In Gen Z Romance Shows Like Crew Girl, Sports Are the New Sex

From left: Sam Braun, Miku Martineau, and Kyle Clark in Crew Girl —Netflix 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 Lif e ).

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.

From left: Jarrett Carlington, Jude Wilson, Connor Paton, Kyle Clark, and Miku Martineau in Crew Girl —Netflix 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.