Crew Girl Review
Director: Simon Barry, Norman Buckley, Amanda Tapping, Jacquie Gould and Alysse Leite-Rogers
Date Created: 2026-09-10 21:06
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Crew Girl Review: Directed by Simon Barry, Norman Buckley, Amanda Tapping, Jacquie Gould and Alysse Leite-Rogers, the Netflix series stars Miku Martineau as Teagan Tao, Jessica Paré as Ella Emerson-Tao, Samuel Braun as Josh Regis, Kyle Clark as Cam Dillinger, Thomas Cadrot as Coach Matt Hayden and Riley Davis as Noah Bainbridge, among others. Created and showrun by Vivian Lin, the show has eight episodes, with each episode running for around 40 minutes.
Crew Girl Review
Netflix’s Crew Girl features a sixteen-year-old Teagan Tao, who has been a gifted rower but whose comfortable life ends up changing when her father, David, is made a fugitive for committing some financial crime. In addition, the girl and her mother, Ella, find themselves forced to give up on their previous way of life by moving away to the East Coast, where Teagan joins Easton Prep School. Unfortunately, the most significant challenge that the teenager has to deal with is the lack of a girls’ rowing team in the school that makes it extremely difficult for the girl to continue with the only sport that has shaped her whole future.
Luckily enough, the solution comes in the form of the boys’ varsity crew, where she is made a coxswain of the team that helps control the rowers. In the Netflix series Crew Girl, rowing is what pushes the main character’s story forward. Teagan does not join the boys’ team just because suddenly she doesn’t care anymore about her own dreams. She wants to return to rowing and show that she is still capable of succeeding in her aim to become a great female rower on her own.
The gradual change in the dynamic between Teagan and her team through her experience as coxswain is another aspect of the show that appealed to me. She enters a group of people who don’t necessarily have any reason to trust her, but she becomes someone that Coach Matt Hayden sees in his team because of her knowledge about the sport and her ability to analyse their competition. 2026 Netflix series Crew Girl is surprisingly successful in conveying all of the jargon of the sport and the role of a coxswain in managing the team, which made watching the racing scenes particularly exciting.
The racing scenes themselves were definitely some of the high points of the entire show in terms of energy level. The other reason why I would be able to remain interested in Teagan is Miku Martineau. I appreciated the fact that Teagan is not depicted as the helpless teenager she is in spite of everything that happens to her. There is determination and ambition in her, and she knows what she wants.
On the other hand, she is provided with enough vulnerability for the reader to understand the extent to which it impacts her. The aspect that I found noteworthy is Teagan’s feeling of discomfort about her mother, who is spending money they don’t have any more. Coming from a privileged family background, it would have been very easy to depict her as a spoiled girl who had lost touch with reality. But this is also where my conflicted views of the series start to surface. Every time Netflix’s Crew Girl series chooses to centre on the connection between Teagan and her rowing, I was much more invested compared to whenever it turned to its typical romance and drama.
The love triangle involving Josh and Cam is constructed on what can be described as a very typical setup. Josh is the snobbish and arrogant captain, whose ego continually gets in the way of the crew’s best interests, whereas Cam is the hard-working underdog who feels alienated by the elite setting of Easton. Although the actors do a good job making the triangle interesting to watch, there simply isn’t enough originality in the writing.
It is also a flaw that is found in other characters. Jessica Paré plays Ella really well, especially when it comes to her efforts to maintain optimism despite the problems that her husband’s choices cause for her. Actually, I wanted more story from her, and watching Ella trying to build a new life after what happened could have been one of the most interesting storylines on the show. Instead, her story often gets overshadowed by the crew’s problems.
Similarly, I found this to be the case with the relationship between Teagan and Juliet. Juliet makes a memorable entrance through an act of defiance involving burning her own car, but thereafter her character is rarely seen, making it difficult for the friendship to seem well-formed. There are even small moments among some of the other boys that reveal just how much possibility there is with this cast, though not all of them are given room to develop past rowing.
Netflix Crew Girl Review: Summing Up
Therefore, personally speaking, I did not hate the 2026 Crew Girl series due to the sufficient amount of heart, charm, comedy and love towards rowing in order to make eight episodes of the show enjoyable to watch. It is pleasant to see the progress that the team makes in the process of bonding, and Teagan’s efforts to win back her identity through the sport ensure a strong emotional core of the series. However, it was impossible to ignore the constant presence of rich kid drama, stereotypical romance and high school clichés.
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