Crew Girl Creator Vivian Lin and Star Miku Martineau Answer All Your Burning Season 1 Questions

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Season 1 of Crew Girl.]

Teagan Tao (Miku Martineau) saved a struggling crew team, got the boy (actually two!), and finally achieved her goal of starting a new girls’ rowing club. But at what cost? Netflix’s teen sports romance, Crew Girl, follows the gifted 16-year-old rower as she and her mother (Jessica Paré) escape from sunny Los Angeles to the leafy town of Eagle’s Cove, Massachusetts, after her father abruptly disappears amid a humiliating financial fraud scandal. Forced to start over at Easton Prep, a prestigious private school that costs as much as college, Teagan seeks to make her mark on the crew team. There’s just one hitch in her plan: Easton only has a boys’ crew team — and they’re not very good.

Desperate to keep her competitive rowing hopes alive, Teagan fights her way onto the team by becoming their coxswain. And soon, she finds herself in the middle of a romantic love triangle between teammates and rivals Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark), the local “townie” with underdog ambition, and Josh Regis (Sam Braun), the arrogant captain from old-money privilege. With the added pressure of earning the team’s trust and motivating them to start winning, Teagan is way in over her head. Slowly but surely, the tide starts to turn when the team become surprise contenders for the coveted Haverford Cup. But outside of the water, things only get more complicated. From secret flings and an irreversible health condition to emotional breakups and near-kisses, Eagle’s Cove is the definition of messy.

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“Rowing is so competitive and so extreme that every personal flaw or insecurity gets magnified in that world,” creator and showrunner Vivian Lin tells TV Guide. “You combine drive and desire plus magnified flaws and insecurities, and then add romance, and it’s a pressure cooker. It’s hot, and it has all the ingredients of something that’s really juicy.” 

Plenty of questions are left unanswered by the end of the first season, so we can only hope that Season 2 is on the horizon. TV Guide spoke with Lin and Martineau to break down the season’s biggest cliffhangers and get the scoop on what’s next for Teagan, Cam, and Josh.

Are Teagan and Cam officially together?

It sure looks that way! After missing opportunities all season long, Cam musters up the courage to make one last romantic gesture in the final minutes of the finale. And this time, it sticks. Motivated by the team’s second-place finish at the Haverford Cup, Cam — newly promoted to the boat’s stroke seat — finally kisses Teagan for the first time in the boathouse.

While things look promising for the pair, their relationship is left undefined after their “ambiguous kiss,” confirming that they haven’t had the talk. Lin believes Teagan and Cam are ready to take their romantic spark to the next level. It certainly helps that they’re both cut from the same cloth, have similar life experiences, and share the same values. “Cam loves rowing in the same way that Teagan does. They have a spiritual connection to it. It is how they’re defined, and you immediately pick that up between them,” Lin says. “They’re a real support system for each other in this crazy, weird world of Easton Prep. They’re immediately drawn to each other. They see themselves in each other and there’s chemistry.”

Cam, though, is far from perfect. His insecurities over his financial situation and lack of self-worth cripple him from making any substantial moves. “It’s really in the finale when he stands up for her and he’s like, ‘I’m not gonna row without you.’ That’s the first time he’s ever said, in front of everyone, what he wants and what he believes without caring for the repercussions,” Lin says. “At that moment, he finds a new voice in himself and finds a little bit of confidence to open himself up and see himself in a new way [where he can be] with Teagan.”

It likely won’t be an easy road ahead for Teagan and Cam, if they do make things official. “All doors have been left open, which is really great because I’m like, what’s gonna happen?” Martineau says. “The door’s open with Josh. The door’s open with Cam.”

Is Josh out of the romantic picture?

For now, at least. At first, it seemed that Josh won the early battle for Teagan’s affections and, for a brief moment, they have a secret short-lived romance after they acknowledge their mutual attraction to each other. But one intense fight, where Josh says they’re both on the “rebound” — him after freshly breaking up with his status-obsessed girlfriend Britney (Sage Linder), her reeling from being dumped by Cam — ostensibly ends things between them. Even so, Josh can’t quite quit the idea of dating Teagan, and in the finale, he confesses that he would like another chance with her in the future.

“With Josh, it’s very much like enemies to lovers. They don’t like each other. They have nothing in common. But the thing that Josh brings out of Teagan is that she is completely honest with him from the get-go,” Lin says. “She never pulls any punches with him. She tells him exactly what’s on her mind. There is a real honesty to the relationship that does not exist with Cam.”

Martineau adds: “[Teagan] and Josh are both a little bit arrogant. Teagan’s quite determined, and she’s opinionated, and she’s there to stand her ground. But Josh is also there to stand his ground, and he never lets that go. She can see through his hard exterior, and I think she softens him throughout the season in really special ways, in which we get to see his character in a new light.”

What’s next for Josh now that his heart condition is no longer a secret?

Josh starts off the series filling the spoiled rich kid stereotype, but it begins to unravel once it’s revealed that underneath the hard exterior is a teenager struggling to meet the demands of his family while hiding a huge secret. He has hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, a serious heart condition that puts him at risk of a heart attack (or worse) if he doesn’t walk away from rowing. Josh hides his condition for the majority of the season, taking alternative measures in order to protect his place on the Easton Prep crew team and continue to meet his family’s high expectations. It all comes to a head in Episode 7 when his condition worsens, and he starts experiencing severe chest pain while arguing with Teagan on an evening drive, which leads to a violent car crash.

That particular scene, one of the last ones Martineau filmed for the season, is one of her personal favorites for its intensity and vulnerability. “That was special because you’re filming something for months and the very last scene is emotional,” she recalls. “[In] that scene, Teagan starts off a bit annoyed with Josh, being like, ‘What’s going on?’ It’s like, same old Josh, and then it’s like, wow, he really opens his heart, and you can see him really break down from all of these pressures that he’s under.”

It’s the wake-up call Josh needs to face his new reality head-on. After Easton Prep medals at the Haverford Cup, he tells his family that that was his last race because of his defective heart. His grandfather, who has had a succession plan in place for years, turns his back on Josh, effectively cutting him out of the family fortune. At least Josh has his dad by his side. He’ll need the support with upcoming surgery and their financial stability now in question.

“With Josh, I wanted to see deeper with him,” Lin says. “Could we get people on his side? Could we get people to really start to feel for him? Could he win us back? He’s not totally absolved. He’s still a jerk, but you’re with him going through [it]. He’s not the easiest guy to root for, so we really wanted to peel back the layers and really make him find his vulnerabilities as the season went on. So piece by piece you see how helpless he is, how stuck he is, how he has no choices, how desperate he is, how he doesn’t know what to do, how lost he is, and how much he loves his dad. Now he has to come to terms with who he is. All he knew to do was tell the truth and jump into the unknown. They’re kind of screwed. Definitely, there will be struggle.”

Don’t worry, the love triangle is here to stay

Like every great YA romance, the love triangle between Teagan, Josh, and Cam will always serve as the undercurrent of the show — no matter who’s in a relationship or who’s single. “Josh and Cam each speak to a different side of Teagan,” Lin says. The appeal of both love interests is why the writers’ room is split on who Teagan belongs with: “There’s a Team Josh contingency and there’s a Team Cam contingency, so they just fight all the time.”

As for whether Lin has an endgame couple in mind, she did tease that she had an idea. “No one is done being the person that they should be when they settle down,” Lin says. “I have an idea of who Teagan should be with at that point [in her life], and I have an idea of who she should be with. I just don’t know who evolves to be that person, and I don’t know how she evolves to be that person. So we’ll see who wins.”

Will Teagan regret having a girls’ crew team?

The jury’s still out on this one. Teagan learns in the finale’s closing scene that Easton Prep will have a girls’ crew team next year, financially backed by the Garner Foundation — with Josh’s ex Britney leading the charge. On one hand, it’s what she’s wanted all along since coming to Easton Prep. But on the other hand, it’s… Britney.

“One of my favorite relationships to explore is Teagan and Britney,” Lin says. “Yes, they fought about Josh but it’s not really about Josh. They’re two girls who could be top dog, and they don’t like losing to each other, so there was something about that that was fun to mine. And I always love it when you get your best wish in the worst conditions.”

“I think she’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be crazy,'” Martineau says of the first thing that crosses Teagan’s mind. “Teagan’s such a determined rower and I think she will do anything to get back into the boat. She’s ready to bring on any competition that stands in front of her. I think her and Britney’s friendship or relationship or acquaintanceship is definitely going to be a challenge. But she’s ready to take it on, and it will be very, very, very interesting to see their dynamic because, as you know, her and Britney’s relationship is confusing and messy.”

But can Teagan stay coxswain for the boys’ team, which is now without a coach, while building the girls’ team from scratch? “Teagan has always been truthful when she says her first love is being a rower, so it does have a natural conflict,” Lin says. “How is she going to do both? What will she choose: herself, her boys, her coxing, her rowing, or her career?”

How did that Kesha cameo come about?

No, your eyes didn’t deceive you! That really was Kesha in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it surprise cameo in the first episode. In the scene, the 39-year-old “TiK ToK” singer appears in a FaceTime call with Easton Prep student Juliet (Olga Petsa), after her absent mother recruits her to deliver upsetting news.

For a long time, Lin and the producers “didn’t know who it was going to be,” though the celebrity gag was already written in the script. “When we were shooting it, we were circling a couple of people and we just didn’t know,” she recalls. “An executive at Netflix actually had a connection [to her] and made their ask and Kesha, who is hilarious and awesome, magically said yes.”

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Do the Easton Prep students actually go to class?

Despite the show being set at an elite (and very expensive) college prep school, we rarely see the crew team (or other students, for that matter) stepping foot in a classroom, let alone laboring over pre-calculus homework or preparing for upcoming exams — save for the occasional mention of academics in the context of their rowing futures. For them, it’s all crew or nothing. But Martineau promises they are a studious bunch. “Trust that we’re in class!” the actress exclaims.

What can we expect in a potential Season 2?

Netflix hasn’t renewed Crew Girl for a second season yet, but Lin already has a general blueprint of where she wants to take the characters next. Who is Josh without crew? How will he fare without grandpa’s money? Will Coach Hayden stay fired? Will we finally meet Juliet’s mother? “We like to gossip [in the writers’ room] and we talk about the characters like they’re real people, so we have a lot of gossip,” Lin teases. “We have a lot of thoughts, but no spoilers!”

Martineau is ready for whatever comes her way. “I’m excited to find out,” she says. “When you’re creating something, there are so many artistic collaborators on one singular project and I feel like I am just a small gear of the machine. So I am excited to hear what the writers, the producers, and the directors have in mind for Teagan’s story going into Season 2 and I want to help bring that to life. I’m along for the ride like everybody else.”

Crew Girl Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.