I clicked on The Summer I Turned Pretty out of mild curiosity as I was starting my junior year of high school. I was having a hard time adjusting to school and the infamous junior year workload. I’d just spent six weeks in the Berkshire Mountains surrounded by nature, music and people who shared similar passions, and now I was dragging myself to early morning Biology and Latin classes. To get myself out of bed faster, I decided that I would watch a few minutes of a show every morning while I was eating breakfast. This would persuade me to a) get ready for the day faster, b) actually eat breakfast and c) be a little less upset about school. I picked the show because I didn’t want to watch anything I’d get too drawn into and want to binge, and it didn’t look like the kind of thing I’d actually want to watch. Four years later, I spent this summer at the edge of my seat, worrying that the main character would pick the wrong brother.
The Summer I Turned Pretty (or TSITP, as it’s affectionately called on the internet) is about a girl named Belly (we all want to know why) who goes to the beach every summer with her mom, brother, mom’s best friend and her two boys. For her whole life Belly has had a crush on Conrad, the older one, but he never noticed her romantically. The summer she turns sixteen she somehow becomes more beautiful, and suddenly both Conrad and his younger brother Jeremiah start noticing her as more than a little sister and friend. Belly is in over her head trying to choose between stable, comfortable Jeremiah and the guy she’s been in love with since she could walk. Also, Conrad and Jeremiah’s mom gets cancer and dies somewhere between season one and season two.
If any of my friends came up to me and told me that any of that was happening to them, I’d be more concerned than entertained. But, somehow, TSITP managed to be everything I and millions of other young people have needed for the last few years.
Allow me to project for a moment: The summer of 2022 was the first one where there were almost no COVID restrictions. We were still working on climbing out of the internet to in-person interactions and hadn’t stopped wearing pajamas out and about. We’d lost two vital years of socializing and found ourselves on the wrong side of a new decade, 16 going on 14, with the real world looming while we got used to being normal teenagers.
Belly was 16. She had been awkward. She honestly was still awkward. She had three guys into her in one summer. Her life consisted of hanging out at the beach, raucous partying and more hanging out at the beach. In short, she had the summer that those who tuned in felt we’d almost had.
Season two came out the summer before my senior year. Susannah, Conrad and Jeremiah’s mom, had just died of cancer, and perhaps more importantly, the strange, long distance situationship Belly and Conrad had started at the end of the previous summer had ended badly. She was in a rough emotional place when Jeremiah, the comfortable, available choice waltzed into her life again. There were a lot of crazy side plots: they slept on a golf course, Belly’s only boyfriend outside the Fisher family showed up and fell in love with Conrad and Jeremiah’s cousin... The important thing was that Belly chose Jeremiah, and Conrad decided to back off.
That summer I was preparing for the college process, and it was looking like it would be a long summer of trying to make myself as impressive as possible to as many schools as possible. I brought potential Common App questions on every trip. I practiced “voice” more than I ever had in my life. I did summer programs that made me feel like a country song: stressed out, alone and stranded somewhere in the endless flatness of Ohio or Michigan or something. No one in my life had died. I hadn’t caused a family feud. Still, Belly and I and about 80% of the people I interacted with who were also watching understood each other. We all needed distractions, and watching Belly distract herself was good enough for the rest of us. Every Wednesday no matter where I was, I tuned in and got upset about someone else’s life for once.
This season has been different. Part of it is probably that I’m pretty different. In the two years since season two came out, I graduated high school and moved to Baltimore to start college and learned a lot of life lessons, like staying up talking until 3 a.m. every night is a net negative and doing homework in advance is cool. When season three started coming out this summer, I imagined that Belly and I would both get closure on high school. Belly’s been with Jeremiah for four years now, but Conrad is still Jeremiah’s brother. I had no particular closure I needed to get from my high school experience, but the reminder that it was over was nice. I and the creators of hundreds of TSITP reels that show up on my Instagram every day thought all the characters would be more grown up and mature. I thought I had enough distance to not be anxiously awaiting the next episode.
But every Wednesday night since the middle of the summer, no matter what I had to do, I tuned in. Before school started, I watched alone in my room when I had time. After coming back my friend and I started watching together. We’ve almost gotten noise complaints for yelling like dads watching The Big Game, and we’ve ranted to everyone at Peabody about the characters’ bad decision making and lack of emotional awareness. Between episodes I helped the freshman class move in, then watched my sophomore friends trickle back. I helped my RA friend decorate her floor. I started classes and went on treks around Baltimore in an effort to “branch out.” I ate, slept and breathed like normal, presumably, but make no mistake, Wednesday has been for me what Sunday was for settlers on the American Frontier. It has been the day my whole week hangs on, and it feels like a sin to work that evening out of respect for the show. If the episode is boring, I’m irritable; if yet another character cheated, everyone around me seems suddenly less trustworthy. The writing of the show needs work and each character is awful and ridiculous, but don’t try to text me after 9.00 p.m. I probably threw my phone, and I’ll find it later.
The final episode came out a few weeks ago. In the seven weeks since I’ve been back on campus, the list of viewers has grown like you would not believe. My room was crowded that night. In addition to the three of us who have been watching since 2022, there was my roommate who thinks shows like this are ridiculous but enjoys our reactions, a friend who swore she would never watch it and her boyfriend, and two guys who have only watched two episodes, but are solidly on Team Conrad. We ordered boba and cheesecake, and when it was all over, those of us who were day-one fans looked at each other, numbed by the fact that the last three years of our lives were over.
There’s going to be a TSITP movie that I’m sure I’ll watch (I’ll be pretending like that’s not true for the foreseeable future, of course). For now there are other things to worry about. I’d like to graduate on time with a respectable GPA. There’s always tea to be spilled and drama to experience. So, I can’t convince myself to watch TSITP again, or at least not for a very long time — now that I know what happens, it's not worth it. Half the fun was wondering how much worse it could get. All this being said, if someone asked me, very specifically, what it felt like to be a 16 year old girl in 2022, I’d show them TSITP. None of us lived like her, but there were bits and pieces of her life that many of us wanted, and those of us who started watching got completely caught up in the fandom and couldn’t pull ourselves away. Somehow I think that’s more illustrative of the time than anything any of us actually did.
Amelia Taylor is a sophomore from Potomac, Md. studying Writing Seminars and Voice Performance.
