Over the past year or so, we have seen an unprecedented number of teenage drama series being released, from The Summer I Turned Pretty to Off Campus. These mainly stemmed from book adaptations, and immediately found an audience, becoming viral on social media. But in a year saturated with book-to-film and book-to-TV adaptations, an original story felt like a genuinely fresh proposition, and Sterling Point delivers exactly that.
It also solves a problem that’s plagued so many of its recent peers: dialogue that simply doesn’t sound like anything a real teenager would say and overly cheesy. Sterling Point avoids that trap entirely and the reason comes down to trust. Megan Park reportedly gave her young cast the freedom to rework lines that felt stilted or false, and let them improvise where it made sense, and it shows. The now-iconic scene of Ellis dragging Annie across the floor is unscripted and it’s become an instant fan favourite precisely because it feels lived rather than written. That looseness runs through the whole show, and it’s the difference between dialogue that sounds like a teenager and dialogue that sounds like an adult’s idea of one.
Where so many of these shows reach immediately for romance and heat, Sterling Point does something quieter and, frankly, braver: it leads with grief. Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin) is not a girl looking for a summer fling, she is a girl looking for answers, and that distinction shapes everything about how the show moves. When she and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo) inherit their estranged grandfather’s island on a Canadian lake, the mystery isn’t a device bolted onto a romance plot, it is the plot, and the show trusts that mystery enough to let it breathe.
One small but genuinely important choice: there are no cell phones on the island, no signal to be found. In a genre so often propped up by group chats and doom-scrolling as shorthand for teenage inner life, the absence of service forces Sterling Point into something rarer, actual presence. Conversations happen face to face because there’s no other option, and the show is all the better for the total, uninterrupted escapism it offers as a result.
Rubin carries the series with a kind of guarded curiosity that never tips into precociousness, and that’s put to good use across two love interests, Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye) and Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), both of whom she has genuinely excellent chemistry with. It’s rare for a show to build two viable options rather than one obvious frontrunner and one narrative obligation, but Sterling Point manages it, and the fandom split is proof, this isn’t the lopsided Team Conrad situation The Summer I Turned Pretty has leaned into, where one side of the triangle was always going to win by a landslide. Here, people are genuinely, evenly divided, and that tension carries real weight through the season.
Her chemistry with Amélie Hoeferle, who plays Ramona, the stranger already living in the cabin Annie has just inherited, is the real engine of the show. Ramona could easily have been written as an obstacle, a hostile rival standing between Annie and her inheritance, but instead the show builds something closer to unexpected sisterhood. It’s a dynamic that feels earned rather than engineered, and it’s what elevates the show above simple escapism.
What makes Park’s approach stand out is also how she treats LGBTQ+ inclusion as an obvious part of telling this story, not a selling point layered on top of it. Ramona’s relationship with Oona (Bo Bragason) is handled with a confidence that a lot of YA shows still struggle to manage, it’s simply part of who these characters are, given the same tenderness and screen time as every other relationship on the island.
The island itself does a lot of quiet work too. There’s a lived-in specificity to the world, the cottage, the lake, the half-siblings and secretive adults, that gives Sterling Point a sense of place most YA dramas don’t bother building. It helps that the show isn’t afraid to let its adults matter. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Joe) and Jay Duplass (Steven) aren’t sidelined into background noise and their presence adds real stakes to a story that is, at its core, about the sins and silences of a previous generation.
What Sterling Point ultimately understands is that not every coming-of-age story needs to be a romance wearing a mystery as a costume. Here the mystery comes first, the family history comes first, and the romance, when it does arrive, feels like one thread among several rather than the whole tapestry.
In a summer crowded with shows chasing the same handful of tropes, Sterling Point earns its place by refusing to chase them at all and it pays off with the show renewed for a second season.
Sterling Point is now on Prime Video
