Over the past year or so, something odd has been happening. All your zillennial and millennial friends, now adults with car insurance and vigorous SPF routines, have been watching cozy, faintly dissociative teen dramas in order to forget their troubles. The Summer I Turned Pretty. Off Campus. The Heartstopper movie. And now Sterling Point, which sounds like a bank, but which is in fact the new Amazon series about 17-year-old Annie (Ella Rubin), who, along with her twin brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo), inherits a remote lake island in Canada, where she spends the summer becoming embroiled in the lives of the locals.
While Sterling Point has all the hallmarks of your regular teen drama—suspiciously absent parents, love triangles, unrequited love, and a secluded yet homey location in which the main characters do not need nor want to leave—there’s something a bit more elevated about this particular series. The characters—a rag-tag group of free-spirited teenagers—are complex, fleshed out, and multilayered, each driven by the textured anxieties and preoccupations of young adulthood: Who am I supposed to be? What do I want for myself? What would happen if I did something differently? How might I find out?
Unlike the glossy, slightly throwback unrealness of shows like Off Campus and The Summer I Turned Pretty—which have their own appeal—Sterling Point exists in a more authentic space. These kids smoke weed in their rooms and have stick ’n’ pokes and read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score. (“I need to find out what the score is, and where in the body it’s being kept.”) They admonish each other for their avoidant attachment styles and wear jorts and bandanas and silver rings. There are moments, when the camera lingers on their wet-slick faces, no sound but the lapping of the lake, in which Sterling Point reminds me more of a coming-of-age indie movie from the early aughts than of the recent crop of teen dramas. It may have been exec produced by the team behind Gossip Girl and My Old Ass, but shiny and campy this is not.
“I’ve always been really excited by the opportunity to take the idea of YA ‘content’ but make it feel really authentic and real and elevated,” Megan Park, the show’s co-creator, director, and executive producer, recently told Teen Vogue.
“Great teen dramas are just great dramas magnified by the lens of coming of age,” co-creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (of The O.C. and Gossip Girl) also added. “When you experience something for the first time (first love, first heartbreak, first best friend), it feels singular and monumental, like no one else has ever gone through this. The best teen dramas capture this feeling.”
