Vancouver Island-shot show lands on Netflix's top global hits list

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Following on the heels of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, Netflix’s new Vancouver Island-shot series Crew Girl is the latest Canadian-made sports romance series to become a global hit.

Released on Sept. 10, Crew Girl hit No. 4 on the Netflix Top 10 list, reaching 5.2 million viewers in 80 countries in its opening weekend.

The series from Blue Ant Studios follows the story of 16-year-old Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau) whose promising single sculls rowing career is capsized by a family scandal.

Forced to move from California to Eagle’s Cove, a fictional small town in Massachusetts, Teagan soon discovers her new school, Easton Prep, doesn’t have a girls’ rowing team. Teagan’s only way to get back on the water is to take the helm as the coxswain for the school’s dysfunctional boys’ varsity crew team.

While set on the East Coast of the U.S., the series, created and developed by Canadian writers Vivian Lin and Morwyn Brebner, is a picture-perfect postcard of the Vancouver Island locales of Victoria, Saanich, North Saanich, Sidney, Brentwood Bay and Colwood.

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The eight-part series made good use of local spots including Selkirk Waterfront, Victoria City Rowing Club, Pacific Institute for Sport Education, Hamsterly Beach, Port Sidney Marina, Royal Roads University, B.C. Aviation Museum, Parkside Hotel and Spa and Church and State Winery.

Crew Girl showrunner Lin, who previously worked on the Victoria-shot Privates Eyes: West Coast said, “Victoria is a hidden gem for film and television production,” and added that the area afforded the Crew Girl production summer-like conditions well into the fall when it was shot last year.

“The landscape is utterly stunning, the ocean, lakes and greenery, and the communities across the island allowed us to capture the authentic small-town feel that we wanted for Eagle’s Cove,” said Lin in an email to Postmedia. “The cast and crew who travelled in from Vancouver would say that travelling on the ferry and taking in the ocean and the island helped transition them to this focused and Zen place that they brought to work.”

With rowing at the centre of this story, it makes perfect sense to shoot the series in and around Victoria. Home to the national rowing team, the area has produced many high-profile Olympic rowing medallists including Darren Barber, Silken Laumann, Malcolm Howard, Caileigh Filmer, Lindsay Jennerich and Patricia Obee.