.jpg)
What makes a great teen drama? The kind you rewatch for years to come, where the characters feel like old friends—a world you can also live inside. For Sterling Point's Megan Park, who has both starred in a YA drama and created one in this new Prime Video series, it’s about that combination of light and dark, nostalgia and relatability.
“[When we were making Sterling Point] I wasn't necessarily thinking about, Oh, I love Dawson's Creek. How can we make this Dawson's Creek?” Park tells Teen Vogue. “But we did talk about, in the writer's room, these characters that are so beloved, so real, nuanced, complicated, and likable; how do we draw on those elements and infuse them in a bigger way?"
She continues, "There's always going to be space and a desire for these coming-of-age shows, because there's always a new generation coming of age—and it's always fun to go back and escape to. You turn on Netflix and it's, like, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl. They're all trending again.”
For Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the minds behind Gossip Girl and The O.C., who are also executive producers on Sterling Point, what makes a great teen drama is even simpler: “Great teen dramas are just great dramas magnified by the lens of coming of age,” they say. “When you experience something for the first time (first love, first heartbreak, first best friend), it feels singular and monumental, like no one else has ever gone through this. The best teen dramas capture this feeling.”
Each member of the Sterling Point cast has their own favorite, formative YA shows; they name Gossip Girl, The O.C., Glee, Riverdale, Sparticle Mystery on the BBC, and Outer Banks. All these shows have that quintessential lived-in energy in common, the sense that the lives of the characters could be continuing on even now.
The same vibe exists in the world of Sterling Point, which premieres on August 5. Set near the beautiful Lake Muskoka—home to the pivotal cottage location filmed in Heated Rivalry—in Ontario, Canada, Sterling Point is a show about found family, family secrets, and the risks and rewards of letting yourself love and be loved. It artfully captures the feeling that one summer might change your entire life.
In the first Sterling Point trailer—set to Gracie Abrams’ new single “Look at My Life” and shared exclusively with Teen Vogue—twin siblings Annie (Ella Rubin) and Connor (Keen Ruffalo) learn that their estranged grandfather Gordon has died and left them property in Canada—much to the chagrin of their dad (Jay Duplass). The twins' mom died when they were little, so Annie decides to go north in search of answers and family history; upon arrival, however, she discovers that her grandpa owned both a cottage and the island it sits on, Sterling Point. But wait! There’s a girl Annie's age, named Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), already living there who says it’s owned by her grandfather.
YA dramas have never been afraid to lean into tropes, and Sterling Point continues that tradition in a refreshing way. Dead-slash-absent parents, secret-sibling reveals, love triangles—this series has it all. But these plot points are never played for pure shock value or soapy drama, and instead are used as vehicles to discuss grief, loss, and complicated, ever-changing relationships.
“At the heart of Sterling Point is a story about family and what constitutes family,” says Dani Gorin, an executive producer on Sterling Point and president of television at LuckyChap, which produced the series. “It’s about coming to terms with your parents’ fallibility, and interrogates whether we’re ever really able to break free of the past. What drew us to this story is Megan’s fresh and authentic voice—her take on really potent and relatable questions.”
Park comes to the teen drama realm with a fair amount of experience. For years she acted opposite Shailene Woodley in ABC Family's The Secret Life of an American Teenager, as the uptight Christian cheerleader Grace Bowman. While she doesn’t name the show directly, Park alludes to early acting experiences as driving her to make a different kind of YA story.
“I've always been excited by the opportunity to take the idea of YA ‘content’ but make it feel really authentic and elevated,” she says. “Because when I was an actor, many years ago, I was young—in my 20s and teens—and most of the time felt like the material I was doing or saying didn't feel necessarily authentic to how I was actually living life, or how I saw younger people around me living their lives.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
Sterling Point is Park’s first TV series as creator, director, and co-showrunner; but over the past few years, she’s become one of the most exciting rising filmmakers telling stories about young people. Her first full-length film, The Fallout, starred Jenna Ortega in a career-making turn as a survivor of a school shooting; her second, 2024’s My Old Ass, was a heartwarming look at aging and grief, with breakout star Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza at the helm.
My Old Ass, like Sterling Point, was filmed in Muskoka, where Park spent childhood summers. Unlike that film, however, the series is intentionally set in the area. “I wanted to have this summer feel, and it's so Canadian to have this lake culture, at least in Ontario," she says. “Everybody has a cottage or at least goes to visit a cottage. That's just so part of our culture here.” (And yes, she found the Heated Rivalry of it all funny, especially since the two shows share an actor in Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova. “We were like, ‘Oh, they beat us to it.’ But as a Canadian, it thrills me when I see Canadian content hitting the international stage in such a way.”)
Life in Muskoka has informed the plot as much as the scenery, with an undercurrent of tension between the rich tourists staying in vacation homes and the working-class people—like one of Annie’s love interests, Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), and his dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)—who enable them to have that lifestyle.
“There is an interesting thing about Muskoka, where you do have these people who've had cottages for a hundred years in the same family, and then you have people coming in with tons of money from other countries and from the States," Park says, "buying and tearing down these beautiful old places and building mega-mansions. That does cause some conflict with the locals.”
Adds Park, “It was kind of fun to think like, How can we explore some of the tension in that world and that space, and kind of combine those two worlds?”
.jpg)
.jpg)
The cast of young actors from the US, Europe, and Canada immediately took to the location, and they spent last summer having their own life-meets-art moment as they filmed between Muskoka and soundstages in Toronto. One weekend, they rented a cabin on the lake and spent several days stargazing, riding jet skis, and watching Twilight. “It was the best summer of my life,” says Bo Bragason, who plays Oona (and will soon play Zelda in the forthcoming live-action blockbuster). “The dynamic that you see onscreen is exactly the same as what you see in real life—all the good bits.”
In true teen drama form, there is a central friend group: We have Ramona; her longtime best friend (and maybe something more), Oona, who lives on a houseboat with her younger sibling Maple (Mabel Strachan); Ellis; and Sully (Nikko Angelo Hinayo). Annie and Connor are the New York City outsiders, as is Annie’s other love interest, Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye), whose family (including mom Denise, played by the eternal scene-stealer Missi Pyle) owns one of the mega-mansions.
Each person has their role in the group. Oona is flirty, unapologetic, and “doesn't give a f*ck about what anyone has to say, but in a very nice way,” says Bragason. Maple is “the reasonable, smart one, even though she’s the youngest,” says Strachan. Ellis is a “lover boy,” says Whiteduck-Lavoie, whose affection for Annie is “love at first sight.” Connor hides behind an “an air of disinterest,” says Ruffalo (who, yes, is the son of Mark Ruffalo). Rory is a “delicate, artistic person,” who Quinn-Toye says is a “victim of the people and lifestyle he surrounds himself with.” And Sully brings everyone together with what Hinayo calls a “welcoming, almost maternal energy about him, which I think comes from being raised by two wonderful women.”
.jpg)
Ramona and Annie’s burgeoning sisterhood is at the center of the plot, as both discover more about who they are and how to cope with shared grief over their mother and grandfather. Each is also grieving a version of life that they’ve lost.
Rubin (The Idea of You, Fear Street: Prom Queen) and Hoeferle (The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) both remember having, while in the audition process, a gut feeling that they were going to work together. They also shared an instant connection with their respective characters.
“I immediately really loved Annie and felt that there was a piece of her in my soul,” says Rubin of her character, who we meet as a high-strung high schooler with a clear history of playing the adult role in the family. Her trip to Sterling Point is the first impulsive thing she’s done in her life. “I wanted to make sure that she was understood,” Rubin adds.
“I've never really read a character that resonated so deeply with my particular sort of journey, I think, with deep sadness,” Hoeferle says of Ramona, who has been taking care of her grandfather on his deathbed and clearly has her defenses up at the beginning of the series. “I've never lost a mom, obviously—I mean, not obviously, but obvious to me, not to you. But I remember thinking, Wow, Ramona has something where I can put this darkness into.”
.jpg)
A major theme in Sterling Point is the question of nature vs. nurture, which goes hand in hand with the series’ nuanced discussions of adoption. Annie and Connor were adopted by their parents; Ramona is the biological daughter of Annie’s adoptive mom. This creates some initial conflict between the characters. For Park, who has adoption in her family, it was important to show the dynamic in a respectful way, but also allow room for messiness and imperfection. Rubin and Hoeferle embraced this.
“I think we just both had a lot of respect for what they were feeling,” Rubin says. “We weren't precious about them being perfectly polite or having completely digestible feelings about it. Some of these things are really uncomfortable…. Family is complex, as is, and when you bring in a biological vs. nonbiological aspect, we all have such different definitions of what that means, what family means, what the definition of family is. For two girls who are teenagers, who are hiding pieces of themselves that are being sort of shown to them suddenly, it's overwhelming.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
The heavier discussions in the series are balanced with lightness: scenic boat rides and sapphic swims in the lake, for instance. Park set out to find this balance—she mentions The Parent Trap and It Takes Two as movies with the sort of vibe she’s going for—after noticing that many contemporary YA shows are either “dark and heavy” or “fluffy and fun.”
“I was excited about the challenge to do something that was a mix of both,” she says, “where it's an exciting, nostalgic world, and you're dealing with firsts and coming-of-age themes and topics, but you're also talking about really real sh*t.”
It was also important to Park for the dialogue to be natural, to feel like the way teenagers actually speak. The best teen dramas end up being something of a linguistic time capsule. On set, she encouraged improvisation from the actors, which I witnessed firsthand while visiting Muskoka. In one flirty canoe scene between Ellis and Annie, Rubin said her line first as it was written, then riffed a half dozen other ways; her improvisation made it into the episode. “I totally forgot that I improvised that,” she says with a laugh.
“It was such a gift,” Rubin continues. “I'd never felt so much agency as an actor and for a character…. Megan trusting us with that allowed me to feel really free as Annie and to know her more deeply. Megan just gave us trust in that we knew our girls, and I had a say in who she was and what she did and how she was built and what she wore.”
Costume designer Marissa Schwartz worked collaboratively with the actors, using some of their own clothes and accessories, including Rubin’s “destroyed” flats and Hoeferle’s own set of keys. With the latter, production only became aware of it after a few weeks of shooting, so there was some concern about needing to make copies to assure continuity in case something got lost. (“I felt bad," Hoeferle admits. "They freaked.”)
Says Rubin, “It [all] allowed me to feel incredibly close to Annie and incredibly protective of Annie. Also, on top of that, it was just so fun. It felt like how you think acting's going to be when you're a kid.”
Hoeferle nods in agreement: “I think that really showed, especially in scenes where Ramona and Annie just talk over each other. It felt free. It felt really free and fun.”
Sterling Point begins streaming on Prime Video on August 5.
