There was a point – several decades, in fact – where first The WB, renamed as The CW, dominated YA television. While the shows themselves varied wildly, if you wanted to watch torrid love affairs, quippy dialogue, and the next generation of stars (usually paired with grown up teen stars of yesteryear) mix it up as they came of age, The CW was your go-to destination. While the channel still exists, the programming is mostly long gone, and since the fizzling of the network (as well as the demise of Freeform), streamers have been desperately trying to grab that coveted YA demo.
Netflix has certainly made in-roads there with To All The Boys, My Life With The Walter Boys, and the rare non-”boys” titled Ginny & Georgia. But it’s Prime Video that may be taking the crown thanks to the culture-dominating success of The Summer I Turned Pretty, which has helped the rudderless streaming service pivot from “we’re a fantasy streamer maybe” and “we’re a superhero streamer possibly” into the semi-definitive destination for shows about teens kissing people they definitely shouldn’t. OR SHOULD THEY? While Maxton Hall and We Were Liars both posted big numbers, and Off Campus is a huge hit, none of these series have really captured the spark of vintage CW (think Gossip Girl, Gilmore Girls, or the rare non-”girl” show One Tree Hill).
…That is, until now, with Prime Video’s Sterling Point, which features star-making turns from the younger cast, three TV veterans in the adult roles, and enough shocking secrets, quippy dialogue, and really excellent kissing to make it feel like it’s 2007 again through magic or science.
Created by Megan Park, who has already shown a strong affinity for well-defined teen characters with HBO Max’s school shooting drama The Fallout, and the excellent sort-of time travel movie My Old Ass, Sterling Point also benefits from co-showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. To list their credits would take up the rest of the word count for this review, but they are veterans of the YA coal mines, from The O.C. (which Sterling Point harvests for a fair amount of DNA) and Gossip Girl to Hart of Dixie and The Carrie Diaries. The new series is undoubtedly channeling the verbose dialogue and well-rounded characters Park has already made her name on, but it’s impossible not to trace Sterling Point back to Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) babbling about nerd stuff on The O.C. and still somehow winning the girl of his dreams.
As for the plot of the show, it’s your typical mix of small-town secrets and lies. After flubbing the application for her dream summer program at Wharton, the babbling (see??), adopted Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin) is at a loss as to what to do with her life, when she gets a letter from the recently deceased grandfather she wasn’t ever allowed to meet. Turns out, he’s been trying to get in touch with her for years, and in his death has left his house to both Annie and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo, and yes, he is Mark Ruffalo’s son). On a whim and with the strange suggestion in the letter to “find her,” Annie spontaneously heads to Canada to the island of the show’s title, where she discovers a populace split between the incredibly rich and the incredibly poor (see The O.C., again, with a dash of Outer Banks thanks to all the boats). She also discovers something even more shocking: her also deceased mother had a secret child, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle).
That’s just the beginning of the season, which drops at least one big emotional bomb per episode and sports an engaging supporting cast including future Zelda (of the upcoming live-action The Legend of Zelda) Bo Bragason as Oona, a horny lesbian who can’t stop sleeping with the town’s straight women. There’s also your requisite two boys who both fall for Annie, because you can’t not have a rich boy and a poor boy pining over our female lead. And you’ve got those adults I mentioned with Jeffrey Dean Morgan (really admirably stretching himself this month between this and a very good performance over on The Walking Dead: Dead City) playing a grizzled fisherman with a dark secret, Missi Pyle (a total hoot) as a real estate agent with designs on the island and some usually drunken advice, and Jay Duplass as “annoyed New York dad,” not getting too far from his usual type. Also very good is Mabel Strachan as Oona’s little sister Maple, who is constantly reading and gets a stand-out episode later in the season (all eight episodes were provided for review by critics) when she gets her first period.
While everyone is solid and the dialogue is crackling, it’s the main trio of performances that really elevate the series to “CW level,” which is a Big Compliment, to be clear. Rubin (who oddly previously appeared as a student of Duplass’s character on Netflix’s The Chair) is no stranger to the screen, but she’s a revelation here, ably challenging Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel for “fastest talking in a teen drama” while also digging to the bottom of her soul as Annie deals with at least one complete table-tossing of everything she thought about her family in every damn episode. She’s also a fantastic romantic lead, and while the boys are fine – Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye) is the rich one who is right for her past, while Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) is the poor one who might be right for her future – Rubin puts her whole body and emotions into making you feel that either of these “okay” choices could be just what Annie needs. Revelations and heartbreak are par for the course for YA, but let’s not underplay that one bit of secret sauce that makes a YA drama great is Really Good Kissing (RGK), and there is, indeed, some RGK going on in this series, all thanks to Rubin.
Other than your genre-requisite boys, the real core relationship of the series is between Rubin’s Annie and Hoeferle’s Ramona, who start at opposite ends of the spectrum before they begin to understand each other as people, and eventually sisters. And the much smaller Hoeferle comes off as a force to be reckoned with, stalking around the island of Sterling Point and terrifying nearly everyone, including Annie. And unlike Annie, who finds sadness sneaking up on her at surprising points while she tries to stuff her feelings down under plans and chatter, Hoeferle plays Ramona like a raw nerve given human form, nothing but rage and anguish that gets slowly whittled away as she discovers a new family in the wake of the death of the grandfather who raised her. There are plenty of twists and turns for Ramona, too, but Park keeps the plot nicely juggled between the two leads; letting Ramona take up a little more space, then Annie, until they find an even point by the end of the season.
And while she is supporting this main duo, Bragason is radiant. There’s a quip late in the season when Connor notes that Oona and Ramona bring a “Bert and Ernie” vibe, which is funny both because it’s shockingly accurate and because Connor misidentifies who is who based on physical size, when their temperaments are the opposite. Bragason is a ray of sunlight in the show, constantly looking at others with optimism and bringing them around to her infectious joy… Even though, again, true to the genre, she’s hiding a lot of pain inside, which Bragason bottles down effectively.
Of the rest of the cast, Ruffalo comports himself effectively as the vapid but funny Connor, with hints that he may get more to do if/when Sterling Point is picked up for a second season. Nikko Angelo Hinayo is also very funny as Sully, an aspiring chef at the local cafe who is most relegated to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern status with Connor, and deserves more of a plotline if the show does continue. Hinayo gets plenty of laughs, but is very much “Supportive Gay Friend” — surprisingly trope-y in a show that is extremely open to the “L” part of “LGBTQ+.”
But this is par for the course for vintage CW, and if the season ran for 22-25 episodes instead of the eight we get on streaming, all that would be worked out. It’s a tightly plotted season of TV that flies through big events at a brisk pace, and would have been inherently different if we had a year-long “summer” in Canada instead of the two months in pseudo-real time we get on Prime Video (if you want more on this, check out The CW’s current vestigial limb show Sullivan’s Crossing, which shares the “returning to small Canadian town and discovering family secrets” plot and has a by-comparison expansive 10 episodes per season). If the show did run longer, characters like Connor and Sully would also undoubtedly have gotten their own secrets, their own plotlines and star-making episodes if we were in the traditional TV landscape of 20 years ago, instead of the condensed one of today. And a side-note on that: it’s a crime Prime Video is releasing a show built for the weekly cliffhanger as a done-in-one binge… Sterling Point easily could have dominated conversation and built fans over eight weeks, when instead it will need to live or die over one week in the doldrums of August.
That said, a big shout out to the casting, which makes the very un-CW choice to include early twenties actors who actually look like teens. Part of that is how Park writes the characters, allowing them to make mistakes, own up to them (or not), and move on, contrasted with the adults who are harboring dark secrets and pain. But this isn’t mid-to-late twenty-year-olds with chiseled abs pretending to be sophomores in high school… It’s kids (or close to it) who actually look and feel like kids.
Look: a big theme of Sterling Point is how you don’t have to let your past define you, and we’re never going to get vintage CW back. The way Prime Video (and others) roll out shows is not the same as appointment TV, every night at 8 and 9 pm, as well as the heady mix of teen drama, supernatural drama, and superhero drama that The CW hit in its prime. But with excellently shot and acted shows like Sterling Point that include instantly lovable characters, stellar performances (particularly from Rubin, Bragason and Hoeferle who are now definitively stars), and plenty of whip-smart dialogue and swoonworthy romance… Close enough: welcome back, The CW.
Sterling Point premieres all episodes on August 5 on The CW – sorry, on Prime Video.
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