Prime Videos best YA hit is also its biggest outlier

Over the past few years, Prime Video has become the ultimate destination for young adult and new adult shows.

The Summer I Turned Pretty whipped the world into a frenzy over the Team Conrad versus Team Jeremiah debate. Maxton Hall served up swoon-worthy enemies-to-lovers angst. Off Campus proved an irresistible addition to TV’s hottest new subgenre: hockey romance.

These shows and more — We Were Liars, Elle, Every Year After — are all part of Prime’s push to court Gen Z. Its latest hit, Sterling Point, is no exception. Created by Megan Park, the director of exceptional coming-of-age films The Fallout and My Old Ass, the series is another entry in Prime’s robust YA library. It’s also its most refreshing standout.

Sterling Point follows New York teen Annie (Ella Rubin) as she visits the Canadian island she and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo) inherited from the grandfather they never knew. Plot-wise, the show doesn’t reinvent the wheel. In fact, it has quite a few elements in common with several other Prime YA hits. The Canadian lake setting of Every Year After. The family secrets of We Were Liars. The love triangle of The Summer I Turned Pretty. The class divide of Maxton Hall. Many of these are standard teen drama tropes, and Sterling Point isn’t afraid to dig into others: magical summers, messy birthdays, grief over losing loved ones. Yet despite this familiarity, Sterling Point manages to set itself apart, and in doing so becomes Prime’s most exceptional teen drama.

For starters, Sterling Point is a completely original entry in Prime’s adaptation-heavy slate. Unlike The Summer I Turned Pretty, Maxton Hall, Off Campus, Every Year After, and We Were Liars, it’s not based on a book series. And unlike Legally Blonde prequel Elle, or the cancelled Cruel Intentions, it has no ties to prior films.

This is not a knock against adaptations. YA novels, especially YA romances, have huge audiences who deserve to see their beloved stories leap off the page. That kind of built-in fandom is also a TV network’s dream, so no wonder Prime is pursuing adaptations in such intense fashion. (Other streamers have pulled similar moves: Netflix with My Life with the Walter Boys, Forever, and the now-concluded Heartstopper, and Hulu with the now-concluded Tell Me Lies.)

However, like any good TV lineup, Prime’s younger-skewing collection needs variety. That means original shows to balance out its host of adaptations. Benito Skinner’s college-set Overcompensating fills this niche on the comedy front, but on the teen drama front, Prime has yet to find that kind of success with an original. (It canceled 2025 teen drama original Motorheads after just one season.) Sterling Point, which took the number one spot on Prime Video’s chart and which has generated huge buzz across social media, may very well be the Prime YA original with staying power.

Sterling Point‘s status as an original already makes it a major outlier in Prime’s teen drama catalog. But what truly sets it apart is its tone, which remains grounded and naturalistic even as its story takes its fair share of soapy turns.

Of Prime’s teen dramas, Sterling Point is the first one I watched that genuinely captures how young people talk. Other offerings like The Summer I Turned Pretty or We Were Liars have more affected dialogue, with voiceovers often narrating directly from the book. The effect is one of glossy drama, but Sterling Point strips the gloss away in favor of natural pauses and overlapping dialogue. Characters ramble and apologize for rambling. They interrupt one another and apologize for that, too. Nothing feels like a mimicry of conversation: It just is conversation. That even extends to Sterling Point‘s occasional use of slang, which avoids the trap of feeling forced. At one point, Connor calls a plate of spaghetti “gas,” and the moment is as lived-in as it is silly.

That same natural feeling is present across Park’s prior projects. The former star of a teen drama herself, having appeared in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Park has emphasized the importance of writing dialogue that sounds like a teen would actually say it. She also encouraged the actors to improvise, creating a sense of messy realness that highlights the strengths of her young cast. Several exchanges feel drawn from a mumblecore movie, which only feels fitting given that Jay Duplass — a key figure of the mumblecore genre, along with his brother Mark — stars as Annie and Connor’s father.

The majority of Prime’s YA series offer up lovely fantasies of romance and self-discovery, and Sterling Point certainly indulges in these fantasies as well. But its dialogue makes them feel more down-to-earth, all without ever diminishing the big life changes its characters are experiencing. It’s a show that manages to have that timeless teen drama quality, earning comparisons to classics like Dawson’s Creek and The O.C. in a way that Prime’s flashier YA shows haven’t. Yet even though it boasts a throwback quality (the lack of phone service around Sterling Point helps), it remains rooted in the now. Thanks to that, out of all Prime’s moves to woo Gen Z, Sterling Point is the series that’s closest to actually getting them right.

Sterling Point is now streaming on Prime Video.

​Mashable