I have a confession: I started Sterling Point at 11 p.m. and watched all eight episodes straight through. No breaks. No sleep. And I’d do it again — in fact I’m going to. I loved this show.
I’ll spare you the full love letter, but here’s the short version: this doesn’t feel like other YA shows. It doesn’t feel like anything else currently on Prime Video. Every character, down to the adults orbiting the edges of Annie’s summer, lands as a real person you know from somewhere.
So I got Missi Pyle (Denise) and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (Kate) on the line to ask what pulled them in, and what it was actually like shooting in a place that gorgeous.
Both answers started with the same two words: Megan Park.
I Would Do Anything Megan Park
For Pyle, this one goes back more than a decade — to a Cinderella Story sequel, of all things.
“I met Megan on a TV movie called A Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song. It’s like Cinderella Story four or five,” Pyle said. “And she played my daughter, and we started writing together. And then I ended up doing some other stuff — I adopted a baby. And she continued to write and made these incredible movies.”
She’s watched Park’s run from the inside, and she is not neutral about it. “If you’ve seen The Fallout or if you’ve seen My Old Ass — that woman is like, I would do anything that has Megan Park in it. So to me, that was a huge thing. And she was really instrumental in getting me hired, and I just loved it.”
Tailfeathers had the same instinct, minus the history.
“Working with Megan Park was what drew me in,” she said. “As an actor, every year I think my career is over and I’m never gonna work again. And there’s that occasional thing — and that occasional thing this time around happened to be Sterling Point. They reached out to me with an offer and I saw that it was Megan Park, and I just love The Fallout and My Old Ass.”
How much did she need to know before committing? Basically nothing.
“As soon as I saw her name attached, I was like, yeah, I don’t even know what the role is, but sure, I’ll do it. That sounds great.”
Teenagers Who Actually Sound Like Teenagers
What Tailfeathers wants to name specifically is how the young characters are drawn — because it’s rare, and because it’s the reason the show hums.
“Megan Park and the whole writing team have done such an amazing job of making these young people an authentic reflection of young people today,” she said. “It feels so messy and real and funny and complicated. And Megan does such a great job with writing women for the screen, and also writing queer characters and the complexities of that as well.”
Muskoka Is a Character — and a Class Divide
Both actors lit up talking about the location. Neither of them describes it as just scenery.
“Muskoka itself, I’d never been. I’d heard of it, but it’s this lush — it feels like a land from Lord of the Rings or something,” Pyle said. “It’s just beautiful, and these lakes, and it’s kind of isolated, and it’s only lovely for a few months out of the year. So just being there was extraordinary. And life sort of spilled over from the set to real life with all the cottage living and whatnot. It was awesome.”
Tailfeathers went somewhere sharper with it — to the economics baked into a place like that, and what it meant to play someone who lives there year-round.
“I think the show does such a great job of capturing the disparity in terms of the extreme wealth that lives in that place for two months, three months of the year, and then the working-class locals, and that sort of tension that’s there,” she said. “You see it in the show, and I really appreciated being able to play a local and to live in that world of having to face this massive opulence that you see in Muskoka on a daily basis.”
Shooting there, rather than faking it, changed the work. “Being there really made all the difference, just in terms of being able to really live in that world and see it for what it is,” she said. “It’s incredibly beautiful, and also very complicated in all of these other ways.”
A Personal side, Because I Couldn’t Help Myself
I had to tell Pyle that the Cinderella Story movies are genuinely tied to some of my favorite memories — I watched them with my nieces, over and over.
“I love that, amazing,” she said. “Yes, and that’s where we met, and that’s where this love affair started. So it’s really cool.”
Which is a very tidy thing to know while you’re watching Sterling Point: a friendship that started on a Cinderella Story sequel eventually produced this.
Watch It
Sterling Point follows 17-year-old Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin), raised in New York City with her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo) and their adoptive father Steven (Jay Duplass), whose life turns over when she inherits her estranged grandfather’s island in Canada, where she finds new friends, budding romances, and untold family secrets. Park created the series, directs it, and executive produces alongside Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage’s Fake Empire and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap.
All eight episodes premiere August 5 on Prime Video. I’m hoping out loud for more seasons. There’s too much good here for one.
