(Warning: This article contains spoilers for Season 3 of “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”)
Tina DiCenso sat on her couch in Columbus, Ohio, beside her daughter, Abbi, holding a bowl of sliced peaches and apples. A bounty of snacks — homemade dirt bombs and pomegranate margaritas among them — were spread across the kitchen counter as they prepared for their weekly TV ritual.
“I’m gonna throw up,” Ms. DiCenso said.
She was about to press play on the series finale of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” Amazon Prime’s hit young-adult drama that follows the coming-of-age of Belly Conklin (Lola Tung), as she has fraught romances with her longtime family friends, Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) Fisher, who are brothers. After the finale aired on Wednesday, Prime Video announced there would also be a “Summer I Turned Pretty” movie.
Ms. DiCenso’s reactions to each week’s episode, which her daughter films and posts on TikTok, have made her an unlikely face of the teen series and its devoted online fandom. Her videos have reflected the anxiety and emotional turmoil the show often inflicts on its fans and have become must-watch programming all their own.
“It is the end of an era,” Ms. DiCenso said in Abbi’s latest video, which had more than 580,000 views as of Thursday evening.
The pair then high-fived, took a few deep breaths and pressed play.
In the nearly 20 minutes that followed, Ms. DiCenso paraded around her home jumping, clapping and cheering. She spun in circles, screamed and wiped tears from her eyes as she watched the conclusion to the show’s central love triangle.
“It just floors me still that people are that interested in what I have to say or how I react,” Ms. DiCenso, 54, said in an interview on Thursday. “It’s just me being me.”
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