When a TV adaptation of Jenny Han’s beachy book trilogy ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ hit Prime Video for it’s first season, I had never heard of Belly, Conrad, or Jeremiah. I tuned in simply because everyone else was doing it – and because the show’s soundtrack heavily featured Taylor Swift songs (Yes! I was a hardcore Swiftie in 2022!). Seven episodes later, I was hooked, but not enough to start reading Han’s books, join the discourse online, or lose sleep waiting for the second season.
Nonetheless, Season 2 came around and I found my way back to Cousins Beach. I powered through the seven powerful episodes reflecting on our three main characters’ grief, but when it ended, I vowed I would never watch the show again. Surely there were more interesting shows on TV to watch… right?
Well, Season 3 of the show hit Prime like an ocean wave breaking the shore. The Internet exploded over Gen Z’s favorite beachgoers in a way it hadn’t before. Though I vowed it wasn’t my kind of show, I watched the whole season through, again. My friends and I rooted for Conrad on our couches week after week, not unlike suburban dads on Saturdays in fall. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was destiny, or maybe, just maybe, it was what Susannah would’ve wanted.
So, why did The Summer I Turned Pretty get so popular? What ingredients did Jenny Han and the show makers mix together with the expertise of a Paris chef to create a TV event that penetrated so many of our fragmented algorithms – and lives?
Reinventing the triangle
“Team Edward or Team Jacob?” “Team Peeta or Team Gale?”
Most everyone around my age knows about love triangles, but we were children during the heyday of teenage girls going feral over dueling love interests. By the time we were preteens, love triangles had been stamped out of the zeitgeist, deemed “cringe”. Shows like Never Have I Ever and My Life With The Walter Boys have certainly kept the trope alive, but it was The Summer I Turned Pretty that truly brought love triangles back in style.
I can’t say that the show nailed the love triangle, but it’s refreshingly fun, and the added layer of keeping score on social media makes it bigger than ever before. Everyone, even companies, are chiming in with whether they’re “Team Conrad” or “Team Jeremiah”!
Bringing back soapy simplicity
These days, it feels like TV episodes are action-packed, every plot crammed into eight to ten breakneck episodes that give us little time to spend with the characters. The Summer I Turned Pretty avoids this by giving us a simple plot – girl falls for two brothers she grew up with- and a beach town to call home. Some argue that the show is ridiculous, but I think Wednesdays at Cousins Beach were a much-needed reprieve from binging episode batches (looking at you, Netflix).
The Summer I Turned Pretty‘s slice-of-life story and one-episode-a-week rollout feels nostalgic, a fun-sized version of an early 2000s teen soap opera. Season 3 in particular reminds me of Dawson’s Creek with its idyllic waterside community, heated love triangle, and characters that feel both aspirational and authentically young. I wouldn’t be surprised if Han was directly inspired by Dawson’s Creek, because they have a similar ending: like Belly, the main character of Dawson’s soul-searches in Paris before her happily-ever-after with the boy she chooses.
Red and blue clues
If there’s one thing about Gen Z, we love a good easter egg hunt. Many of my peers and I were raised on the queen herself, Taylor Swift, who has been known to drop sneaky hints called “easter eggs” about her music years in advance. It’s no secret that Jenny ripped a page from Taylor’s playbook and made every shot of the show count.
In the third season alone, there are clear visual parallels to Sabrina and The Notebook, indicating Belly and Conrad’s eventual happy ending together by having them mimic shots of other “endgame” couples in media. Details in the props, costumes and set pieces haven’t gone unnoticed by fans, like the color coding of Conrad (red because “loving him was red”) and Jeremiah (blue because “losing him was blue…”) Then there’s the unforgettable music, which is curated with the kind of every-lyric-counts neuroticism that runs through the Stranger Things soundtrack. My favorite example of a musical easter egg is Belly’s favorite musical being Bye Bye Birdie, which features a main character named…you guessed it… CONRAD.
It’s interesting that we as Gen Z are attuned to minuscule filmmaking details like these, and the creators of the intricately made shows we love know this. As an entertainment/culture journalist, and a proud ‘Blue’s Clues’ kid, I’m personally all for joining the easter egg hunt. Dissecting television episodes encourages media literacy; it also makes for interesting discourse on YouTube and TikTok.
A show that feels authentically gen z
Perhaps the biggest reason we love The Summer I Turned Pretty is because it reflects the unique real wants and struggles of young women in the 2020s. Conrad versus Jeremiah isn’t really about who’s the better brother – it’s about what we want and won’t tolerate in a world where dating is increasingly difficult.
Girls love Conrad because, even though he’s first presented as the bad, broody choice, he has a heart of gold underneath. He yearns for Belly, and it makes us go wild because so many girls just want the men in their lives to show that they care, to choose commitment.
Jeremiah is presented as the golden retriever to Conrad’s black cat who eventually wins Belly over, but season 3 reveals that Jeremiah was unfaithful on spring break in Cabo (meanwhile Conrad never stopped loving her). The world turned on Jeremiah Fisher, and on the cheerful “golden” boyfriend trope as a whole, because of his nonchalance and audacity to propose to Belly as an apology.
With The Summer I Turned Pretty (and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild”), girls everywhere made it known that they were done both with Jeremiah and male immaturity. Conrad may be moody, but at least he’s honest! He even goes to therapy!!
The perfect needle drops
Lastly, I have to give it up for the people who made the Summer soundtrack. It’s perfectly contemporary, tailor (or Taylor?) made for a gleeful road trip to the beach. Notoriously, there’s a Taylor Swift song in almost every episode, which I think perfectly documents relationships from a female perspective as if each song was written about or by Belly. Olivia Rodrigo is another fun featured artist of the soundtrack. I especially loved “lacy” and “making the bed” for Summer. There are some surprising song choices that break the modern pop vibe, too. My favorite twist song was U2’s “With Or Without You” – paired with Belly and Conrad, it felt like a gut punch!
As fun as The Summer I Turned Pretty was, I’ll be happy to see it go after the upcoming movie. There are other TV love stories – ones with actual life-or-death stakes – that will preoccupy my hopelessly romantic heart come Thanksgiving.
