YA, like every other fiction genre, has its tropes. When those tropes are used in rote, lazy fashion, they can be particularly exasperating. But when they're deployed with a respect for the intelligence of both the audience and the characters, it doesn't matter how many times you've encountered a love triangle, shocking secrets, feuds, and all the rest.
Prime's new YA drama Sterling Point is a fine example of how to play the genre's greatest hits with wit and empathy. Created by Canadian filmmaker Megan Park (My Old Ass), and produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage — whose 2000s hit The O.C. also showed how everything old in the genre could feel new if you tried hard enough(*) — it's nothing you haven't seen before, again and again. It's just a very well-made version of all that.
(*) A necessary disclaimer: I once collaborated on a book about The O.C. with Schwartz and Savage, so take my opinion on Sterling Point with however many grains of salt you want. But plenty of their stuff has bounced off of me, and I've either written that in reviews or stopped watching after an episode or two. And this is Park's show; she wrote and/or directed many episodes, where Schwartz and Savage were in support roles.
Sterling Point begins in New York with Annie (Ella Rubin), a type-A high schooler living with her shallow twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo) and their father Steven (Jay Duplass). The siblings' mother died when they were too young to remember her, and they know nothing of her side of the family. So when a grandfather they've never met dies and leaves them his cottage in the small eponymous Canadian lake town, Annie decides to head north in search of answers about her past.