The new season of The Summer I Turned Pretty, a melodrama about a love triangle set in a fictional beach town, opens with a classic dilemma. Isabel (played by Lola Tung), a college junior whom everyone calls “Belly,” has made it off the waitlist to study abroad in Paris in the fall. But her excitement fades when she learns that her boyfriend—a senior—must complete an extra semester at home in the United States. He’ll be sulking on campus alone while she’s presumably fending off handsome European co-eds. Should she stay or should she go?
As described, “to Paris or not to Paris” may not sound like a totally original—or even consequential—plot. But The Summer I Turned Pretty, which is one of the most popular series on Prime Video right now, concerns itself with the little things. To the 21-year-old Belly, Paris matters. Decisions like these are pivot points—choosing Europe over a guy actually will determine everything about her life. Concentrating on such individual choices is crucial to the appeal of the young-adult blockbuster, which is adapted from a series by the teenager-whisperer Jenny Han. The show is serious about the barely exceptional lives of unremarkable American kids, finding profundity by treating these crossroads in life with care and nuance, not as petty problems.
The Paris question reflects the story’s central drama: the intersecting romance between Belly and the Fisher brothers, Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), whose families summer together somewhere in idyllic New England. Since Belly “turned pretty,” hitting puberty and discovering contact lenses, she has flip-flopped in anguish between Jeremiah’s peppy, openly affectionate personality and Conrad’s mysterious, mercurial yearning. (Ahead of the Paris choice, she’s been dating Jeremiah.) This is high-stakes teenage stuff, and the show leads a second life online, where superfans in opposing camps fire off rounds of GIFs meant to condemn one brother over the other. Judging by the grammar, it’s moderately easy to tell which posts are made by 11-year-olds during their allotted family-computer time.
But the show’s growing success does not rest on the backs of middle schoolers alone. In July, Amazon confirmed to Variety that The Summer I Turned Pretty has an older fandom, too. The show offers plenty of cross-generational entry points: Parents may identify with Belly’s mom, Laurel (Jackie Chung), who struggles with watching her daughter make life decisions she disagrees with. Belly’s older brother offers intermittent comic relief—and deceptively sensitive levity—as he navigates his on-again, off-again relationship with Belly’s best friend. And those who have experienced the death of a family member might recognize the Fisher boys’ misdirected grief after losing their mother to breast cancer.
Still, what sticks out most is the show’s treatment of youth. A series such as HBO’s Euphoria depicts teenagers embroiled in very adult problems, whereas Han, who also wrote the popular series To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, is reverent of the experience of simply being young. To her, this quotidian adolescent drama is as important as anything else: “If you have a big fight with your best friend and you’re in high school, it can be very earth-shattering,” she told Elle. “It can really destabilize your whole existence. I don’t feel that’s any less real or important than something happening to an adult.”
Such events feel credibly weighty on the show because they transpire in a world that is recognizably ours yet free of bad headlines, allowing the big emotions—sadness, gladness, everything in between—to unfurl without interruption. Many TV shows that choose to depict the contemporary moment will pad their scripts with online colloquialisms and passing references to divisive events. The recent streaming hit The Pitt, to name one, mentions mass shootings, abortion rights, and anti-vaxxers; Season 2 will reportedly address Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
The Summer I Turned Pretty has none of this. No dashed-off mentions of Trump, or COVID-19, or attending school over Zoom; almost no online slang. The show offers a fantasy of a culture not so plagued by toxicity, allowing the creators to exchange the politics of the day for the nuances of growing up. Belly’s greatest hurdle might be accepting that not every summer can be the same as the last one—that she must let go of the people and places she loves. Here, the show being a story about young people, primarily meant for young audiences, proves most useful. Because the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex naturally thinks, The world revolves around me, eliding the “real world” from Belly’s internal-monologue narration is not only excusable but accurate. (It also helps keep the potential viewership as wide as possible.)
It’s not that the show assumes that today’s young Americans don’t care about politics—that they aren’t paying attention to the Trump administration’s attack on civil rights, or the latest stats on the climate crisis. If anything, its attention to the sad textures of teenage life seems to acknowledge that for many young people today, paying attention to their own life might feel futile or too small, given the relentlessness of the news. The show exists in the context of modern teenage sadness: According to a government survey, “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” among U.S. high-school students nearly doubled from 2009 to 2021, from 26.0 to 44.2 percent. Every time teens use the internet—which 46 percent say they did “almost constantly” in a 2023 study—they see catastrophes of all kinds, which might inspire an unhealthy amount of shame about focusing on a relatively smaller problem, such as a fight with your best friend. Yet how else does a young woman understand her life and what she wants from it? In Belly’s case, making the Paris decision—let alone the decision of which brother to be with—involves critical-thinking skills and a sense of self, neither of which is a trivial quality.
On The Summer I Turned Pretty, the acting is capable and the writing is fine. The perspective is what’s special, as it respects what is small and yet sacred about life. It’s something that children need to learn and that adults are, it turns out, relieved to remember. At one point this season, Belly muses, “It’s just weird how one choice can end up shaping your whole future.” How right she is—and when she decides to go to Paris after all, we believe that it will really matter.
The post A Big Show About the Little Things appeared first on The Atlantic.
