Out of all the YA series on all the streamers in all the world, why have I decided to write about “Crew Girl,” an eight-episode romantic sports soap opera, premiering Thursday on Netflix, set around a rowing team at a posh New England private school?
It’s not that I care in particular for sports stories, and I blow hot and cold on teen lit, but aesthetically I like the look of sculls, or shells, and how they sit on and move over the water. And I have a special touristic affection for Boathouse Row, the collection of 19th century boathouses along the Schuylkill River just west of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (And who doesn’t love Thomas Eakins’ 1871 painting “The Champion Single Sculls,” a.k.a. “Max Schmitt in a Single Scull”? I mean, come on.) Anyway, it was a good decision.
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 Paré) hauls them east to fictional Eagle’s Cove, Mass., Ella’s old, unloved hometown. “My life as I knew it was over,” Teagan says in voiceover, leaving you to correctly predict the kicker: “But little did I know, my new life was just beginning.” (Cue opening titles.)
Unaware that Teagan’s educational trust fund has also gone with the wind, Ella has enrolled her in posh Eaton Prep, which has a men’s rowing team — low-ranked — 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’s Crab Shack. Crew coach Matt Hayden (Thomas Cadrot), who knew Ella back when, calls her “the girl who got a second job to buy a car to drive to her first.” They are townies at heart.
Because there is no opportunity for her to row at Eaton — and won’t be, says nice Coach Hayden, until the men’s team starts winning races and gets donors excited — 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’s tuition, and once they win a race — that’s not a spoiler, but an inevitability — they’ll start to come around.
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’s garage and is called “Faid” for “financial aid,” she meets cute, crashing a bicycle into his truck and somersaulting into the bed. (Which is not at all to say his bed; he’s not that kind of guy, and it’s 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’re not. “How can someone be so compelling and repulsive at the same time?” 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.
Josh is also competitive with, and looks down upon, his half brother and teammate, Ryder (Connor Paton), over who gets the important “stroke seat” in the scull, which might eventually decide which one of them will inherit grandpa’s airplane business. Meanwhile, Josh’s girlfriend, academy queen bee Britney (Sage Linder), described by Juliet as “voted most likely to win in a land war in Asia,” is anxious to get Teagan out of the picture, one way or another. But there is more desperation than evil in their characters.
There’ll 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 “Crew Girl” is formulaic in its broad strokes, nice details are worked in among them. There’s sculling lingo to learn — eight seat, catching a crab, puddles, the engine room, rushing the slide. A romantic moment is built around the question of popping a rower’s 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’re not paying attention, but it’s worth looking a little harder.
Developed by Vivian Lin and Morwyn Brebner, “Crew Girl” 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 Paré, whom many will know as Megan (so great) on “Mad Men” and, given that it ran on CBS before transitioning to Netflix, many more might recognize from “SEAL Team.” (She’s Canadian too). But the actors are all able, so that even the ones obviously cast (in part) for their beauty — between the people, and the scenery and the shells on the water, it’s a nice show to look at — read as human. The worst of them have their wounds and sadness and medical conditions.
“Rowing, like life, is a constant state of resetting yourself,” says Teagan, explaining the four-stage cycle of a stroke. So you get a little philosophy, too.
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