Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 7, 2026
I watch an unusual number of YA and YA-adjacent shows for a middle-aged man (I am a television critic, but I also have teenage daughters who love to talk about television). Some of them are great (Never Have I Ever, Sex Education, Heartstopper, Maxton Hall), some are pretty good (Off Campus, Outer Banks — for two seasons, anyway), some are bad (We Were Liars, Every Year After), and some are just too YA for adult viewers to attempt (My Life with the Walter Boys).
Sterling Point straddles the line between pretty good and great. It’s not as sexually charged as Maxton Hall or Off Campus (though it remains just as sex positive), but it’s also not bogged down by a murder mystery or a treasure hunt. It’s a relationship drama, and a fairly complicated one, but like Heartstopper, it’s more sweet than randy, and while the situations are melodramatic, the characters feel real for their age.
It’s a great cast, too, mostly of little-knowns, save for the three adults (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Missi Pyle, and Jay Duplass). It centers on Annie (Ella Rubin), a well-off, overachieving, adopted 17-year-old who wants to go to Wharton but learns that her estranged grandfather has died and left her and her fraternal twin brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo), an island in coastal Canada — the same island where her mother died when Annie was a toddler. Annie decides to visit in the hopes of connecting to the place where her mother died, only to find someone else already living in the home she’d inherited.
That other person is Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), who turns out to be the sister Annie had no idea existed. Annie (straight, emotionally vulnerable) is the opposite of Ramona (gay, jaded, and walled off), who had been taking care of their grandfather, Gordon, before he died. I don’t want to spoil anything else, because there are a lot of family secrets, and those secrets are largely what propel the plot, except to say that Sterling Point belongs to the found-family genre — only in this case, some of the members of this found family are Annie’s actual family.
There’s also, obviously, a love triangle: Annie is torn between Rory, a guy from back home in New York who just so happens to have a summer place in the same area, and Ellis, a townie who works at the marina with his father, Joe (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). There’s not that much suspense about who Annie is most drawn to, but it says something that both Rory and Ellis are great kids, both equally worthy of her affection.
Ella Rubin is really terrific in the role, although Amélie Hoeferle as Ramona is the series’ standout — a complicated girl in a complicated situation with complicated feelings. I’m sure the target audience views these shows as romances, but as a parent watching, you kind of just want to see these kids make good choices, and they mostly do (except — Jesus, what’s with all the smoking in 2026?). It’s also nice that the romantic pairings don’t overwhelm the rest of the relationship dynamics. There’s some heavy stuff going on here, but creator Megan Park handles it with care and tenderness, and, importantly, none of the kids are self-destructive or harboring dark secrets. They’re just kids dealing with and processing new dynamics in their lives, aware of their privilege where it exists.
And that’s finally what makes Sterling Point such a lovely surprise. For all the melodrama — the dead mother, the secret sister, the inheritance that unearths a family’s buried history — the show never mistakes cruelty for depth or pain for maturity. It trusts that watching decent kids stumble toward the right thing can be just as gripping as watching them self-immolate. Park has made something genuinely tender, a show that likes its characters and wants good things for them, and that generosity is contagious. By the end, you’re not just rooting for Annie and Ramona to find themselves — you’re grateful the whole messy, gentle thing exists.
