When Annie Jacobson wakes up each morning, she turns off her voice-activated white noise machine, opens her laptop to review her five-year plan and launches into a multi-step skincare routine. She talks to her friends in careful therapy speak, organizes her life with a color-coded calendar, and is so laser-focused on her career that partying doesn’t register on her radar.
Annie may sound like a career-obsessed 30-something, but she is actually 17.
As the central character in Prime Video’s hot new teen series Sterling Point, Annie belongs to a growing archetype of Gen Z female protagonists who are high-achieving, hyper-competent and always play by the rules. A recent wave of wildly successful YA coming-of-age dramas has introduced audiences to a string of young women like this.
There’s been Ella, the straight-A star of Prime Video’s hit Off Campus; Jackie, the straight-laced Princeton-bound student in Netflix’s teen drama My Life with the Walter Boys; and Ruby, the ambitious scholarship student in Prime’s Maxton Hall. They are emotionally intelligent, articulate and hyper-aware of other people’s boundaries — a far cry from the messy teens of the gritty British drama Skins, where emotional intelligence wasn’t even in the lexicon, or the debauched, decadent world of Gossip Girl.
It may be a fictionalized portrayal of teenhood, but this type of buttoned-up restraint speaks to the way young people are living and trying to succeed. Research has shown that perfectionism among college students is at an all-time high, as a generation prepares to enter a cutthroat job market increasingly reshaped by AI, while navigating an online culture that relentlessly demands self-optimization.
Teenage fantasy looked very different in the coming-of-age dramas that defined the mid-to-late aughts. In The O.C., Degrassi and Dawson’s Creek, hedonism and rebellion were part of the appeal. We watched teenagers wrestle their freedom from their parents through drinking, smoking, petty crimes and plenty of sex. But the teens depicted onscreen today seem to have already graduated to adulthood. Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf blew off steam by getting hot and heavy in the back of Chuck Bass’s limo, whereas Sterling Point’s Annie seems to get her kicks curating a neatly organized spreadsheet. You can imagine that an afternoon with Skins bad boy James Cook (played by Jack O'Connell) would scandalize her forever.
Succeeding academically and professionally is Annie’s only goal at the outset of Sterling Point. The series follows 17-year-old (Ella Rubin) and her twin brother (Keen Ruffalo) as they discover they have inherited an island from a grandfather they never knew. Within the first few minutes of the first episode, we learn that Annie is intent on getting into her dream summer program at Wharton Business School – a goal she’s been chasing since her first internship in the sixth grade. Moments later, her twin brother tells her to go out and have fun instead of catastrophizing about her future. “Go and party. You’re 17,” he tells her. “You’re acting 30.”
Premature adulthood is a recurring theme across these new YA shows. In My Life With The Walter Boys, Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez), a 15-year-old Manhattan native, is tragically orphaned and moves to rural Colorado to live with the Walter family (and their handsome sons) on a ranch. Despite the trauma she has endured, Jackie and her friends have the same kind of emotional literacy we see in Sterling Point, or Netflix’s relentlessly wholesome queer drama Heartstopper. Jackie operates like someone twice her age; dresses for high school like she’s moonlighting as a high-powered solicitor and has the rigorous morning routine of an Olympic athlete.
It is telling that today’s teenage characters are so consumed by anxiety about the future — and the need to optimize themselves for it. Online, content creators are championing the “5-to-9” side hustle — waking before dawn to work on another business venture before the traditional 9-to-5 — while other influencers promote looksmaxxing, the controversial idea that a glow-up, achieved through surgery, is a necessary investment in your future.
Megan Park, Sterling Point’s creator and co-showrunner and executive producer, tells The Independent that the show is partly a study on how young women today feel pressure in society. “There’s massive pressure on women of every age to be perfect. To handle everything,” says Park.
The director says it was a deliberate choice to make Annie ambitious and a strict rule-follower, while making clear that her drive comes entirely from within. “She’s a product of her environment. Growing up wealthy, in a big city, going to a fancy school has of course influenced this quality and drive,” says Park.
As the plot unfolds, we learn that because Annie lost her mother as a child, she had to become an adult very quickly. “This show is as much a study on how the young women feel that pressure in the current timeline but also how much their mother[s] felt the same pressures and refused to conform,” adds Park.
Andrew Levey, LMSW, a therapist at LightLine Therapy who works with teens in New York City, says the pressure to succeed is reaching young people earlier than ever before. “Children are being told that they need to succeed at a really young age compared to maybe what previous generations were exposed to, to the point where there becomes this obsessiveness or this career-driven mindset at such an early age,” he says. “Young people are seeing themselves in these characters, facing the same pressures as them.”
Eventually, we see that breaking point reached. In Sterling Point, Walter Boys, Maxton Hall and Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, there comes a moment for the protagonists to let go and embrace the chaos of teenhood. Sterling Point’s Annie discovers herself in Canada away from the stresses of her life in New York and starts to prioritize her mental health; Walter Boys’ Jackie falls recklessly into a love triangle with two brothers (we’ve all done it); and Ruby from Maxton Hall falls madly in love with her school frenemy, James. Eventually, these characters become messy. Their layers unravel; they yearn and finally act their own age.
At this point, the shows become about escapism for the teen viewers. While millennial viewers may feel nostalgic about their own youth, today’s teens aren’t experiencing that same hedonism. Research has shown that teens spend an average of more than eight hours of screen time per day, while various studies point towards young adults drinking less and having less sex than older generations.
“A lot of teens feel forced, either internally or externally, that they need to succeed to move on to that next phase of life, to be productive, be successful,” Levey says. “And I think some teens just don't really hit the breaking point that some of these characters in these shows might be hitting in these shows until they're in college, or until they are in their young adulthood already,” he says. “They may not relate to characters who party, drink or skip school as much as they did in older TV series. But they have the same desire to toss it all aside to focus on themselves.”
In Gen Z coming-of-age shows, this current crop of characters gives voice to a generation burdened by adult pressures long before they reach adulthood. They reflect how the younger generation is grappling with anxiety about the future at the same time as yearning for reckless abandon.
And it seems that the people who make these shows understand that completely. “Gen Z is such a misunderstood generation,” Park previously told Rolling Stone. “They’re so wise and have been through such a crazy time in their lives.”
