Make ‘Sterling Point’ Your Late-Summer TV Obsession

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.August 5, 2003: 26-year-old Josh Schwartz, then the youngest showrunner in TV history, lobs up a late-summer buzzer-beater, and with five instantly-classic words—“Welcome to the O.C., bitch,” of course—delivers a new Hall of Fame teen drama. Fast forward two decades and a dozen more series in between, and Big Schwartz hasn’t lost his fastball. Twenty-three years to the day of The O.C.’s seminal series premiere, Schwartz and his producing partner Stephanie Savage are once again closing out the summer with another arresting teen melodrama in Sterling Point, a new Prime series from My Old Ass writer-director Megan Park.As a graduate of 90s/aughts-era WB, any soapy serial about late-stage adolescents trying to figure it all out will always have a special place in my heart. Bonus points if there’s an actual mystery to figure out on top of the existentialism and will-they-won’t-theys. So far, Sterling Point is restoring the feeling, down to having Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the cast and a Tom Welling variant as one of the love interests.Our hero is Annie (Ella Rubin), a neurotic Type-A Brooklyn private school overachiever whose summer frees up just in time for her to learn that she and her twin brother have mysterious family ties to a secluded, idyllic Canadian island, the titular Sterling Point. This being a TV show about rich kids, of course Annie jets up north in first class to fill in the blanks about the dead mother she never knew, even though she doesn’t even have a drivers license and it takes three episodes for her dad to figure out where she is.Sterling Point has everything you want in a good teen drama. Existential angst from people barely old enough to vote. Class tension (the island locals spend the summer begrudgingly catering to vacationing one-percenters). At least two love triangles. Shady parents with secrets. A dead relative moving plot pieces around from beyond the grave. A sage parent played by a beloved character actor (Morgan). And—most crucially—a gorgeous, inviting universe for all the fuckery to unfold in. Characters trade deep breaths and awkward silences while boating to and from the mainland; estranged siblings commiserate in between afternoon cliff jumping; every 10 minutes there’s a pan across some beautiful island foliage. One of the things missing from a show like Euphoria was that it felt like an Anywhere, USA suburb with no real landmarks; contrast that with a show like Veronica Mars, whose fictional high school and the surrounding town were as distinct as the characters that populated them.But Veronica Mars, classic as it is, is a noir murder mystery at its core. Cruel Summer, one of the more recent teen shows to move me, is a multi-timeline ordeal centered around a teenage girl’s kidnapping. Sterling Point is blessedly devoid of the darkness that most shows in this vein tend to get saddled with. No one is missing or being nefariously manipulated. There’s no edge, just emotions. To that end, it reminds me most of Everwood, the underrated WB series anchored by the late great Treat Williams (alongside then-newcomers Chris Pratt and Emily Van Camp): a good-looking cast, feeling angsty big feelings in the midst of beautiful nature.Plot is secondary to likable characters in these types of shows, and this one hangs together mostly on the strength of Ella Rubin, whose Annie straddles the line between dream girl and spaz. She plays Annie like an endearingly neurotic mess, often always tripping over her own words and stuttering her lines out in double-time as the character second-guesses herself in real time—when she’s not tearing into a heartwrenching monologue about loss, grief and emotional despair (the back half of the season is good for at least one reel-worthy scene per episode). In lesser hands Annie could come off snooty and privileged, but in Rubin’s, she’s alluring.