The Summer I Turned Pretty is... just okay. So why the vitriol from some fans?

Yes, I watched a teen romantic drama. Judging from the fans I thought there would be something more to it. I should have known better...

Yep, I watched The Summer I Turned Pretty.

I know. It’s not a show I would ever consider watching. I have nothing against book adaptations—this one is based on a trilogy of novels by Jenny Han—but I didn’t watch teen series growing up, and it takes me a lot of convincing to watch anything with a romantic angle that’s front and center. (I mean, Castle has a central will-they-won’t-they relationship, but it is also primarily a quirky, sit-back-and-chuckle police procedural.)

But then, the Amazon Prime show picked up hype a few months ago, as its second season began airing. Maybe it’s because they decided to drop episodes one week at a time, rather than in one go as is typical of most streaming services. Maybe it’s because the writers’ and actors’ strikes meant there weren’t a lot of new shows to watch, and both viewers and the press were looking for something to really savor. Or maybe it’s because things got really interesting at that point—the central love triangle between Belly (played by Lola Tung) and brothers Conrad (played by Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (played by Gavin Casalegno) really picked up.

Me, I felt that I had nothing to lose, really. Nat had been telling me a lot about the show, and I thought I needed to watch something relatively lighter after my busiest weeks at work. But somewhere along the way I got swept up by the hype—and by that, I mean I started to think there was something more to the show than just being about a love triangle. Maybe all the chatter about why Belly should go one way or another is because there really is a lot to work with. Maybe I would enjoy watching the show as someone who tends to overanalyze things.

Well…

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining that the show doesn’t amount to much. It’s not meant to be anything otherwise, and in many cases television shows don’t have to be anything otherwise. Spoiler warning: you know what lies ahead.

Looking back, it’s funny that I expected more—but then, the elements established in the show’s first season (which dropped all in one go last year) were interesting. There are the summers Belly, her brother Steven (played by Sean Kaufman) and the Fisher brothers spent at the latter’s beach home somewhere in New England, carefree childhoods giving way to a blossoming and the start of many different changes in their lives. (The series was actually shot in North Carolina; you can see the post-production doing a lot of heavy lifting.) There’s the long-running friendship between their mothers, Laurel (played by Jackie Chung) and Susannah (played by Rachel Blanchard) that I thought was so interesting I actually think I want to see a spin-off of it.

But then, it’s an adaptation of a novel series first published in 2009, and while the show has actually gone as far as altering some details to move things more smoothly and make them more palatable to today’s audience, and to a television audience in general—Conrad has anxiety attacks! Jeremiah is bisexual! New plot devices, err characters, everywhere!—it is limited by how the books have first moved things along, and more importantly, the expectations of those who have already read them.

I haven’t, so while watching the show I actually had several debriefs with Nat to clarify a few things. For a while I thought the show suffered from having too few episodes, having to speed things along to get to the good parts. (The first season only had seven episodes; the second season had eight.) But it turns out the show chose not to fill too many gaps left by the novels. Sometimes it does so to strong effect—take the “fireworks” scene in season 1, where Jeremiah officially entered the game, so to speak—but otherwise it just left me bewildered. Is it too much to want to see what exactly Belly sees in Conrad? I get a lot of telling, which makes sense in book form, but not on a show I am actually watching.

It gets (kinda) worse in the second season, when the focus decidedly shifts to the love triangle. Well, I don’t mean it’s bad, but all the interesting side stories were shunted further in the background—save for Susannah’s death, which propels the whole thing—to focus on engineering moments between both Belly and Jeremiah, or Belly and Conrad. Cousins Beach. Tower of Terror. Brown University parking lot. You know, typical teen drama territory. Not really a bad thing, but again, it isn’t what I was expecting, and I was getting a little bored at how the season pretty much became a collection of moments that can be clipped, compiled, and uploaded on YouTube as fan music videos—you know, the very thing Community poked fun at. I mean, they had Kyra Sedgwick on, and all she did was be peeved—although I suppose it’s the show being hamstrung by the books on this one, too.

A major exception to this is the blossoming relationship between Steven and Belly’s best friend Taylor (played by Rain Spencer). It happened on the sidelines of the not-really-subtle bickering between the brothers for Belly’s affection, and it grew organically, and as a result I paid more attention to it. I suppose it helps that both characters were significantly expanded from the books, and their pairing is not at thing at all on there.

But I will admit all that is on me. I came into The Summer I Turned Pretty (after weeks of conversations, reading press coverage and marveling at Lola’s hair) thinking I’d get something a little more substantial. I wasn’t expecting a prestige drama, but I wasn’t expecting something more throwaway than this. Funny, because I told Nat I was going to watch the show precisely because I wanted something I could “turn my brain off to”, only to get caught up in all the chatter about who is the best ship and ending up watching the show through that lens.

Take all those expectations away, and it’s an okay show. Sometimes ridiculous, sometimes contrived, often too on-the-nose, especially with the musical selections (what else to soundtrack a montage of Belly crying in the car than with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License”?) but a good enough way to pass the time, especially if you don’t get too invested in it. Sure, rooting for your favorite pair is a fair way to spend your idle time, but you can’t really dive into it, because a lot of how things go can defy typical logic.

Now, here’s when I talk about that pretty big blind spot I have. I’m in my mid-30s, and The Summer I Turned Pretty is literally my first teen drama. Setting aside the fact that these shows mostly target female viewers, I watched different things when I was actually a teenager. I spent time with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I enjoyed MythBusters to the point that I am currently rewatching episodes on YouTube. There was a point when I stayed up late just to watch British comedies like Coupling and Absolutely Fabulous. And, yes, I watched the news. The heyday of shows like One Tree Hill and The O.C. passed me by, even if my college classmates kept on talking about it. So this one’s a new thing to me, and so I beg for your forgiveness as my calibration was off at the beginning.

That said, the show is all right. I don’t regret watching it. I actually got a kick out of watching it. Lola Tung—this is her first ever credited acting gig? Her portrayal—mischievous at times, mature at other times, controlled all throughout—reminds me that this show isn’t about who ends up with who, that it’s ultimately about Belly changing, as the world around her changes as well. It’s worth remembering that the series starts with her suddenly blooming and getting the attention of guys. Heck, it’s in the show’s title. I find that we’re better off focusing on how Belly navigates things than whether Conrad or Jeremiah “win” the thing. The writing, especially in the second season, just doesn’t sustain it.

Anyway, I can’t wait to see more from her. But maybe not on the show’s third season.

Tell me, why is there so much vitriol among some of the show’s fans? I’ve seen some of the Twitter exchanges, and I’ve seen some of the TikTok clips—and again, rooting for your favorite pair is a fair way to pass the time, but since when did the ship you choose become an indicator of how much better of a person you are, and how others are terrible people for choosing another ship? I mean, claiming people who root for Bellyjere are supporting gaslighters and psychopaths and murderers? In real life? And going as far as bullying them and doxxing them until they either recant or go on private?

I don’t remember things being like this when I covered Glee in my early years as a paid writer. Gleeks were free to choose Finnchel or Fuinn (no, really, I forgot it was called Fuinn) but people didn’t really fight other people because they chose a certain ship. It was never a gauge of their personal beliefs. It was just who they wanted to see together at the end. Let’s say I don’t like the idea of Furt. Does that automatically make me a homophobe, a bigot? Since when was fandom like this?

Yes, I know I publish this essay at a time when seemingly all fans of the show have turned their backs on Gavin for his alleged views on women and the LGBT community. That made this thing trickier to write, honestly, although I am reminded of how some Bonrad fans are claiming it as a moral victory for them, as if the character and the actor are one and the same. (“Belly shouldn’t be with Jeremiah because Gavin is this and that.” What?) But that’s a different story altogether. In the end, The Summer I Turned Pretty is just an all right show. What’s all that for?