You don’t need to have your life figured out at 18—and ‘Sterling Point’ gets it

If you are 18 and already feel like everyone else has their life together, Sterling Point would like you to relax. The Prime Video coming-of-age drama follows Annie, a high-achieving teenager whose carefully planned summer falls apart after she is rejected from a prestigious business programme. Instead of spending the summer building the perfect CV, she ends up on a remote Canadian island she inherited from her mysterious late grandfather, where she discovers family secrets, meets people she never expected to know and, most importantly, has no idea what she is doing next.

Spoiler alert: major plot points ahead.

That sounds like a pretty wild way to spend the summer, but Annie’s story is actually about something much more familiar. At 17, almost 18, she has already decided what her life should look like. She has the grades, the ambition and the plan. When that plan falls apart, she initially treats it like a crisis. But Sterling Point slowly becomes the place where she learns that getting rejected from one opportunity is not the same as failing at life.

It's okay to not have a plan

Annie is very much the girl who has been told that if she works hard enough, she can control what happens next. So when she loses the summer programme she was counting on, she doesn’t exactly know what to do with herself. Her trip to Sterling Point starts as an impulsive attempt to uncover more about her mother, but the island gives her something her carefully organised New York life didn’t: the space to be a person without constantly trying to impress someone—and to actually behave like a 17-year-old.

There are new friendships, romantic confusion, family revelations and plenty of bad decisions. Annie doesn’t suddenly become a completely different person, either. She still overthinks, still cares about what people think, still follows a rigorous skincare routine with 17 bottles of creams and serums, and still has moments when she has absolutely no idea what she is doing. And that’s the whole point.

The show also lets its teenagers actually be teenagers. They talk, flirt, mess up, change their minds and have conversations that don’t always lead to some huge life lesson. Phones and social media barely feature, which makes Sterling Point feel like a little bubble where the characters can exist without documenting every second of their lives.

You can figure it out as you go

By the finale, Annie has a pretty big decision to make. Ramona, the half-sister she discovers during her summer, heads to New York to reconnect with her newly found father, Steven, while Annie decides to stay on the island, spend more time figuring herself out and enjoy her swoon-worthy romance with Ellis. Their lives, which become unexpectedly tangled as the show begins, move in completely different directions by the time it ends.

And that feels like the most fitting ending for Annie. She doesn’t leave Sterling Point with a five-year plan. She doesn’t even decide to stay with one. She doesn’t suddenly know exactly what career she wants, who she should be with or what her family is going to look like after all the revelations. She simply chooses something because it feels right to her in that moment.

Lead image: Prime Video

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