Megan Park’s first series is warmer and odder than its poster suggests: a grief story with two sisters at its centre and an island around them. The performances carry it. The mystery that supposedly drives it is the least interesting thing on screen.
Megan Park has made a series about grief and dressed it as a mystery, and the disguise is the weakest thing about it. Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin) inherits an island in Canada and finds a sister, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), that nobody thought to mention. There are eight episodes. Park created the show, wrote on it and directed alongside Aurora Guerrero and Andrew Ahn, with Margot Robbie among the producers, and after two features, The Fallout (2021) and My Old Ass (2024), this is her first television. It is good. It is not good for the reasons the trailer wants you to think.
The reason is the sisters. Rubin plays Annie as a girl who has arrived with a plan and a suitcase and is not going to admit either was a mistake; she talks quickly, apologises rarely and watches everyone. Hoeferle’s Ramona is slower and warier, a person who has grown up on an island and knows how small it can get. Park’s dialogue for the two of them is the best writing in the show. They interrupt each other, mishear on purpose, and say the real thing sideways while pretending to talk about something else.
There is a scene, early, in which the two compare what each was told about the other’s mother. It moved us more than we expected, and we can say what did it: neither actress raises her voice, and the camera stays on the one who is listening rather than the one who is speaking. We have seen a great many sibling reunions on television. This is one of the few that felt like two people meeting rather than a plot point being delivered.
Kristen Correll and Ante Cheng shoot the island in the last hour of daylight whenever the story lets them, so that the water is flat and the docks throw long shadows and everyone looks slightly sunburnt. Zazu Myers’s production design keeps the cabins worn and the shop underlit; it looks like a place people live rather than a place a show is set. Marissa Schwartz dresses the islanders in the jumpers they already own and Annie in clothes that are wrong for the weather for at least three episodes, which is a neat way of telling us she has not decided to stay. Jaco Caraco and Tyler Hilton’s music is mostly songs, and there are perhaps two too many of them.
The romance we will not map, because who ends up looking at whom is half the pleasure, and Park is honest enough to let a girl fall for a girl without a speech about it. Bragason, Whiteduck-Lavoie and Quinn-Toye make the islanders people first and rivals second. The adults are thinner. Jay Duplass’s Steven Jacobson and Missi Pyle’s Denise get a handful of scenes each and play them well, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Joe spends most of the season being significant in the background. We kept waiting for him to be given something to do.
Then there is the mystery, which is where we grew impatient and then a little cross. Nearly every episode ends on a revelation, and nearly every following episode spends its first ten minutes softening the one before. Four editors are credited, Gabi Arno, D. Gillian Truster, David Greenspan and Jorge Weisz, and the episodes are cut to different speeds; one dawdles on the beach for forty minutes, the next hurries through three confrontations before lunch. Most critics have forgiven this. So, mostly, have we, but it is the part of the season that plays as television made to a template.
Set against Park’s own films it is looser and kinder than The Fallout and less sharp than My Old Ass. Set against teen television generally, it is unusual in trusting silence, and in letting its young people be reasonable with one another without making a point of it.
Watch it for the two girls on a dock working out what they are to each other. If the clue in the last minute of an episode makes you reach for the next one, do not blame yourself; that is what it is for. It is a 15 certificate and it began on 5 August 2026, which is the right time of year for it.
