Netflix's 'Crew Girl' Isn't the 'Summer I Turned Pretty' Replacement You're Looking For | Review

Published Sep 10, 2026, 3:01 AM EDT

Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women’s sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She’s covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling’s best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.

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.

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.

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