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, Vixpected marks — filthy-rich mean kids, intrafamily feuds, an angsty love triangle and many pretty shots of lakes — breezily enough to consume over a weekend for viewers who can’t get enough of this specificandveryprolificgenre
But as Teagan and her ultra-competitive teammates know, “good enough” is far from the same thing as “elite.” While the show can be endearing in flashes — and while its affection for the sport shines brightly enough that you might find yourself daydreaming about taking up an oar yourself — underdeveloped characters and an under-explored world leave it short of a transporting experience.
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Unlike some sports shows (even some very good ones), the series does not treat athletics as incidental, but as the very sun around which this entire verdant and sun-dappled universe revolves. The premiere shows us the inside of an Easton Prep classroom for the first and last time, and does the expository work of explaining that since this only recently coed institution has no girls’ rowing program for Teagan to join, her only way of getting on a boat is to serve as coxswain (the non-rowing member who helps steer and coordinate the team) for the boys.
How precisely this furthers Teagan’s lifelong goal of getting recruited to Stanford as a solo female rower is somewhat unclear. But it makes for an ideal excuse to treat us to many drone shots of serene fir-ringed lakes, or action shots of athletes heaving back and forth in satisfying unison — as well as to surround Teagan with eight cute, ripped, frequently shirtless fellows obligated to hang on her every word, though the two she’s primarily concerned with are Josh (Sam Braun), the stereotypical wealthy asshole whose family name hangs over the school’s boathouse, and Cam (Kyle Clark), the stereotypical working-class townie painfully aware of how little he fits in among this blue-blooded milieu.
The love triangle that inevitably forms between Teagan and the two of them is standard-issue stuff on paper and not much more interesting in execution, as 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. Perhaps to compensate, Martineau plays Teagan’s attraction to both potential suitors with an overwrought sultriness that feels out of sync with how long it’ll take the character to actually be getting around to smooching one of them.
Besides, all three involved seem in agreement that whatever their hearts or hormones are pushing them toward is less important than the sport to which they’ve all dedicated so much of their lives, and upon which they’ve pinned all their hopes and dreams. If nothing else, the show’s prioritization of the athletic angle, with the close-knit team dynamics and regular bouts of competition it entails, sets it apart from so many otherwise similar YA series.
It can yield some sweet moments predicated on the idea that, as Teagan puts it, “people who wouldn’t be your people become your people” by virtue of being on the same team. I was touched by a minor storyline in which Baloo (Jude Wilson), the outgoing one, shyly asks his boat bros to help pick out a thirst trap to send to a hot dude online, and amused by another in which Noah (Off Campus‘ Riley Davis), the nerdiest of the bunch, struggles to make this group of strapping jocks play along with the Roaring ’20s murder mystery he has so misguidedly organized for their post-race afterparty.
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 between Josh and his slightly less blue-blooded cousin, Ryder (Connor Paton), Cam’s family’s financial struggles, Baloo’s eventual romance with the internet guy. Even Teagan’s choice between her two would-be suitors seems to be understood by all three of them as being as much about who she considers a better athlete as who she thinks would make a better boyfriend and/or hookup buddy.
Any plot element not directly involved with crew is sidelined or outright ignored (if Teagan so much as cracks open a laptop to do some homework, I don’t remember it). This narrow focus does a disservice to intriguing subplots like that revolving around Teagan’s mother Ella (Jessica Paré), who’s forced to start rock bottom in the hometown she hates after being abandoned by her wealthy but criminal husband. Paré is quite good when she’s onscreen, serving a layer cake of forced optimism, barely concealed disappointment and proud determination, and she conjures a believably loving chemistry with Martineau. But her growing confidence as a single working mom plays out in broad, irregular beats with little room for nuance.
Teagan is granted exactly one non-crew friend — an artsy classmate named Juliet (Olga Petsa), who makes a literally fiery first impression by setting fire to her own car in the premiere as a cry for attention from her emotionally distant parents, and then disappears for such long stretches that it’s a surprise when the show occasionally reminds you they’re besties. Especially since otherwise, Crew Girl positions Teagan as the somewhat tiresome cliché of the cool girl who can hang — in sharp opposition to girly girls like Josh’s sweetheart Britney (Sage Linder), who is portrayed as unreasonably jealous, ruthlessly ambitious and one-dimensionally unpleasant.
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. I’m not even sure if it’s the one Crew Girl means to advance, or if it’s simply too thinly written to support characters and relationships more complex than the familiar tropes they’re built on. 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.
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