Is 'Sterling Point' a Real Place? All About the Teen Drama's Filming Locations

"Sterling Point" opens with a premise that sounds simple enough for a logline: two teenagers inherit a cottage. What the Prime Video drama is actually about, per the show's synopsis and coverage from the Lethbridge Herald, is messier. Seventeen-year-old Annie Jacobson and her twin brother Connor inherit land in Muskoka from an estranged, recently deceased grandfather, and the plot turns on a secret half-sister named Ramona and the buried history of the twins' late mother. It plays more like a family excavation than a beach read, and the setting is doing more work than a scenic backdrop usually does.

That's because Muskoka isn't standing in for anywhere else. The region, an arc of lakes in southeastern Ontario that includes Lake Muskoka, Lake Joseph, and Lake Rosseau, plays itself in the show, filmed on location between June and October of 2025 rather than renamed or disguised the way creator Megan Park's earlier projects have done. Muskoka has been Canada's answer to the Hamptons for generations, a stretch of cottage country where land tends to pass down inside families rather than sell. The fictional property that gives the show its title, Sterling Point, borrows its name from an actual cottage Park used as a filming location on an earlier project, a small detail that hints at how much of this show is drawn from her own geography rather than an invented one.

That geography is personal for Park. She has told CBC and Rolling Stone about summers spent in Muskoka as a kid, and about her father's recent death shaping the show's emotional core: grief and inheritance, more than a love triangle. She's also written in a real regional fault line, old-money cottage families against newcomers, plus the development and lake-health pressures that come with waterfront that's both scarce and loaded with status. It's friction Ontario's local press has documented for years, and it gives the show's class tension an actual place to stand rather than a generic "rich teens by a lake" gloss.

The pedigree behind the camera explains why critics keep reaching for 2000s references. Park wrote and directed 2024's "My Old Ass," the Sundance breakout that Amazon acquired, and "Sterling Point" is her first television series, made with the same studio. Showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage created "The O.C." and "Gossip Girl," which is presumably why Variety, Time, and The Everygirl have all reached for "Dawson's Creek" and "My So-Called Life" comparisons in their reviews. Margot Robbie's LuckyChap Entertainment executive produces alongside Schwartz and Savage's Fake Empire, and the cast includes Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Missi Pyle, and Jay Duplass in the adult roles, the kind of casting that signals a bigger budget than a typical streaming teen drama gets.

The reviews have landed well, with a 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 76 on Metacritic, and critics have specifically credited the show for resisting a pure romance engine in favor of grief and family mystery. No second season has been confirmed yet. What's left, for now, is a stretch of real Ontario lakefront that a fictional family claims as birthright, and a title that started as someone else's cottage before it became Annie and Connor's inheritance.