Ashley Garcia: Genius in Love

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (And Felt Even More)

I’ve seen this show before. Not this show, exactly—Ashley Garcia: Genius in Love, the Netflix sitcom about a 15-year-old robotics prodigy navigating NASA, unrequited crushes, and the existential dread of being the smartest person in the room. But I’ve seen the formula.

The precocious kid in a grown-up world. The quirky sidekicks. The will-they-won’t-they romance that arrives like clockwork, right on schedule for the second act.

The laugh track that cues us when to chuckle, even if the joke landed somewhere between "mildly amusing" and "did I miss something?"

And yet. There’s something quietly radical about Ashley Garcia. Not in what it does—because, let’s be honest, it doesn’t do much that’s new—but in who it is.

A Latina teenager, a girl in STEM, a character whose genius isn’t played for quirk or comic relief but as a fact of her existence. She’s not the "nerd" who needs to be fixed or softened; she’s the one fixing things. That alone should make this show worth celebrating.

But does it?

The show’s premise is a fantasy, but not the kind with dragons or superheroes. It’s the fantasy of being seen. Ashley (Paulina Chávez) moves across the country to live with her uncle Victor (Jencarlos Canela), a washed-up minor-league baseball player turned high school football coach, after her parents die in a car accident.

(Yes, the show drops that bombshell in the pilot and then never really circles back to it. More on that later.) At 15, she’s already a PhD-holding rocket scientist working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The disconnect between her professional life and her personal one is the engine of the show: she can calculate orbital trajectories but can’t figure out why the boy she likes won’t text her back.

It’s a premise that should feel fresh—after all, how many teen sitcoms center a girl whose biggest problem isn’t acne or algebra but the fact that she’s too good at algebra?

But here’s the thing about Ashley Garcia: it’s a show that doesn’t quite trust its own premise. Decider’s review nailed it when it called the second half of the series (rebranded as Genius in Love) "heavy on the teen-love crapola and light on the teen-genius shinola." The shift isn’t subtle.

The first eight episodes, released under the title The Expanding Universe of Ashley Garcia, lean into Ashley’s work at NASA, her struggles to fit in with her peers, and the occasional surreal detour (like a subplot where she builds a robot to help her uncle coach football). It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s something—a show that at least tries to balance the personal and the professional, the heart and the brain.