Amazon YA Drama From ‘The O.C.’ Producers

It seems you can hardly skip a stone these days without hitting yet another YA drama about a girl coming of age over a transformative summer vacation in some idyllic waterside hideaway. The specific details may vary, but the basic concepts rarely seem to; watch enough of them, and you’ll probably find them coalescing into a single undifferentiated blur of love triangles and dead moms and cannonballs off the dock.

How refreshing, then, to land on one that actually manages to take those familiar pieces and make them feel new again. Sterling Point, from creator Megan Park and executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, might not be reinventing the wheel. But blessed with unusual wit and sensitivity, as well as a delightful young cast, the Amazon drama nevertheless stands out as something special.

Ella Rubin stars as Annie, a New Yorker so rigidly ambitious that even her businessman father, Steven (Jay Duplass), reminds her it’s okay to just be 17 and have some fun. Within minutes of our meeting her, however, her life is derailed by two pieces of news. The first is that she’s been rejected from the prestigious Wharton program she’d planned her entire summer around. The second is that her maternal grandfather has died, willing her and her slacker twin brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo), a nice bit of property off Ontario’s Lake Muskoka.

Still reeling from the former development, Annie decides, with uncharacteristic impulsivity, to act on the latter. Leaving only a hastily scribbled Post-It note for her dad, she sets out for Sterling Point in hopes of learning more about this estranged late relative, the inheritance he’s given her and perhaps, by extension, the mother who died when she was just a baby.

What she finds once she’s arrived, you can mostly guess. Of course she unearths shocking family secrets, sometimes with the help of townsfolk like marina owner Joe (a sad-eyed Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Of course she finds herself caught between two cute boys, salt-of-the-earth Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) and posh Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye). Admittedly, I did not predict Annie’s relationship with a mysterious young stranger, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), becoming the beating heart of the show. But of course the backstory linking them is appropriately twisty. And of course Annie falls in love with Sterling Point and the person she can be there, until it starts to seem more like home than home.

What is striking, however, is how fresh Sterling Point makes it all feel. If the influence of Savage and Schwartz shows like Gossip Girl or The O.C. can be felt in the broad contours of these storylines, the laid-back voice in which they’re executed is pure Park.

As a director, she has an eye for both the grand beauty of Lake Muskoka and the tiny unconscsious gestures that reveal entire characters. As a writer, Park demonstrates, as she did with My Old Ass and The Fallout, an ear for teen dialogue that sounds like it’s coming from actual teens. They trade clever quips and offbeat pop culture references (Camp Rock 2 proves amusingly formative for one character); they also stumble over their words, ramble about nothing, make jokes that don’t quite land.

Her characters might evoke recognizable archetypes — the himbo, the party girl, the rich kid — but they’re too specifically realized to be defined by them. Rubin sets the tone with a lead turn that’s perky but not quirky, expansively emotional but not mopey, and the rest of the cast similarly pitch their performances somewhere just north of naturalistic but south of soapy.

My favorites included Ruffalo’s hilariously bro-y turn as Connor (even if the show doesn’t always seem to know where to put him) and Bo Bragason’s charisma bomb as Annie’s shamelessly flirty new pal Oona. Best of all is Hoeferle’s raw nerve of a performance as Ramona. It begins as a shock of fury before peeling back the layers to reveal a wry humor, a thoughtful mind and, especially as Ramona falls for the unattainable Oona, melting vulnerability.

Sterling Point’s marriage of low-key characters and high-key plotting isn’t always seamless. A few big reveals seem rushed or slowed for the sake of filling an eight-hour season. And while the characters could plausibly be of our world, Sterling Point, the place, might as well be a fairy tale land.

The island conveniently does not get cell service or Wi-Fi, suspending the Gen Z characters in a prelapsarian state of phonelessness not seen since the heyday of Gen X. Parental figures are either absent or so careless they might as well be — Rory’s mom, Denise (Missi Pyle), doesn’t just tolerate his friends’ underage drinking but refills their wine glasses. (That these youths prefer Sancerre to cheap beers or mixed drinks is another odd detail.) Ordinary concerns like money do intrude on occasion, pitting working-class locals against wealthy tourists, but not to the point that the gang is beholden to anything so mundane as a set work schedule.

If all of this makes Sterling Point sound almost like a modern Neverland, though, the geographically and culturally secluded island really functions as a safe space in which these adolescents can work through the real and relatable anguish of growing up.

Park takes her young characters’ emotions seriously in a way she doesn’t the challenges of modern parenting or the illegality of underage drinking. While the show involves entirely too much booze and weed and sex to be considered family-friendly, there is nevertheless something sweet, even wholesome, about Park’s insistence on meeting Annie and Ramona and their friends with an abundance of compassion and a lack of judgment.

They’re allowed the room to be confident grown-ups one moment and scared little kids the next, to try on new personality traits and reconsider old ones, to mourn the time they’ve already lost before diving headfirst into their futures. “When does childhood end?” Oona’s 12-year-old sister (Mabel Strachan) asks at one point. Annie considers before replying: “I guess, like, maybe when you stop worrying that it’s over.” By that metric, Annie herself is somewhere short of fully mature. Sterling Point recognizes that, and is all the more moving for it.