What Crew Girl Should Keep and Cut If It Comes Back

Crew Girl is at its best on the water. If Netflix orders a second season, that is the part worth building on, because most of what dragged Season 1 down happened on land.

This piece discusses the whole of Season 1, including the ending.

Our Season 1 review gave the show 2.5 out of 5: easy escapism with a real crew at its heart, let down by weak acting in serious scenes and a plot that piled on more than it could make believable. A second season can keep the first half of that sentence and lose the second.

Keep the Easton crew and the rowing

The best thing about Season 1 was the crew itself. Eight boys who fought constantly, and still closed ranks the moment anyone from outside pushed in. Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau) arrived as exactly that outsider, faced setback after setback, and slowly became one of them.

The payoff was the best moment of the season. When Teagan is pulled from the boat before the Haverford Cup, the whole crew refuses to row without her.

The rowing and training scenes were the best in the show too. They work because they're physical, eight people moving as one, and that is something this cast does well. More of those, please.

Keep Josh's story going

Josh Regis (Sam Braun) had the one storyline with real weight: a son trying to prove himself to a grandfather who only values him when he wins, hiding a heart condition rather than risk being seen as defective. When his father, Richard Regis (Niall Matter), finally chooses him over the grandfather's approval, it is the one Regis moment that works.

Josh stepping away from rowing is the most promising thing the finale sets up. Showrunner Vivian Lin has said Josh has to "build a better Josh". Without an oar to hide behind, he has somewhere new to go.

Keep building Cam Dillinger

Josh handing the stroke seat to Cam was one of the season's best moments. Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark) had been the best rower in the boat for weeks and kept getting passed over for boys with the right surnames.

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Lin told Deadline that Cam has "healed a little part of himself" now that he's a leader. That is a better story for Season 2 than another fight over who gets the seat.

Put Teagan Tao at the centre

Teagan rarely felt like the lead of her own show. So many subplots competed for attention that scenes kept drifting away from her.

The new girls' team is the obvious fix. It puts her back where the show says she belongs, rowing rather than steering someone else's boat, and gives her storylines that are hers alone.

The risk is splitting up the ensemble that made Season 1 work. Rowing for the girls' team shouldn't mean leaving the boys' crew behind. The two boats should share training, coaching and race days, so Season 2 gains a second crew instead of swapping one set of characters for another.

Cut the scandal of the week

The back half of Season 1 stacked a bribe, a sabotaged oar, a rigged rowing machine and a firing on top of each other, after a middle stretch already crowded with infighting. Some of it was hard to believe. A lot of it was simply over the top.

A second season doesn't need a new crisis every episode. It needs one or two that land.

Cut the extra subplots, and skip the love square

About half of Season 1's side stories never landed, and the rest felt strange. The feud between the Regis cousins was badly handled, and the romance between Teagan's mother, Ella Tao (Jessica Paré), and Coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot) never convinced.

The love triangle went exactly where you would expect from the first episode. Miku Martineau has joked about a love square for Season 2. Please don't.

The case for going the other way

Not everyone agrees the show needs more rowing. The Hollywood Reporter argued the opposite: that nearly everything in Crew Girl comes back to crew, and that this narrow focus shortchanged its other stories, Ella's especially.

That is a fair reading of how the season is built. But the side stories didn't struggle for room. There were too many of them, and half never worked. Fewer, better ones would do more than extra screen time.

The romance is part of the draw, too, and Netflix sells the show on rivalry and attraction. Keep the triangle. Just stop making it the engine.

If Crew Girl comes back, we'll watch. It doesn't need to be great to be worth a weekend, but a second season with fewer scandals and more rowing could be a lot better than the first.

For where the renewal decision stands, see our Season 2 page. For the full finale breakdown, see Crew Girl ending explained.

Everything on Crew Girl

1 review · 5 Unscrewed