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 Life). 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 —NetflixThese shows have all the love triangles and class struggles and outsider angst that have defined youthful romance tales since Jane Austen was writing them, capturing eternal adolescent fantasies (being desirable enough to have two people fighting over you) and fears (not measuring up to the rich kids) alike. Pretty appears to have sparked a mini-trend of siblings competing for the same crush, a trope that also pops up in Every Year After, Walter Boys, and Finding Her Edge. The fraught post-DEI-backlash politics of representation, especially for the most racially and ethnically diverse generation on record, are evident in the shows’ leads. Like Crew Girl’s Martineau, many are multiracial but play characters with vaguely defined backgrounds who live with either a single white parent or a white surrogate family. (New York magazine just spotlighted the "Wasian generation," a long list of up-and-coming white and Asian stars, citing Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, Pretty’s Lola Tung, and XO, Kitty’s Anna Cathcart among other white and Asian stars.) Liberal and minority viewers get to see mixed-race families and romances, and a TV landscape that isn’t all white. The anti-”woke” crowd is spared identity politics, non-English dialogue, and often all other forms of cultural specificity. Savvy streamers avoid backlash from both sides.
Connor Storrie, left, and Hudson Williams in Heated Rivalry —HBO MaxSummer romances, and specifically those that bring together wealthy vacationers and the locals who work for them, aren’t new to fiction. It’s the prominence of nature in the recent crop of teen romances (and teen hits in other genres, like Netflix’s Outer Banks) that makes an impression. As it toggles between protagonist Percy’s (Sadie Soverall) life in her late 20s and a sequence of idyllic teenage lake-house summers glimpsed in flashbacks, Every Year After uses its setting to visualize two brothers’ rivalry for her affection. In one recurring image, Percy sits at the edge of her house’s dock, looking on as sensitive Sam (Matt Cornett) and arrogant Charlie (Michael Bradway) shove each other off a slippery wooden raft. Sterling Point brings a high-strung New York City girl (Ella Rubin) to an island in Canada’s Muskoka region, a paradise of lush, lakefront forests. Her rich-vs.-poor-boy love triangle plays out over lazy days spent boating, swimming, and sunbathing on rocky beaches. Cellphone service is conveniently spotty.
Belmont Cameli and Ella Bright in Off Campus —Liane Hentscher—Prime
Why use athletics as a fig leaf for sex in the uncensored age of streaming, years after shows like Euphoria and Skins obliterated the notion that TV for teens should be wholesome? Maybe because modesty is in. Gen Z’s squeamishness about sex on screen has fueled successive waves of hand-wringing among their elders. The so-called sex recession plaguing this cohort in real life has been duly noted, with suggested explanations ranging from extreme onlineness in general to poor socialization during the COVID years of Zoom school and virtual prom in particular. The thing is, biologically speaking, teens are the same jumble of hormones in 2026 that they were during the Summer of Love. “Many of them are very horny,” Carter Sherman, the author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, assured WIRED last year. “They would like to be having sex, and in fact they feel a lot of shame over the fact that they haven't had sex yet or that they’re not having sex enough.” As transitional objects to ease anxieties around physical intimacy, swimsuits and erg machines make a lot of sense.
The most salient takeaway from Crew Girl and its ilk might be buried in a less eye-catching finding of 2025’s Teens and Screens, the annual UCLA report on young people’s attitudes toward entertainment media that reliably stokes the “Gen Z hates sex scenes” panic. Relatability is the new watchword. Whereas millennials wallowed in wealth porn, took vicarious flight with superheroes, and sucked the life out of vampire content, today’s adolescents ranked “people with lives like mine” as the No. 1 element they’re looking for in TV shows and movies. Although they’re aspirational enough to feel escapist, with their summer houses and prep-school popularity contests, this season’s teen romances reflect that shift. For a generation raised in the sensory deprivation tank of the internet, whose fears of infinite digital liminality just gave us the horror movies Backrooms and It Ends, the fantasy is humbler than superpowers. It’s being grounded in physical space, a human body capable of sharing tactile experiences with other embodied people. Sex is one way to make those connections. Crew is another.
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