewhere on the Atlantic coast, in that Netflix rendering where old money has colonized every square inch of shoreline. The kids at Easton Prep, Teagan’s new school, arrive by chopper and spend their summers piling up crypto fortunes. Teagan gawks at it all. Her old life of private hotels and pay-to-play athletics was itself a tour of privilege, but the show treats her as an outsider anyway, hoping we won’t notice. At Easton, of course, there’s no girls’ rowing team, which means Teagan’s only option for staying on the water is to take the tiller of the boys’ varsity eight as their coxswain. Like every member of the 99 percent, we too did not know the meaning of that sentence before finishing this series. So, in layman’s terms, she’s in charge of steering the damn boat.
Half the season is Teagan grinding against ingrained misogyny for scraps of respect; the other half is the camera treating those same boys like a very generous buffet, complete with heaping helpings of shirtless, sweaty rowing-machine choreography set to EDM thumpers. It’s the kind of eye candy that starved fan-edit accounts are going to make a whole meal out of. Crew Girl, and we mean this affectionately, knows its audience. Every sport, as the running theory goes, can be gay if you squint hard enough, and this show is operating with its eyes glued shut.
Netflix’s ‘Crew Girl’ Has a One-Sided Love Triangle and a Family Plot That Won’t Quit
The love triangle here is where things get thin. Josh Regis (Sam Braun) is the standard arrogant prep-school captain, and Braun doesn’t add anything to the template. Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark), the quiet underdog with a chip on his shoulder, is more interesting. And Clark plays him that way, with a mix of sincerity and edge that only makes the romance more lopsided. You quickly get the feeling that one side of this triangle is doing all the work.
The family plot drags too. Every teen soap seems to feel it needs shitty parents to justify the kids acting out, and Crew Girl leans on that too hard. The FBI subplot, the mom-daughter fallout, the absentee dad… none of it goes anywhere, and all of it pulls focus from the team dynamics that should be driving the show. Paré is the only adult in the cast who can actually act her way through the material, and she even struggles to make sense of why the camera’s spending so much time on characters drinking Pinot in airplane hangars instead of Oakley-armed meatheads in tiny little boats.
Netflix’s ‘Crew Girl’ Is Fine — If You’re Here for the Boats
We’re wondering too, because, weirdly, the boathouse is the only place Crew Girl works. The rowing scenes are the surprise. Someone in the production clearly cares about the sport, and you can see it in every frame on the water. The coxswain moments, especially, with Teagan barking splits, reading the water, and correcting a stroke rate, are shot with the kind of care the show doesn’t bother to bring anywhere else. And the Haverford Cup arc in the back half is the closest the series gets to earning its plot. It’s not Friday Night Lights, obviously, but by the end, we were Googling what an erg is, and that’s more than most eight-episode teen soaps get out of anyone.
None of this makes Crew Girl good. The love triangle lacks spark, the dialogue is stiff, and outside of Clark and, to a lesser extent, Martineau, the cast is mostly just hitting marks. There are no teeth to the rich-kid satire or real stakes to the familial subplots. But if you’re the person this was built for — a YA romance junkie with a yacht club membership — it’s fine. Not what Netflix wants it to be, not as bad as it could have been.
Crew Girl is now available to stream on Netflix.
- Release Date
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September 12, 2026
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Vivian Lin
- Directors
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Alysse Leite-Rogers, Norman Buckley, Jacquie Gould, Simon Barry
- Writers
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Jennica Harper, Julian Doucet, Vivian Lin
Cast
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Jessica Pare
Ella Emerson-Tao
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- Crew Girl delivers on the shirtless-boys-on-rowing-machines promise, if that’s what you came for.
- The rowing scenes are well-shot and actually interesting to watch.
- The family scandal plot drags every episode down.
- Most of the supporting cast can’t act.
- It’s cheesier than the shows it’s trying to be.
