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

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...