Huzzah!!! Sterling Point has been renewed for a second season! The press release sharing the joyful news hit my inbox as I was drafting this very recap, so thanks, I guess, to the insomnia and migraine that have derailed the last 48 hours of my life, for holding me up so I could include the renewal news in this issue!
When will we get a second season? Very much an open question. Something that didn’t make it into the published version of my interview with Megan Park was a brief mention of the movie she’s set to shoot for Apple. I would love to see a new season next summer à la the yearly schedule for The Summer I Turned Pretty and Off Campus, but I’m not holding my breath.
This issue is where the paywall begins for remaining recaps covering Sterling Point’s first season. Our regular weekly issue will arrive on Sunday. Happy reading & happy viewing!
Connor Jacobson is a walking explosive, a sentient bundle of TNT. With seemingly no effort, he takes over every space he’s in. Ramona is disgusted with his plan to sell Sterling Point and/or building a Four Seasons there, but once Annie makes it clear she, too, is on Team Never Sell, Ramona quickly finds herself gleefully finishing Connor’s sentences and vice versa. Where Annie is an earnest try-hard, Connor is the happy-go-lucky life of the party. One minute, he’s comically spitting out a bite of beaver tale (this is anti-Canadian bigotry!!), the next, he’s hopping into Rory’s Jeep to go cliff-diving. He compliments Rory’s mom Denise on the crispness of her Sancerre (sounds delicious, but why are you condoning this, Denise?!), and he is overgenerous with his hipflask, getting Ramona absolutely wasted at the otherwise very wholesome movie night / Lake Muskoka Fun Fair.
Connor is a chaos Muppet, and I must compliment Annie on never fully losing her cool with him. Is he charming because he knows he has to smooth over the rough spots left in the wake of his chaos Muppetry, or does he sow chaos wherever he goes because he knows his charm will ensure he can get away with it? Chicken, egg, we may never know.
I must also compliment Annie on her very clever choice to execute a tremendous belly flop with her pitch to Connor. The future Wharton graduate’s pretend flailing as she tries to appeal to Connor’s interests – Girls! Boating! Great produce! High-quality water! – is convincingly bad and I love that she’s thought far enough to devise tactics to support a strategy that will most likely work. Chances are very good that Connor will meet a girl to crush on and that Sterling Point’s natural charms and lovable social circle will work their respective magics upon him.
Annie spends most of the episode starting to wonder aloud about what it means to be the daughter of a dead mother. She’s been hermetically sealed off from all but the most sanitized version of her mother for her entire life, and now that she’s putting together bits and pieces of truths she hadn’t previously known were out there, she’s started to wonder “what if having a dead mom is the thing that’s fucked me up the most?” It’s intense to be unable to stop thinking “what if all this had been mine as a kid? What if my mom had lived? Who would I be?”, but I think those are exactly the right questions to ask, and being able to feel it deeply and capable of articulating it so clearly for the first time is a gift.
The contrast between the story Annie’s always believed and the reality of her mother’s death is thrown into even starker relief when she learns from Joe that Goldie did not die of cancer, but in childbirth, and he was there. Sir. What?!
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