Amazon’s Show of the Summer Is Here. It’s a Pleasant Surprise.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

These are odd times to browse shows on Amazon Prime Video, where the success of The Summer I Turned Pretty has inspired the streamer to commission a crop of samey-sounding series about the romantic trials and tribulations of high schoolers and college kids . This June and August, the streamer released not one, but two shows about girls from cities who spend transformative summers on Canadian lakes, swimming, boating, and kissing cute boys. Unfortunately for the terminally dull Every Year After , this month’s chart-topping Sterling Point has made its early-season predecessor look utterly zest-free in comparison. I hope TSITP fans will forgive me for saying that Sterling Point also beats that show with a stick. Sterling Point is as deep as the water where its characters jump off cliffs, full of sharp dialogue and unexpectedly moving moments. Amid all the Prime young-adult romances, this is the one that will stand the test of time.

Maybe I should have predicted this outcome: Megan Park, a former actress best known for the ABC Family series The Secret Lives of the American Teenager , is the showrunner of Sterling Point , and Park had already shown herself to be an expert at making coming-of-age stories that have a sharp point of view. Her 2021 feature directorial debut The Fallout , a story about survivors of a school shooting, starring Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler, had many of the same elements that enhance Sterling Point : funny, naturalistic dialogue, befuddled parents, girls falling in love with girls, a sensitivity for the intensity of teenage experiences. And everyone loved 2024’s My Old Ass , in which a girl about to leave home for college, played by Maisy Stella, encounters her older self, played by Aubrey Plaza, while tripping on mushrooms. Both Sterling Point and My Old Ass were filmed and took place near Lake Muskoka, in Ontario, which looks really, really nice.

Viewers of My Old Ass know that Megan Park knows that one summertime swim with the right person can change your life. But although there are multiple romantic storylines and a lot of hand-rolled joints in Sterling Point, neither sex nor drugs are at the heart of this tale, which is textured enough to enthrall adults and teens alike. Seventeen-year-old twins Annie (Ella Rubin) and Connor (Keen Ruffalo) are wealthy New York City kids whose adoptive mother died when they were toddlers. Their adoptive father, Steven (Jay Duplass), has always been sad and vague on this topic. When their maternal grandfather, Gordon, dies, he leaves the twins two-thirds of the island of Sterling Point, along with his cottage there. The other third, we find out after Annie skips town to visit this place she knows her adoptive mother loved, is in the hands of 16-year-old Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), who turns out to be, through a series of complicated circumstances, Annie and Connor’s long-lost sister.

Annie is nervy and verbose, and Ella Rubin plays her with the perfect mix of precocity and vulnerability.