Every now and then, a television show comes along that makes you feel seen. Sterling Point is that show for me.
It captures so perfectly the inner lives of Gen Z, how we relate to one another and fall apart and join together. The show’s creator, Megan Park, portrays a relatively realistic life of a modern-day teen, minus the crazy family drama, with a spotlight on female friendships forming the bedrock of the show.
Female friendships are so important, and to see them represented so openly and complexly in a series is refreshing. So often the media can present these friendships as girls pitted against one another, celebrity feuds splashed on the front of tabloids or through a sexualized male lens.
Here, we get real women being vulnerable together, whether it is through casual tasks of going to the bathroom and debriefing on the night together, navigating relationships and life in general or crying in one another’s laps.
Sterling Point gives us a private view into the characters’ feelings through moments of communication and connection. When the characters are talking to their friends and trying to figure out how they feel, there are pauses, repetitions and ineloquence. It feels as though we are stumbling into a shared moment between friends, rather than a highly polished and flat monologue capturing perfectly how someone is feeling. This is how female friendships are built, in these vulnerable moments with one another where we ask for advice on things we do not yet know how to face, sharing our deepest fears and insecurities, all whilst doing the most mundane things like fixing our hair.
The characters in Sterling Point are also written so vividly they become real people to us. There are no cliché depictions of anyone as overly masculine or feminine. Instead, they are simply people, each dealing with their own insecurities and emotions. We are not smacked in the face by hypermasculine men or defenceless women often in need of rescuing — something other shows from the ’90s and early 2000s have an abundance of, like One Tree Hill, for example. Instead, the boys share their feelings. The normalization of opening up allows more young men to feel comfortable expressing their emotions, by talking rather than through violence, which the media can so often glorify.
Similarly, sexuality in this show is treated as fluid. People are not put into a box of gender expectations. Instead, it shows people finding love without the emotional turmoil other shows depict when coming to terms with being queer. Here, it is almost a non-issue, a shrug of shoulders saying, “So, why do you care who I like?”
Further, Park’s own experience acting on the show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, made her determined to filter out what she thought was an unrealistic depiction of being a young person, according to a CBC article.
In Sterling Point, she gives us a nostalgic return to the teen dramas of the ’90s and early 2000s reimagined in modern times. The show marks a new age of teenage drama, one that current youth can see themselves reflected in. Everything down to the music is thought through. Olivia Rodrigo’s song “maggots for brains” in the show’s opening scene drives home the point that Park knows Gen Z. She knows who we listen to, what we say to each other and how we express ourselves. This is in part due to the atmosphere of approachability she created on set, saying in an interview that she encouraged the young cast to contribute their ideas for the show.
What made this show stick with me is the way Park tackles topics that usually are not given a big platform. The scene between all the girls where they talk about their first periods and celebrate another character getting hers is so refreshing. The honesty in that moment helps normalize what women go through. It allows us to feel comfortable expressing our issues, not treating them as unimportant or taboo. This permits us to take up space and be unapologetic.
Overall, this show has felt like a paradigm shift. Together with other shows like Adults, Sterling Point is reinventing the teenage and young adult drama in a realistic and more representative way.
