In the Netflix teen drama Crew Girl, 16-year-old solo rowing champ Teagan Tao has her life uprooted when her hotel-magnate dad gets a tip that he’s about to be arrested for financial crimes and disappears. Suddenly, Teagan (Miku Martineau) and her flighty mom, Ella (Jessica Paré), are broke and moving across the country to the crumbling New England house where Ella grew up. The town is all clam shacks and marinas—and the prestigious Easton Prep, where Teagan matriculates thanks to an education trust that was somehow spared from the seizure of the Taos’ assets.
The only problem, besides the rampant snobbery, is that Eaton has no girls’ crew team. Forced to coxswain for the boys, Teagan starts falling for two of her teammates: kind, working-class townie Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark) and bratty airline scion Josh Regis (Sam Braun), who’s locked in a premature succession battle with his cousin Ryder (Connor Paton). Meanwhile, a gay rower, Baloo (Jude Wilson), is secretly hooking up with a guy on a rival team.
All of which is to say that Crew Girl, whose first season is now the no. 1 show on Netflix, plays like a greatest-hits compilation of teen romance tropes. First among the classics is a love triangle (see: Twilight, Riverdale, The Vampire Diaries, My So-Called Life). As is often the case, this one is enhanced by the quaintness of its small-town setting (Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill) and complicated by both wealth disparities (Gossip Girl, Pretty in Pink) and one character’s fish-out-of-water, new-kid-in-school status (The O.C., Beverly Hills, 90210).
There’s also a youthful mom (you might remember Paré as Mad Men’s Megan) doing a painfully slow will-they-won’t-they dance with an old friend (Thomas Cadrot), à la Gilmore Girls’ Lorelai and Luke. But what’s remarkable about Crew Girl—which is, despite an effervescent lead and a few fun storylines built around eccentric minor crew-boy characters, otherwise decidedly mid—is how comprehensively it showcases the conventions unique to the genre’s newest generation. TV has, in the last few years, capitalized on publishing’s pandemic-era romance boom, churning out love stories tailored to the young, female audience driving authors like Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood up best-seller lists.
Often, that means adapting popular YA or New Adult novels; Prime Video’s success with Jenny Han’s coming-of-age, beach-town love triangle The Summer I Turned Pretty paved the way for Netflix’s take on Ali Novak’s My Life with the Walter Boys as well as XO, Kitty, Han’s spinoff of her book-to-film franchise To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Queer romance, mainly of the gay male variety, from Netflix’s tender and chaste Heartstopper to the spicy Canadian phenomenon Heated Rivalry, which streams on HBO Max in the U.S., has also jumped from page to screen. (Crew Girl isn’t an adaptation, but a novelization released in tandem with the show suggests it’s meant to feel like one.) This year has seen a particular glut of new titles, from Netflix’s figure-skating drama Finding Her Edge to Prime’s Off Campus and Every Year After. The latter platform even scored a hit in August with an exceptional original teen romance, Sterling Point, proving the niche isn’t entirely dependent on preexisting IP.
These shows have all the love triangles and class struggles and outsider angst that have defined youthful romance tales since Jane Austen was writing them, capturing eternal adolescent fantasies (being desirable enough to have two people fighting over you) and fears (not measuring up to the rich kids) alike. Pretty appears to have sparked a mini-trend of siblings competing for the same crush, a trope that also pops up in Every Year After, Walter Boys, and Finding Her Edge. The fraught post-DEI-backlash politics of representation, especially for the most racially and ethnically diverse generation on record, are evident in the shows’ leads.
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