Jumping into a crisp lake, morning sunshine through lush green leaves, cicadas buzzing in the hot summer air: the quintessential cottage-country mood is the setting for Sterling Point, Prime Video’s latest word-of-mouth teen drama, which takes place on a fictional island in Muskoka, Canada. Away from the city and the cell towers, summer becomes the idealized version everyone imagines, and few backdrops are better suited to a story about a young person questioning what she wants from life.
Creator Megan Park, working alongside co-showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the pair behind The O.C. and Gossip Girl, built a series that punches above its weight and above its target age demographic. The scenic Muskoka Lakes region also grounds the show’s soapy family stakes in something specific and atmospheric.
The protagonist, Annie, played by Ella Rubin, is a 17-year-old overachiever who lives with her twin brother Connor, played by Keen Ruffalo, and their adoptive father, played by Jay Duplass, in New York. On the verge of her senior year, she learns of her grandfather’s death and, through a letter her father is reluctant to share, discovers that she and her brother are inheriting his cottage and the entire island it sits on. The grandfather adds a cryptic instruction to find someone.
Annie tells her father she is vacationing in Thailand with her boyfriend and heads to Muskoka instead. There she learns that her adoptive mother had a biological daughter, Ramona, played by Amelie Hoeferle, and the first episodes trace the two getting to know each other as newfound sisters. She also reconnects with Rory, played by Daniel Quinn-Toye, an old classmate and piano prodigy summering in something closer to a mansion than a cottage.
The romances are never quite the point. The series is far more interested in excavating family secrets, of which there turn out to be many by the finale. Viewers not immediately won over by capsizing canoes and other lakeside shenanigans tend to be caught by a stretch midway through the season, when the show finds its shape around a group of new friends, cliff jumping, outdoor movie nights and the planning of Annie’s 18th birthday.
That middle run also gives the show its emotional core, including a tender queer subplot in which Ramona confesses feelings for her friend Oona, played by Bo Bragason, scored to an extended cut of Lana Del Rey’s Off to the Races. It is those intimate, unhurried moments, as much as the mysteries, that explain how a modestly scaled streaming drama became one of the summer’s most talked-about shows.
