Sterling Point Is the Summer Show We Needed
The Summer I Turned Pretty wrapped its run last year, and if you're anything like me, you've been walking around with a little void where your summer-show obsession used to live. Amazon's working on the TSITP movie, sure, but that's not here yet. What is here, and what scratched that exact itch for me, is Sterling Point.
Created by Megan Park (My Old Ass, The Fallout), Sterling Point dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Prime Video back in August, and I finally sat down and binged the whole thing in one go. It's got that same sun-soaked, coming-of-age energy TSITP built its audience on, but it's carrying its own weight too, not just riding on the coattails of a show that came before it.
The Setup
Annie Jacobson, a 17-year-old raised in New York, gets rejected from her dream summer program and then finds out her estranged grandfather has left her and her twin brother an island on a lake in Muskoka, Canada. She heads up there to check it out and immediately finds the cabin isn't empty. There's a girl named Ramona already living there, one with an uncanny resemblance to Annie's adoptive mother. That's about as far as I'll go plot-wise, because the family mystery at the center of this show is genuinely one of its best assets, and I don't want to spoil the unraveling.
My Thoughts
What I didn't expect going in was how grounded it would feel. Teen dramas can tip into "over dramatic" territory really fast, everything's the end of the world, every relationship is a five-alarm fire. Sterling Point mostly avoids that. The performances are strong across the board, and the characters actually feel like people, not just archetypes standing in for "the jock," "the mean girl," or "the brooding love interest." Even side characters get enough shading that you don't feel like you're watching cardboard cutouts move the plot along.
The female characters especially are well written, rounded and complex enough that each one stands out on her own. Ramona is a good example, she comes across as too much at first, but the show makes it clear she's dealing with a lot and reacting the way her personality would react to that. As the season goes on you start seeing other sides of her, and the sister relationship that develops between her and Annie ends up being one of the show's most genuine threads.
There's also a quieter detail I appreciated: Annie and Connor both lost their mother young, but the show doesn't hand Connor the same grief journey it gives Annie. That's left almost entirely to Annie to carry. It's a subtle way of showing how growing up without a mother can hit differently depending on whether you're a girl or a boy, and I liked that the show didn't force Connor into a parallel arc just for symmetry's sake.
One thing does throw the illusion a bit: the casting reads older than the characters are supposed to be. Annie especially, Ella Rubin's playing a 17-year-old, but she's reportedly 25, and it shows. She comes across more like someone with a 9-to-5 than someone stressing about high school and college decisions. It's the classic Hollywood thing of casting twentysomethings as teenagers, and I get why studios do it, but it does make it harder to buy into the "still in high school" stakes at points.
One more thing worth calling out: for a show set in the present day, phones are almost entirely absent, and there's no real social media presence either. That's a smart, almost sneaky choice, since most of the season plays out on a remote island where signal doesn't reach, so the show gets to work around that without it feeling like a gimmick. The effect is a series that feels more refreshing and more timeless than most current teen dramas, without constant texting, posting, or screens pulling focus from the actual people in the scene.
One thing that stood out to me is how the show handles its love triangle. Annie's got two guys in her orbit, Ellis and Rory, and the old-school playbook would've made this a Team This Guy vs. Team That Guy situation with the two of them at each other's throats. Sterling Point doesn't do that. It felt less like "who will Annie choose" and more like both of them served a real purpose in her journey, no manufactured drama or friction between Ellis and Rory just to pad out the runtime. It's a genuinely mature way to handle that trope, and honestly one of the season's strongest choices for me.
My favorite structural touch, though, is how the finale mirrors the pilot, almost shot for shot. The season opens on Annie waking up in her New York bedroom, automatic curtains pulling open on her old life before any of this even starts. The finale closes on that exact same shot, same bedroom, same curtains, and without giving anything away, what's different about it by the end says everything about where this season took these characters. Given how identical the setup is, I'd bet money those two scenes were filmed back to back. It's the kind of callback that tells you the writers had this whole season mapped out before they shot a single frame, nothing about it feels accidental.
Critics have been kind to it too, it's sitting around 91-93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and being Canadian myself, I'll admit the Muskoka setting hit a little different, it's shot in actual cottage country, not a generic stand-in for "lake town," and it shows. I also just love that the show is set in Canada, period. Funny enough, the islands and the whole vibe of the place look a lot like home to me here in BC, even though it's actually set in Ontario.
My take: 4 out of 5 stars. If you're missing your summer show and you want something that leans more into family-mystery territory than pure romance, Sterling Point is worth the eight-episode binge. It's already been renewed for a second season, so whatever Amazon does with the TSITP movie, at least there's somewhere else to point that summer-show energy in the meantime.
Available via Prime Video. I recommend watching Season 1 as a full binge.