[This story contains some spoilers for Prime Video’s Sterling Point.]
Television’s experiencing a bit of a coming-of-age renaissance. It’s far from the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last, but between adaptions of beloved romance novels and teenaged prequels, it’s a good time for YA on TV screens.
As the quantity of shows increase, the pressure for higher quality only grows. Megan Park, the writer-director behind Sundance hit My Old Ass and a former coming-of-age series actress, has found a way to bring needed realism into the space with her new Prime Video series Sterling Point, whose full season debuted Wednesday. “I wanted to make a YA show that felt as authentic as possible,” Park tells The Hollywood Reporter on a recent Zoom.
The 40-year-old creator and executive producer got her start in the industry at 15. A few years later, she landed a leading role in ABC Family’s hit teen drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager. With firsthand knowledge of coming-of-age shows, Park set out to make her first TV series something she wanted to see.
Sterling Point centers around New York City teen Annie (Ella Rubin), who along with her twin brother, played by Keen Ruffalo, inherit their grandfather’s island in Canada. Once in Canada, Annie meets Ramona, played by Amélie Hoeferle, in her grandfather’s house. Annie tells her brother after the pair meet that “someone that looks like mom” is saying the house belonged to her grandfather.
LuckyChap, which produces the series, sought out a partner for Park as she’s a first-time showrunnner. They approached genre giants Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. “It’s very rare that Josh and I just get an email and click it open and start reading whatever’s in the email. But we both did that,” says Savage. The pair sat across from one another and read the script, noting how smart and funny it was. Naturally, they were 100 percent in, as they put it.
Park told Schwartz and Savage that she wanted to evoke similar feelings to some of the shows they’ve brought to life, like The O.C. and Gossip Girl. “[Shows] where the kids were treated like adults,” Schwartz says. It’s a concept he and Savage have always believed in when making television.
“When you’re a teenager and you’re coming of age, everything feels so life and death and dramatic and emotional. You’re figuring yourself out in a way that really happens at that moment in your life,” Schwartz continues. “It’s a rich source of drama, and Megan just mined it beautifully and with a really original, unique voice.”
Park’s writing helped ground the show, but it goes far beyond that. “What blew me away about Megan is how much trust she put in us with her characters. I think that’s hard to find,” says Ruffalo. The 25-year-old notes that once Park got an idea how her cast perceived their characters, she’d let the young actors run with it.
“Megan allowed us to improvise a lot,” Rubin says. “Even if the scene [deals with] something that’s dramatic or slightly outlandish in certain ways, [improvising] allowed us to be messy within that moment and find the truth within it, linguistically and physically.”
Rubin, Ruffalo, Hoeferle and Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie lead the young cast alongside Bo Bragason, Daniel Quinn-Toye, Nikko Angelo Hinayo and Mabel Strachan. Jay Duplass, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Missi Pyle and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers reoccur on the series in parental roles.
“[Megan] just has this very calming and young soul that she just makes you feel like her best friend from the get-go,” Whiteduck-Lavoie says. “It definitely took a big pressure off my shoulders on our first weeks of shooting because it just didn’t feel like a set where it was a super strict set, or I had to play by the rules.”
While Sterling Point tackles the typical coming-of-age staples like love triangles and romance, that wasn’t the only story Park was trying to tell — nor was it the most important, in her eyes. “We kept saying the true love story was this sisterhood,” the creator says.
The show works, in part, due to the richness of the complicated new bond between Rubin’s Annie and Hoeferle’s Ramona. “We did chemistry reads, and it was just so instantaneous with them,” Park says of the actresses.
Park says Rubin and Hoeferle really did become like sisters, and the team started adding in little details of their friendship into the characters. When Park noticed that the pair were always braiding each other’s hair, the writers added in scenes of Annie and Ramona doing the same. “The day we met, I had a feeling it was going to be the two of us. Ella would say the same,” Hoeferle says.
Rubin does, in fact, say the same: “It was a really intuitive natural process, honestly. Amélie is a really incredible. I don’t think I have a more specific word.”
“She is a dream of a scene partner,” Hoeferle adds. “That’s my sister.”
The adults are certainly an important part of the narrative, which is nothing new in the YA space. Schwartz and Savage themselves are known to work plenty of that into their series, including Gossip Girl, The O.C. and Nancy Drew. And this parental cast all seemingly had a clear motive for joining the series. “We’re all here for Megan,” Pyle and Morgan say simultaneously.
“Jay [Duplass] and I were talking earlier about how she’s able to not only write for us old people, but how she has managed to capture these 17- and 20-year-old kids. The emotion and the dialogue that she’s able to write and come up with is so spot on,” Morgan says. “She has become the voice of this kind of younger generation. I don’t understand how she has done it, but she has fucking done it.”
Adds Duplass, “She’s telling a story that’s endemic to a real place, and she runs deep at that place. She knows these kids, she knows the world, she knows everything.”
As much as Park wanted the show to be real, she also knew that it needed to have all the “juicy qualities” that YA shows are known for. She took the characters seriously, but she also knows that sometimes melodrama, as Schwartz pointed out, comes with being a teenager.
“I find a lot of times people feel like YA shows either have to be really dark and edgy or really light and fluffy, and I think that they can be a combination,” says Park. “They can just be authentic.”
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