Sterling Point‘s female friendship is the beating heart of the series, and it is the bond between Annie and Ramona, not the show’s romantic storylines, that carries the most emotional weight. According to JustWatch, Annie is 17 years old when everything in her life changes, placing her squarely in that particular stretch of adolescence where the people you turn to for help are, more often than not, other girls your own age.
Sterling Point Female Friendship and the Girlhood It Captures
The show is set in the present day, but it unfolds on an island without cell service, across a summer that feels deliberately cut off from the modern world. The result is a setting that functions like a time machine. Conversations happen face to face. Secrets are shared by torchlight. No one disappears into a phone screen mid-sentence.
For anyone who came of age in a smartphone-free era, that texture is immediately recognisable. The sleepovers, the end-of-day debriefs, the ability to communicate an entire story with a single look across a room: Sterling Point reconstructs the architecture of girlhood with enough specificity to feel earned rather than nostalgic. Brushing teeth mid-story and having to pause to spit. Braiding hair while recapping a first kiss. Curling up on the sofa the morning after a bad night, going over every decision in forensic detail. These are the rhythms the show gets right.
The period scene stands out in particular. When the girls celebrate Maple’s moment together at summer camp, making her a flower crown and howling at the moon, it plays less as a quirky set piece and more as a statement: we matter, and we witness each other. That kind of collective acknowledgement is exactly what female friendship provides when other structures fall short.
When Female Friends Become a Lifeline
Annie and Ramona are sisters as well as friends, but the dynamic the show builds around them speaks to something broader. Neither has a mother they can go to, which means they go to each other instead. Sterling Point treats that substitution seriously. The show acknowledges, through the character of Oona, that maternal absence takes more than one form: a mother can be physically present and emotionally unreachable. Either version leaves the same gap.
Elizabeth Su, whose writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and who holds a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University, has written about this directly from her own experience. As someone whose mother was emotionally absent, she describes her teenage female friends as the people who taught her practical things, told her the truth, showed up without being asked, and never once required her to perform a version of herself that was easier to deal with. That is the specific kind of loyalty the show keeps returning to.
Two teenage girls on the cusp of adulthood, figuring out what it means to be a person: that is how Su frames Annie and Ramona’s relationship, and it is a more precise description than most reviews have managed. The show’s intelligence lies in understanding that this figuring-out is not a backdrop to other drama. It is the drama.
Creator Megan Park built a series in which the writing is sharp enough to carry the weight of that material, and the characters are drawn with enough specificity to avoid the usual shorthand. Sterling Point treats platonic love not as a consolation prize for the absence of romance but as its own complete and serious thing. The show’s island setting, its warm soundtrack, and its resistance to easy resolution all serve that central argument.
With Annie at 17 and Ramona alongside her, Sterling Point places its characters at precisely the age when those friendships feel most total, and most necessary. The series makes the case, scene by scene, that girlhood is not a phase to be grown out of. It is foundational, and the friendships formed inside it tend to set the template for every relationship that follows.