From left: Sam Braun, Miku Martineau, and Kyle Clark in Crew Girl —NetflixIn 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 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 —NetflixBut 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. Often, that means adapting popular YA or New Adult novels; Prime Video’s success with Jenny Han’s coming-of-age, beach-town love triangle The Summer I Turned Pretty paved the way for Netflix’s take on Ali Novak’s My Life with the Walter Boys as well as XO, Kitty, Han’s spinoff of her book-to-film franchise To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Queer romance, mainly of the gay male variety, from Netflix’s tender and chaste Heartstopper to the spicy Canadian phenomenon Heated Rivalry, which streams on HBO Max in the U.S., has also jumped from page to screen. (Crew Girl isn’t an adaptation, but a novelization released in tandem with the show suggests it’s meant to feel like one.) This year has seen a particular glut of new titles, from Netflix’s figure-skating drama Finding Her Edge to Prime’s Off Campus and Every Year After. The latter platform even scored a hit in August with an exceptional original teen romance, Sterling Point, proving the niche isn’t entirely dependent on preexisting IP. These 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 MaxWhat’s most striking about these series, though, are the novel ways in which they embrace physicality. With the steamy exceptions of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus (both geared toward a slightly older age range), the sexual content is pretty PG-13. Objectification is kept to a minimum, at least by characters we’re supposed to like. Yet bodies are conspicuously activated, in what feel like pointed responses to—and, for young viewers, escape hatches from—digital disembodiment. Summer 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.An abundance of sports romances make such physicality even more explicit. In Off Campus and Heated Rivalry, the boys who serve as eye candy for any viewer attracted to men are always slamming into each other on the ice and changing together in the locker room. In Finding Her Edge, a show about young Olympics hopefuls at a residential training center, an ice-dancing duo is bound to become a love affair (as long as the guy is into girls). Even the neurotic hero of Heartstopper (Joe Locke) finds first love on the rugby field. Crew Girl casts many thirsty gazes on the musclebound upper bodies of Teagan’s teammates. These stories aren’t just about the sweaty sensuality of athletes in motion, though. They’re about ambition and passion and the competitive spirit as romantic accelerants—about how the shared commitment to spend hours every day striving for excellence while one’s peers are screwing around online can bond people.Belmont Cameli and Ella Bright in Off Campus —Liane Hentscher—PrimeWhy 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.