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 cosy, 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 Noughties than of the recent crop of teen dramas. It may have been exec produced by the team behind Gossip Girl, but shiny and campy this is not.
That said, with its idyllic, pine tree-laden location (Sterling Point was primarily filmed around the Muskoka Lakes region in Canada) and actors with weirdly model-lish looks, this is still very much escapist TV. These teenagers get from place to place by boat and throw parties in lakeside log cabins and mainly just hang out in between their cash-in-hand jobs. Their problems are real and complicated, which keeps things pacy, but never harrowing. There is no “capital T” trauma here; you’re never left fearful that something truly awful is about to happen. And when much of modern life, particularly for young people, can feel as though it’s confined to the bright rectangle of iPhone screens, there’s something deeply soothing about watching a series so rooted in nature, and the slow building of human relationships.
So, yes, while Sterling Point fits within the recent wave of teen dramas, it will likely also appeal to those who want something more substantial than saccharine background TV to half-watch while simultaneously scrolling on their phones. It’s juicy and compelling enough to hold your attention, without setting your nervous system aflame like the most recent season of Euphoria–or edgier teen dramas of yore, like Skins. Instead, it gradually draws you into its world and makes you comfortable there. By the time it’s over, you won’t want to leave.
