Sterling Point is the summer series that catapulted Quebec actor Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie to the big screen

Sterling Point is being called the American summer series, and it arrived on Amazon Prime Video with enough momentum to catapult a young Quebec actor into Hollywood's spotlight. Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie, who played Xavier in Radio-Canada's Premier trio, stars in the miniseries as one half of a privileged Manhattan pair discovering secrets in their family's past.

The eight-episode run follows Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin) and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo, son of Mark Ruffalo), both 17, who inherit an island estate in Muskoka from a grandfather they never met. Their monoparental father, played by Jay Duplass, has kept their family history from them. When Annie arrives at the modest, vintage cottage on Sterling Point — a $21 million property the twins could sell to developers — she begins unraveling family secrets that shift everything she thought she knew.

Starling Point trades the polished, coming-of-age formula of a competing Amazon series, L'été où je suis devenue jolie (The Summer I Turned Pretty), for something rawer. The characters smoke pot indoors, swear liberally, wear thrift-store clothes that are just cool enough, and live mostly unbothered by parental oversight — a far cry from the preppy restraint of its rival. A key character, Ramona, a 16-year-old rebellious lesbian played by Amélie Elisabeth Hoeferle, doesn't shave her underarms, and the show never turns her appearance or orientation into dramatic stakes. That specificity — the refusal to sanitize adolescent reality — is what separates Sterling Point from more heavily produced youth dramas.

The series builds its tension around Annie's identity quest, each of the eight episodes ending on a mystery. The source does not reveal how the secrets unfold or whether all are resolved by the finale.