‘Crew Girl’ Review: Netflix’s New YA Rowing Drama Finds Its Rhythm, Even When the Script Doesn’t

Teagan Tao’s life capsizes long before she ever steps into a boat. When her father’s financial crimes force her and her mother out of their comfortable Los Angeles existence and back to a small Massachusetts town, the sixteen year old single sculler loses her sport, her friends, and her sense of who she is, all in one summer.

‘Crew Girl’ picks up from there, following Teagan as she enrolls at the elite Easton Prep only to learn the school has no girls’ rowing team. Her workaround is becoming coxswain for the boys’ varsity crew, a chaotic, status obsessed group she has to whip into shape while managing family fallout at home and a slow burning rivalry turned romance with two of her new teammates. It is the kind of setup that could have played as one long underdog sports montage, and there are moments early on where it threatens to.

What actually keeps the show afloat is how much it commits to rowing as a metaphor for everything else happening in Teagan’s life. She spends the first several episodes learning that control does not mean doing it all herself, and watching that lesson play out through an actual boat, where one selfish stroke throws off seven other people, gives the series a spine that a lot of teen dramas never bother building. It is a smarter structural choice than the genre usually gets credit for, even when the dialogue surrounding it is not always doing the same heavy lifting.

Miku Martineau carries the show almost entirely on her own shoulders, and she is genuinely good at it. Her Teagan is stubborn without being insufferable, wounded without becoming a mope, and the show is smart enough to let her be prickly instead of instantly likable. The supporting cast fares less evenly. Josh and Cam, the two boys orbiting Teagan’s affections, are sketched mostly through their rivalry rather than as people with lives outside the boathouse, and the show’s insistence on filtering nearly every subplot through the lens of competitive rowing starts to feel less like thematic discipline and more like a lack of imagination by the back half of the season.

The visual side of the production deserves real credit. The rowing sequences have a physicality and clarity that a lot of sports dramas fumble, and the show clearly put in the work to make the racing scenes feel tactile rather than staged. Where it falters is in the connective tissue, the scenes meant to deepen the world beyond the water, which too often lean on genre shorthand instead of earning their emotional beats honestly.

None of that makes ‘Crew Girl’ a bad watch. It is comfort television in the truest sense, the kind of show you can move through in a weekend without ever feeling like you have to think too hard, and there is real craft in how it uses its central sport rather than just decorating a teen soap with it. I just wish the writing trusted its characters half as much as it trusts its premise.

Taken as a whole, ‘Crew Girl’ is a solidly entertaining debut season that never quite becomes the show its best ideas suggest it could be. I am landing on 7 out of 10, a score that reflects a series with real craft and a star making performance, held back by a supporting cast and a script that rarely row in sync with each other.

Did ‘Crew Girl’ win you over or leave you drifting? Drop your verdict in the comments.