This article contains spoilers for Season 3 of “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”
As “The Summer I Turned Pretty” comes to a close, Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) is living her best life in Paris. Her childhood friends, the brothers and romantic rivals Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno), have grown too, following the messy implosion of their summery love triangle. And with just one episode left in the third and final season of Prime Video’s global hit, fans are anxious to see how the story will end — and who its heroine will end up with.
But showrunner and creator Jenny Han, who adapted the coming-of-age romantic drama from her own bestselling YA novels, is the last person who’d let slip whether fans will get the swoony endgame of their dreams or one that deviates from the books.
“I do love surprising people,” says Han with a smile over video chat, fittingly from France, days before the Paris-set finale arrives Wednesday and brings closure to a season that’s seen a roller coaster of emotions (and a trail of emotional carnage) shape Belly’s journey into adulthood. “I feel strongly about wanting the audience to have the experience of not knowing what’s going to happen next … even though I know that others are probably restless to see how it all ends.”
“Restless” might be as much of an understatement as the delicate little engagement ring Jeremiah gave Belly this season, prompting viral memes galore. Each week TikTok videos, podcasts and fan reactions on social media predict and agonize over who the young heroine, now finishing college abroad, will choose. The uncertainty has fans in such a choke hold that small details in the show have taken on enormous canonical meaning, like Sour Patch Kids; the colors red, blue, dark gray and gold; the infinity symbol; peaches; hydrangeas; a stuffed polar bear named Junior Mint and the Taylor Swift needle drops that punctuate the show’s impeccably curated soundtrack.
Meanwhile, the flower aisle at Michael’s has become hallowed ground synonymous with dreamy yearning thanks to Season 3’s fifth episode, told from Conrad’s point of view, that also marks Han’s directorial debut.
Even on a well-earned vacation, Han received a welcome note from the proprietors of the home she rented in Provence that included support for Conrad, the brooding elder Fisher brother with the young Leonardo DiCaprio vibes who’s learning to be open with his feelings. And during a recent birthday dinner, Han received another surprise when the restaurant sent over a dessert inspired by Jeremiah, a golden retriever frat boy and budding foodie, and his special wedding request to Belly: A two-tiered dark chocolate cake with a raspberry coulis filling and a mirror glaze.
After bringing her novels to the screen, including “To All the Boys” and its spin-off “XO, Kitty” on Netflix and now her powerhouse “Summer” series, the popularity of her adaptations has been staggering. Prime Video says the Season 3 premiere drew 25 million viewers in its first week and hit No. 1 on the platform in 120 countries, and is its most-watched season among women ages 18-34. Ad Age reports that nearly 200,000 TikTok posts related to the show generated 2.9 billion views in the last month alone. This was also the season that major brands hopped onto the “Summer” meme-wagon by riffing on the show’s title font and weighing in on its viral moments, and strangers at packed bar watch parties screamed together over moonlit beach confessions. MLB and NFL teams, and friends and families alike faced off in the debate of our times: Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah?
But Han is especially touched to know that viewers around Belly’s age are experiencing the show together and building community.
“One of my favorite things has been seeing people watching the show in their dorm rooms and common rooms, maybe with new friends,” she says. “That’s special to me. I remember freshman year and how scary those first couple of nights were, and to think that maybe somebody can make a new friend by watching the show or talking about it makes me emotional — to be part of helping to make a community somewhere, and to see people coming together watching it like it’s the Super Bowl.”
Over the last three seasons, the author, producer and screenwriter had her fingerprints on every aspect of the show with unprecedented creative control, delivering on the heart-fluttering “non-negotiable” moments from the books that readers craved while also making key changes to her saga of a teenager navigating first love and heartbreak over idyllic summers in fictional Cousins Beach.
Her overall deal with Amazon came with a high degree of faith from the studio: She knew her audience best after building an intimate relationship with her readers as an author. They also trusted her vision for adapting her books into a multigenerational ensemble drama and granted her a sizable music budget that would make the show’s starry soundtrack either a launchpad to or a return to the charts. Songs like Ariana Grande’s “We Can’t Be Friends” and a bevy of Taylor Swift tracks, including “Cardigan,” “The 1” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” serve as subconscious inner monologue for Belly, to name a few recent memorable musical moments.
The changes Han introduced to the series included new and expanded characters, the Season 1 debutante ball and a four-year time jump. Viewers of the show also saw Belly experience important milestones that were not in the books, like a Season 2 flashback where she loses her virginity to Conrad, set to Des’ree’s “Kissing You” from 1998’s “Romeo + Juliet,” during a snowy visit to the summer house.
“It felt right to me because we had been on this journey with this character and experienced so many firsts with her, and I didn’t want to miss that one,” says Han, looking back on the tougher challenges of adapting and adding to her books. “I wanted to give that to her. I think it’s important for the audience to understand, too, that they really did love each other.”
The fan base and its loyalty multiplied this season when “Summer” pivoted to weekly episode drops, creating a nail-biting frenzy over Belly’s entanglements and how her story will end. (Unlike previous seasons, advance screeners were not provided to press.) Now an epilogue, significantly expanded from the novels, has brought the final three episodes into uncharted territory: Belly is blossoming in Paris, where she’s gained independence and a taste for pain au chocolat, finding herself in new friendships and even dating someone new. (Bonjour, Benito.)
At the end of last week’s penultimate episode, Conrad boarded a plane to find Belly in the City of Love as viewers saw her getting a dramatic haircut, ready for a new beginning. The show’s promos have playfully frayed fan nerves by teasing, “Anything could happen.”
The three-episode conclusion has provided Han the opportunity to give Belly a more fully dimensional journey of unlearning bad habits, spreading her wings and figuring out who she wants to be in the world.
Sending her to Paris in the wake of her broken engagement to college sweetheart Jeremiah (instead of Spain, where she goes in the books) was a necessary push out of her comfort zone inspired by Han’s own early adulthood. “For many young people who are so lucky and privileged to study abroad, that’s the moment when you go, ‘Oh, wow. This is harder than I thought,’” she says. “I think as a young person you need to test your mettle a little bit and find out what you’re made of. It’s so satisfying when you realize that you have the inner strength to keep going.”
The change of scenery might surprise readers, but it’s been hinted at since the first season. Han titled her third book, “We’ll Always Have Summer,” after the famous line from 1942’s “Casablanca,” and pitched Paris early on to Amazon Studios. Cinematic nods throughout the series reference another Humphrey Bogart classic, the 1954 romance “Sabrina,” in which Audrey Hepburn has a glow up in the French capital amid a love triangle between two brothers, and 1953’s “Roman Holiday,” in which Hepburn lops her hair into a bob and rides a Vespa before finding love.
“Audrey Hepburn in Paris, coming into her own and becoming a young woman there, is so iconic I thought it would be so lovely if Belly could have that too,” says Han.
When production moved from Wilmington, N.C., to Paris, where Belly pays the rent on her cramped flat by working at the Écoles Cinéma Club, the theater serendipitously already had a poster of the 1967 Alain Delon film “Le Samouraï” adorning the wall. “Alain Delon was one of my references for Conrad’s style in Paris, so it was a nice wink to myself to have that,” Han says.
Regardless of how her love life shakes out, Belly’s Paris era is crucial for her to learn that she can be OK on her own and have experiences outside the Cousins Beach bubble, says Han. “That’s a running motif through other stories that I’ve told, with Lara Jean [the heroine of ‘To All The Boys’] and her mom saying, ‘Don’t go to college with a boyfriend; spread your wings,’ and Kitty [the protagonist of ‘XO, Kitty’] going to Korea,” she says. “I think you have to find out who you are alone before you can really be with somebody else.”
As “Summer” ends, Belly’s not the only character who’s on a life-altering journey of growth. Conrad — who’s becoming a doctor, going to therapy and has just reconciled with Jeremiah months after ruining his brother’s wedding to the girl they both love — may be en route to Belly after handwriting her subtly romantic letters, but “he and Belly aren’t in the same place,” teases Han. “She’s saying that she’s ready for something new this summer, and he’s something old coming back into her life,” Han says. “Are they going to meet at the same place in the road?”
Fans are so invested, and so ardently split between the fictional Fisher brothers, that Prime Video preemptively issued warnings against “bullying and hate speech” on social media after Han, who is fiercely protective of her cast, spent the second season pleading for kindness in comment sections. “People can forget that you’re talking about a character, but you’re saying things about the person that plays the character when you’re talking about their appearance or mannerisms,” she says. “That is a real person, and just because they’re famous doesn’t mean that it’s not painful to read those things.”
But even Jeremiah, recently dubbed “the internet’s most hated boyfriend” by the New York Times, has started to earn redemption as the finale approaches. Han hopes that after next week, viewers can take a beat and appreciate the character’s journey. Like “Summer’s” other central arcs, it’s one marked by love, grief, mistakes and healing, and as Han notes, “growth is not linear.”
“I genuinely love his story this season,” says Han. “People were really hard on him [for hooking up with Lacie Barone in Cabo while he and Belly were on a Ross and Rachel-esque break], but in many ways the story is heartbreaking. In his heart of hearts, he knew Belly still loved Conrad and he knew Conrad still loved Belly. And he also knew he was always going to keep taking her back no matter what she said. In his mind when he slept with someone else, it was him making an irrevocable break from her because he thought that she was never going to forgive that.”
Even when frustrations are aimed at her as “Summer’s” author and showrunner, Han reminds herself that it’s a privilege that anyone cares deeply enough about the story to feel anything at all. “You can be Team Jeremiah and be friends with somebody who’s Team Conrad and vice versa, it’s all valid,” she says. “And it wouldn’t be so split if there was an easy answer.”
After making her first foray into directing this season, Han learned to embrace the unknown — kind of like Conrad, a character she feels a special kinship to. “I put a lot of my own journeys into all the characters but I have a lot in common with Conrad when it comes to, I guess, everything,” Han says. “We’ve had similar struggles. And as the oldest child I really understand him, so it’s really easy to write him.”
And as a showrunner so intimately involved in every storytelling decision for the last five years, she’s happy that the studio didn’t push her to keep the show going beyond the three-season run because of its success, which felt right to her. “Doing what I think is best for the story has always been my north star, and the story to me fit for these three seasons,” says Han. “I appreciate that they respected that. To be able to say when, to be able to call it, is rare when something is doing well and making people money. But I have to be true to myself and what I think is best for the story.”
That’s not to say she wouldn’t consider expanding the Cousins Beach universe. Fans are already clamoring for a prequel spin-off exploring the soulmate friendship between Laurel (Jackie Chung), Belly and Steven’s mother, and her best friend Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), Conrad and Jeremiah’s mom. Han isn’t exactly saying no to more “Summer.”
“But it has to feel like genuine excitement for me, because showrunning is 24/7, 365 days a year,” she says. “I feel I have to be there every day to make sure I can stand behind it. I’m definitely open to doing more stories in the universe, it’s just that I want to figure out what the story is that I feel so compelled to tell it that I’m willing to spend the next few years throwing my whole body into it.”
With “Summer’s” finale on the horizon, Han likes to think that people will be watching it together and hopes it leaves hearts feeling full.
“I love it when I see dads and grandpas watching it with their daughters and granddaughters, and people having conversations about what the characters are doing,” she says, “although I want people to go easy on Belly. People can be really harsh with her, but she’s a young woman in the world who’s figuring things out. They’re all young people just figuring it out.”
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