Review: In 'Crew Girl,' Netflix's latest YA show, rowing and romance go hand in hand

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Set us as preferred 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 dissem...