Before you press play
Watch if
You want easy escapism about good-looking rich teenagers, a love triangle and a sport teen dramas almost never touch.
Wait if
You need a cast that can carry a dramatic scene, or a story with more weight than a weekend soap.
Is Crew Girl worth watching?
Crew Girl is not a bad show, and it is not a good one either. It is good enough to watch, a light and good-looking weekend of escapism, as long as you don't look too hard at the acting.
The eight episodes landed on Netflix on 10 September 2026 and follow a teenage rower dropped into a rich prep school on the American East Coast. The setting is the one genuinely fresh idea here. We have seen plenty of love triangles and plenty of teen sports shows, but nearly all of them pick a sport everyone already knows. Rowing is unusually fresh ground for this kind of teen drama, and the show clearly loves it.
Almost everything around that idea is familiar, and a lot of it is thin.
The story has a couple of genuinely strong threads but piles far too much on top of them, the script is simple, and the performances wobble whenever a scene turns serious. What holds it together is the rowing, the scenery, and a crew you end up rooting for.
What Crew Girl is about
Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau) is a 16-year-old single sculler from California with a promising rowing future, until her father's fraud scandal wipes the family out. She and her mother, Ella (Jessica Paré), move to a small New England town, and Teagan starts at Easton Prep, a school where some students arrive by helicopter.
There is no girls' rowing team. So she takes the only seat on the water left to her: coxswain for the boys' varsity boat, the person who steers and calls the race rather than rowing it.
That puts her in a boat with Josh Regis (Sam Braun), the entitled golden boy whose family name is on the boathouse, and Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark), a local boy on financial aid who happens to be the best rower on the team. You can guess the shape of the love triangle from there.
Why rowing makes Crew Girl different
Sports romance is a crowded shelf, and the sport is usually the part you already know by heart. Rowing isn't. Eight boys moving as one on still water, with a 16-year-old girl in the back shouting the rhythm at them, gives a very worn setup something to look at that you haven't seen a hundred times.
It is also where the show is at its best. Whenever the crew is on the water or training together, the teamwork looks real. Part of the reason is that these scenes are physical: they ask the cast to move as one, not to carry an emotional moment on their faces, and the show is far more comfortable with the first than the second.
The indoor rowing competition later in the season works for the same reason.
Teagan and the Easton crew
After the sport, the crew itself is the show's best idea. At the start, the boys fight constantly among themselves, but they close ranks the moment someone from outside pushes in, and Teagan is exactly that someone.
She meets real resistance, and she learns to use the crew's rivalries to her advantage. Then the setbacks keep coming. What makes the arc work is that she stops trying to beat the team and starts being part of it.
By the end of the season, the payoff is earned, and it is genuinely good to see. The crew's camaraderie has plenty of smaller moments like that along the way.
The rich kids of Easton Prep
The rich-kid setting is part of the appeal. Shows about absurdly wealthy teenagers are rarely great and reliably popular. Crew Girl has some of Gossip Girl's vibe, and gives its audience the surface of that world: students arriving by helicopter, a boathouse named after your family, parents who deliver bad news through a paid celebrity video message.
The trouble is that the money rarely looks like money. Josh's Regis Airlines-themed birthday party in episode 3 is supposed to show off a fortune, and it looks cheap and badly designed. The rich characters behave the way TV rich people behave, and that is as far as it goes.
The Regis family politics don't help. Josh's grandfather runs an airline, yet treats rowing as the test of which grandson deserves a future in the business. That is a hard idea to take seriously as business logic, and the rivalry between Josh and his cousin Ryder Regis (Connor Paton) is badly handled and not much fun to sit through.
Where money does work is on the other side of it. Teagan is suddenly poor among the very rich: an ex-rich girl who knows the rules of this world but can no longer pay to play by them. Cam is the kid who never could. Here and there, that gives the show something solid to stand on.
Her father's case, meanwhile, sits deliberately in the background. The show is far more interested in Teagan fitting into her new life than in the crime that forced her into it.
Miku Martineau as Teagan Tao
The show is built around Teagan. She is in almost every scene, the title is about her, and the story starts and ends with her. Yet she rarely feels like the lead.
Part of that is the writing. Crew Girl runs so many subplots (two boys, a family feud, a mother starting over, a crew full of secrets) that the attention keeps drifting away from her. But even when she is at the centre of a scene, the scene doesn't gather around her.
Riverdale at least had a story driving it, and leads who pulled every scene toward themselves: Archie, Betty and Veronica each held the room whenever they were in it. Martineau doesn't, yet.
By the end of the season, it plays like an ensemble of supporting players with nobody at the centre. Crew Girl isn't written or shot as an ensemble, so the gap shows.
Sam Braun and the Crew Girl cast
The acting across the cast is weak, but it is rarely a disaster. This is a young, mostly early-career cast, and they are attractive and charming enough to hold your attention. There are scenes where it works. It just never gets past fine, and if you look closely, you notice.
Where it breaks is the serious conversations. When a scene needs weight, such as bad news, a real argument or someone in trouble, the cast can't pull it off, and those moments land as lightly as the party scenes.
The adults don't rescue it. The will-they-won't-they romance between Ella and Coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot) never looks remotely like two people who would end up together, and neither performance sells it.
The closest thing to an exception is Braun. He gets the most to play, the arrogant heir with something softer underneath, and he comes nearer than anyone else to making it land. If there is a performance in Crew Girl worth pointing at, it's his.
Camera work and locations
The locations are beautiful, and the photography makes the most of them. The Massachusetts town and its school are fictional: the show was filmed around Victoria on Vancouver Island, with local lakes and waterways as the rowing courses and Hatley Castle standing in for Easton Prep.
The dialogue scenes are a different story. A lot of conversations are shot from behind the actor who is speaking. Maybe it is meant to show off the backdrop. Either way, it doesn't work, because in the scenes that most need faces, you often can't see one.
Story and tone
Crew Girl's story does have a couple of real heavyweights. The biggest belongs to Josh: a boy trying to prove himself to a family that only ever talks about rowing, and who will not give up, whatever it costs him. It is genuinely sad, and it gives Braun his best material.
The trouble is everything piled around it. In the middle of the season, the crew's scandals stack up so fast that a lot of it stops being believable and tips over the top. Around that sit more subplots than the show can handle, such as Juliet Morny (Olga Petsa) and her absent parents. About half of them never land, and the other half just feel strange.
Most of the time the tone stays light, a soapy hangout with races in between.
The script has no depth, but it is clear, and nobody will get lost. For a show about good-looking people trying to win a race while sorting out a love triangle, that is about enough.
Crew Girl earns its two and a half for the rowing, the crew, the scenery and a cast that is easy to spend time with. It loses the rest whenever it has to get serious, and whenever it tries to do too much at once. If a second season arrives, it will still be worth a weekend. Escapism doesn't need to be great to work.
The love triangle. Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau) dates Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark) first, with tacos in the back of his truck and a date to the fall formal, but his embarrassment about money wrecks the formal. That night, Josh Regis (Sam Braun) finds her in the boathouse and they hook up. Episode 6 briefly puts her back with Cam before the two of them end it.
Josh's heart. Josh has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that makes rowing dangerous. Terrified of what his family will think, he bribes a doctor for medication so he can keep racing. The sad part is that his grandfather only values him while he is winning on the water, and Josh keeps going because he still has something to prove. The truth comes out after he blacks out at the wheel with Teagan in the passenger seat and crashes. She stays with him, and he finally tells her. When his family finds out, his father stands by him, the one saving grace in the Regis family politics. His grandfather writes him off the moment he can't row. It is the season's most serious storyline, and it gives Braun the most to do.
The sawn oar. The stroke's oar snaps in the middle of a race against rival school Westvale. Noah Bainbridge (Riley Davis) turns his murder-mystery party into a real investigation, and the trail leads to Logan (Tyler Roberge), a Westvale rower whom Baloo Garner (Jude Wilson) had left alone in the boathouse after a hookup. An episode later, Logan tells Baloo the truth: Josh sawed the oar himself, sabotaging his own boat because he was terrified his heart would give out mid-race. He confesses to the crew without giving the real reason. The show does come back to it, but for a betrayal that serious, it lands far more lightly than it should.
Baloo and Logan. Two rowers from rival schools falling for each other is a nice Romeo-and-Juliet idea, and they do end up back together. The romance never lands, though, mostly because Logan's side of it never convinces.
The rigged rowing machine. At the indoor qualifiers, with a scout from the junior national team watching, Josh's cousin and rival Ryder Regis (Connor Paton) pays Cam $48,000 to lose. When Teagan finds out, she swaps onto Cam's machine and jams blister tape into it. The fault wipes out both their scores, giving Cam another shot at the Olympic pathway at the risk of her own chance in front of the scout.
Her father. David Tao (Byron Lawson), on the run since the FBI raid, comes back with a plan to blackmail his business partner and restore the family's old life. Teagan tells him she would rather he turned himself in. He watches her final race, then does exactly that. It is a tidy ending for a storyline the show never cared much about.
The Haverford Cup. Race officials rule that either Cam or Teagan tampered with the machine, and the principal orders Coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot) to pull the guilty one from the boat. Teagan steps aside, and one by one the whole crew refuses to row without her until Hayden puts her back in. It is the moment the season has been building to, and it is genuinely good to see. Josh gives up the stroke seat to Cam, and the crew rows together to silver, Easton's first trip back to the podium. Hayden takes the blame and is fired.
Too much at once. The back half stacks a bribe, a rigged machine, Teagan being pulled from the boat and a firing on top of the heart scare, after a middle stretch already crowded with infighting. Some of it is hard to believe, and a lot of it is simply over the top.
The ending. In the final minutes, Josh tells Teagan he has a lot of work to do on himself, and hopes that when he is done, she will give him a second chance. Moments later Cam finds her, and they kiss. Coming straight after Josh's goodbye, it plays less like a cliffhanger than like Teagan keeping both boys on the hook. The last word goes to Britney Garner (Sage Linder), Josh's ex, who has quietly been learning to row (partly, she admits, to get over Josh by beating him at the thing he loves) and has talked the school into starting its first girls' team. That leaves Teagan choosing between the boys' boat and her own rowing career, and creates a clear storyline for a possible second season.
Bright Bulbs
- Rowing is a genuinely fresh setting, and the rowing and training scenes are the best in the show because the teamwork is physical.
- Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau) slowly winning over a crew that fights constantly but closes ranks against outsiders is the season's best arc.
- The locations and water photography are beautiful, and the young cast is attractive and charming enough to keep you watching.
- Josh Regis (Sam Braun) is the strongest performance, and his fight to prove himself to his family is the one genuinely sad storyline.
- Teagan falling from rich to poor, beside financial-aid student Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark), gives the soap something solid.
Dull Bulbs
- The script has no depth, but it is clear and easy to follow, which is about enough for what the show wants to be.
- The acting is weak across the board, though for a young, mostly early-career cast it rarely tips into disaster.
- The love triangle is exactly the one you expect from the first episode.
- The father's fraud scandal that starts everything stays deliberately in the background for most of the season.
Shattered Bulbs
- Serious conversations fall flat, and shooting many of them from behind the speaker leaves you without faces when you need them most.
- Teagan never feels like the lead: the subplots keep pulling focus, and she rarely holds a scene on her own.
- The money never looks like money. Josh's Regis Airlines birthday party is meant to dazzle, and it looks cheap.
- The rivalry between the Regis cousins and the romance between Ella (Jessica Paré) and Coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot) both feel forced.
- The middle of the season piles on so much crew drama that it stops being believable, and half the subplots never land.
Cast
- Miku Martineau as Teagan Tao
- Sam Braun as Josh Regis
- Kyle Clark as Cam Dillinger
- Jessica Paré as Ella Tao
- Thomas Cadrot as Coach Matt Hayden
- Connor Paton as Ryder Regis
- Olga Petsa as Juliet Morny
- Sage Linder as Britney Garner
- Jude Wilson as Bronson "Baloo" Garner
- Riley Davis as Noah Bainbridge
- Connor Wong as Perry Chou
- Jarrett Carlington as Chris "Crabcatcher" Padmore
- Vincent Muller as Damon Quaid
- Niall Matter as Richard Regis
- Sara Canning as Imogen Regis
- Byron Lawson as David Tao
- Lucia Walters as Senator DeeDee Garner
- Alaska Leigh as Amber
- Aiden Howard as Liam
- Tyler Roberge as Logan
- Hana Huggins as Madison Hayden
- Liza Huget as Principal Inez Cabrera
- Amber Lewis as Karina Regis
- Ted Cole as Viktor Regis
- Michael Teigen as Oren Dillinger
- Tess Atkins as Assistant Coach Lana
- Kesha as Herself