Joan Didion<\/a> (\u201cLike all aspiring writers of my generation, I wanted to write like Didion. With restraint, economy and total control. If i could write like that, I could be like that. Or so I thought.\u201d), as well as a manuscript titled \u201cLess Than Zero,\u201d though here it\u2019s a screen treatment rather than the 1985 novel that made the author famous at 21. (One character will call it \u201cbrilliant.\u201d)<\/p>\nAs did Real Bret, TV Bret attends the private Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, where he is one in a small clique of rich, beautiful cool kids: Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber) and Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner) in contrasting shades of Veronica and Betty; and Susan\u2019s jock boyfriend, Thom (Graham Campbell). Debbie is Bret\u2019s girlfriend, though he is also actively, if secretly gay, and has a kind of thing for Susan. They are shallow, if sad, nostalgic for their own untrammeled youth; they still have a little innocence left to lose. Because Bret is kind to marginal characters, beneath the notice of his friends, from whom he mentally distances himself by virtue of observing them (he\u2019s Nick Carraway in Wayfarers), he reads as slightly more sympathetic, if no less tedious, and possibly more problematic. \u201cI told myself I was only going to chronicle the decadence,\u201d says narrator Bret, \u201can excuse I\u2019d return to many times in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Into this shakily ordered universe comes handsome, charismatic, mysterious new kid Robert Mallory (Homer Gere, son of Richard, with Carey Lowell), whom Bret remembers seeing at a screening of \u201cThe Shining\u201d a year before, though Robert denies having been there. Soon he has cast a spell over Bret\u2019s friends, stirring in Bret twin feelings of obsession and competition: \u201cI smelled him before I saw him \u2014 it was cedar and sandalwood as if he had just walked through a forest of citrus,\u201d but also, \u201cHe was up to something and it was up to me to find out exactly what that was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Around the same time that Robert arrives, a serial killer, eventually dubbed the Trawler, comes to town. (Happily, we see only the elaborately staged, possibly satanic results of their work, not the process.) Who this person is, and what less than random reasons might explain the murders, remains a mystery at least through the nine out of 10 episodes available to review. But Bret points a finger so often at Robert that, by the mathematics of television drama, one can only believe him innocent. Still, no idea.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a world from which adults are almost entirely missing, and when they are not, they are disappointing, or trouble. Significantly, there are Wes Bentley as Debbie\u2019s skeezy movie producer father and Evan Rachel Wood as Debbie\u2019s mother, a narcotized failed actor straight out of \u201cValley of the Dolls.\u201d Jordan Roth plays Bentley\u2019s somewhat sinister, sometimes helpful right hand kitted out post-glam Bowie style.<\/p>\n
To be perfectly honest, if one set out to create a show I would be constitutionally disposed not to care for, this is it, though I allow that this is also exactly a show some people would be born to love. It\u2019s often absurd and always melodramatic \u2014 not in itself a criticism \u2014 but if you\u2019re in the market for a slick miniseries about cocaine-sniffing kids (and adults), murder, animal mutilation, sex and sports cars in New Wave L.A., with cameos from Hamburger Hamlet and Orange Julius and an excellent selection of period songs on the soundtrack, you can\u2019t do better than this.<\/p>\n
![\"Ella](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1785960011_902_.jpeg\")
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Ella Rubin, left, and Bo Bragason in Prime Video\u2019s \u201cSterling Point.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Sabrina Lantos \/ Prime Video)<\/p>\n
\u201cSterling Point,\u201d on the other hand, is just my cup of Canadian Maple Syrup Soda. (It\u2019s a thing.)<\/p>\n
Ella Rubin plays Annie Jacobson, and like the kids in \u201cThe Shards,\u201d we meet her suspended between her junior and senior years of high school, facing a summer she had planned to fill with more school. \u201cYou\u2019re 17,\u201d says her knuckleheaded, yet strangely perceptive twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo, son of Mark), \u201cyou act like you\u2019re 30,\u201d suggesting instead a period of \u201cjust going bug wild.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then a letter from a lawyer arrives, and it transpires that their maternal grandfather, whom they never knew, has left them, among other things, an island in Ontario\u2019s Muskoka Lakes district. (Their mother died when the twins were 2.) Annie leaves their father (Jay Duplass) a misdirecting Post-It note \u2014 she knows he\u2019s been lying to her about her grandfather \u2014 and scurries off to pierce the heart of this mystery, which comes from an incomplete instruction to \u201cfind her.\u201d (She\u2019s a rich girl. Scurrying from New York to rural Canada doesn\u2019t require a second thought.)<\/p>\n
Arriving by seaplane, Annie meets Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), a townie working for Jeffrey Dean Morgan\u2019s marina owner, Joe, who carries himself like a man with a secret. Ellis, a sweet guy not averse to skimming a little off the top when dealing with moneyed customers \u2014 it\u2019s a summer getaway for the rich \u2014 takes an immediate shine to Annie. This will be complicated by the coincidental appearance of Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye), a former piano prodigy Annie knows from New York, who\u2019s in residence with his mother (Missi Pyle, ever a treat to see), who always seems just a little bit drunk and thinks nothing of pouring one out for the kids. (Adult presence is minimal.) There are posh parties, through which some of the young characters pass, though no one is doing cocaine or getting murdered. (There is pot and underage drinking.)<\/p>\n
The crew is filled out by Oona (Bo Bragason), a sort of seafaring vagabond who lives on a boat with her 12-year-old sister Maple (Mabel Strachan), and Ramona (Am\u00e9lie Hoeferle, terrific) an angry local returning after some time away, and possibly presenting the answer to a riddle.<\/p>\n
What makes \u201cSterling Point\u201d work so beautifully is its rare, real, unhurried sense of of time; it stretches out the way days do when you\u2019re young, a sense heightened by the fact that Annie speaks twice as fast and as much as anyone else in the series. (It\u2019s that New York energy.) Though there are some low-key melodramatic plot points, the show feels diaristic. It isn\u2019t that the stakes are low, or that conflict is nonexistent, but that the drama is driven by issues of connection, identity, love and longing. (As in \u201cThe Shards,\u201d there\u2019s a scene in which someone who likes someone discovers them liking someone else \u2014 but who hasn\u2019t been there.)<\/p>\n
The series emanates a sense of urgency without cooking up abnormally dramatic situations. There is a lot of conversation, which, indeed, is what takes up a large portion of teenage life. One couldn\u2019t exactly call \u201cSterling Point\u201d unglamorous, since this is an attractive green and blue world \u2014 all that water makes the show refreshing to watch in a heat wave \u2014 and the cast is good-looking, in interesting ways, chosen, I would guess, not for perfection but for soulfulness. Who wouldn\u2019t want to live here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If we are lucky enough to survive into our 20s, and have attained some degree of adult consciousness,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[260496,259524,260491,260497,6935,260492,85270,146,85,46,28344,20550,260495,260493,3263,259523,260494,9475],"class_list":["post-575846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-adult-consciousness","tag-annie-jacobson","tag-bret-share","tag-canadian-mystery","tag-character","tag-debbie-schaffer","tag-ellis","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-kid","tag-mother","tag-serial-murder","tag-shards","tag-show","tag-sterling-point","tag-susan-reynolds","tag-thing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Kaia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1785960010_185_.jpeg\")
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