Miku Martineau plays Teagan Tao, a championship rower whose L.A. life and dreams of Stanford and Olympic glory are disrupted when it turns out her hotelier father has defrauded investors out of millions of dollars; he goes on the lam in the middle of her latest race. Friends and money gone, mother Ella (Jessica Par\u00e9) hauls them east to fictional Eagle\u2019s Cove, Mass., Ella\u2019s old, unloved hometown. \u201cMy life as I knew it was over,\u201d Teagan says in voiceover, leaving you to correctly predict the kicker: \u201cBut little did I know, my new life was just beginning.\u201d (Cue opening titles.)<\/p>\n
Unaware that Teagan\u2019s educational trust fund has also gone with the wind, Ella has enrolled her in posh Eaton Prep, which has a men\u2019s rowing team \u2014 low-ranked \u2014 but, as it turns out, no female rowers whatsoever. Even though Teagan was a person of privilege up until the first minutes of the series, she is temperamentally a girl of the people, unspoiled, unentitled, unbiased; so it is with Ella, who, after a brief spell of dissembling is back working unashamedly at Jim\u2019s Crab Shack. Crew coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot), who knew Ella back when, calls her \u201cthe girl who got a second job to buy a car to drive to her first.\u201d They are townies at heart.<\/p>\n
Because there is no opportunity for her to row at Eaton \u2014 and won\u2019t be, says nice Coach Hayden, until the men\u2019s team starts winning races and gets donors excited \u2014 the script arranges for her to become coxswain instead, the person who faces the rowers and guides and encourages them. The boys in the boat will take a moment to accept her, but things have a way of working out in this show, including the question of Teagan\u2019s tuition, and once they win a race \u2014 that\u2019s not a spoiler, but an inevitability \u2014 they\u2019ll start to come around.<\/p>\n
![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1789032376_171_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Cam (Kyle Clark), left, and Josh (Sam Braun) are rowing teammates who become entangled with Teagan.<\/p>\n
(Craig Minielly \/ Netflix)<\/p>\n
Naturally, the series is designed to satisfy certain teenage desires; not unusually, the main romance is triangular. Teagan is the Archie to Betty and Veronica teammates Cam (Kyle Clark) and Josh (Sam Braun). Cam, who works in his father\u2019s garage and is called \u201cFaid\u201d for \u201cfinancial aid,\u201d she meets cute, crashing a bicycle into his truck and somersaulting into the bed. (Which is not at all to say his bed; he\u2019s not that kind of guy, and it\u2019s not that kind of show.) Josh, by ineluctable contrast, is an entitled rich kid whose father, a slick bully, paid for the fancy boathouse. In the usual way, he and Teagan will be antagonists before they\u2019re not. \u201cHow can someone be so compelling and repulsive at the same time?\u201d Teagan asks her friend Juliet (Olga Petsa), who is very, very rich, but not a jerk, and the character\/actor I most wanted to see more of.<\/p>\n
Josh is also competitive with, and looks down upon, his half brother and teammate, Ryder (Connor Paton), over who gets the important \u201cstroke seat\u201d in the scull, which might eventually decide which one of them will inherit grandpa\u2019s airplane business. Meanwhile, Josh\u2019s girlfriend, academy queen bee Britney (Sage Linder), described by Juliet as \u201cvoted most likely to win in a land war in Asia,\u201d is anxious to get Teagan out of the picture, one way or another. But there is more desperation than evil in their characters.<\/p>\n
There\u2019ll be races, and troublemaking and getting in trouble, tears and triumphs, parties, a fall formal and underage drinking, as well as plenty of grown-up business for Ella to contend with. If \u201cCrew Girl\u201d is formulaic in its broad strokes, nice details are worked in among them. There\u2019s sculling lingo to learn \u2014 eight seat, catching a crab, puddles, the engine room, rushing the slide. A romantic moment is built around the question of popping a rower\u2019s blister. Scenes designed to advance the plot feel more contrived than ones in which characters just share thoughts and feelings, but there are plenty of those. It might seem like fluff if you\u2019re not paying attention, but it\u2019s worth looking a little harder.<\/p>\n
Developed by Vivian Lin and Morwyn Brebner, \u201cCrew Girl\u201d is a Canadian show, filmed in British Columbia (though set here, to please domestic tastes), which speaks to a certain modesty in the production, a straightforward presentation that restrains rather than emphasizes the melodrama, and which I do think of as particularly Canadian. It also means that the cast will be largely unfamiliar to most Americans, with the notable exception of Par\u00e9, whom many will know as Megan (so great) on \u201cMad Men\u201d<\/a> and, given that it ran on CBS before transitioning to Netflix, many more might recognize from \u201cSEAL Team.\u201d (She\u2019s Canadian too). But the actors are all able, so that even the ones obviously cast (in part) for their beauty \u2014 between the people, and the scenery and the shells on the water, it\u2019s a nice show to look at \u2014 read as human. The worst of them have their wounds and sadness and medical conditions.<\/p>\n \u201cRowing, like life, is a constant state of resetting yourself,\u201d says Teagan, explaining the four-stage cycle of a stroke. So you get a little philosophy, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Out of all the YA series on all the streamers in all the world, why have I decided…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[181116,6193,181114,181117,127979,48,52,51,181115,181119,47,50,49,181113,9233,24488,101912,181118,1860,181112,8843],"class_list":["post-459221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-championship-rower","tag-character","tag-crew-girl","tag-hotelier-father","tag-josh","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-late-race","tag-late-ya-show","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mother-ella","tag-netflix","tag-romance","tag-rowing","tag-scull","tag-show","tag-teagan-tao","tag-way"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}