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

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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. Rubin’s wide, expressive eyes and mouth, as well as her masses of brunette hair, recall Anne Hathaway. (In fact, Rubin played Hathaway’s daughter in 2024’s The Idea of You.) As a wealthy, driven New York City kid who takes an Ambien at the beginning of her flight from New York to Toronto (she thought it would take way longer than 45 minutes) and brings a pile of skincare products into the woods, Rubin is perfect. (“Annie’s not doing anything for her birthday?” a friend asks Connor, her flip, fun-loving brother. “I don’t know, she mainly organizes her creams,” Connor replies.)

Luckily, the show doesn’t dwell too long on easy bits about a city girl who overpacked, or on the fact that the island doesn’t have Wi-Fi or 5G, instead letting Annie settle in, fall in love with the woods and the lake, and connect with the prickly Ramona and her local friends, including charismatic Oona (Bo Bragason) and handsome, taciturn boat-builder Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie). Connor shows up, as does Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye), a New York City friend of the twins whose family (a bit too coincidentally) owns a huge, overbuilt rich-person’s cottage nearby. (They have Starlink, so you know that’s where Connor chooses to stay.) Some light class struggle unfolds, with Connor lobbying Ramona and Annie to sell the island for a huge profit, so more rich people can build there. Over the course of the season’s eight episodes, Annie finds herself increasingly torn between her city self and her lake self. And the three teenage siblings uncover the true story of what happened to their mother.

All these early-twentysomethings playing high schoolers thrive under Park’s direction. Rubin is the center of gravity, but Bragason is bright and charming, Hoeferle projects hard-shelled abrasiveness and sterling honesty, and Quinn-Toye, who at first blush seems too gangly and odd to work as a romantic interest, turns out to be intelligent and perceptive, and more than holds up his end of the inevitable love triangle between Annie, Ellis, and Rory. Ruffalo gets all the funniest lines, and, just like his famous father would, knows how to slyly take full advantage. (Connor, tripping on mushrooms, asks Rory’s mom: “Do you think that raccoon has distemper?” “It’s a mailbox,” she says. “Oh, I’m glad he’s OK,” Connor sighs.)

Every character is a little old-feeling in Sterling Point, not just in the way they look, but in the way they act. Take the hilarious Post-it note Annie leaves on her door in the first episode, breaking the news to her father that she’s gone to Thailand for the summer. Rich city kids and rural locals alike are largely parent-free: Ramona is 16, floating in some kind of legal hole between guardians; Oona’s mom is perpetually off traveling; Rory’s mother gives kids wine and takes them into the hot tub. You could defend all this by pointing out that parentlessness isn’t just a convenient way to give these teenage characters freedom, but rather a theme of the show. But the emotional truth is in your reactions: When you get to the final episode of the show, when Annie dreams of an alternate life if her mother had lived, you’ll cry like I did, whether or not you think 24-year-old Ella Rubin really looks 28. “Canada is random as fuck,” Connor says at one point. Canada is also, it seems, this summer’s undisputed romance queen.