The second season of Prime Video’s teen romance series “The Summer I Turned Pretty” stays on course.
Author Jenny Han is a familiar name to young adult readers thanks to her contemporary romances like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Once Netflix adapted that trilogy into a wildly popular series of rom-coms, Han emerged as a real power player in film and TV. Han has evolved into a savvy and reliable showrunner, bringing her own novels and characters to life with a deft touch and keen understanding of her core audience. This revelation may have come to many of her fans via the sweet but sharp Netflix series “XO, Kitty,” but she’d already established her behind-the-camera credentials over on Amazon thanks to the adaptation of her pre-To All the Boys YA romance series, “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”
Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) has visited the picturesque Cousins Beach, Va., every summer since childhood, sharing the postcard-perfect season with a rich family friend and her two sons: Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalengo.) The simplicity of childhood gave way to the messy emotions of adolescence, with the brothers battling over Belly amid their burgeoning romantic feelings for their friend.
Having chosen one over the other in the first season, the family finds itself at war. Now, the boys’ mother has died, having lost her battle with cancer, and the serenity of Cousins Beach will never be the same again.
Much like “XO, Kitty,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty” demonstrates Han’s earnest knowledge of the romance genre — particularly as it is catered towards young women — and the merits of taking a simple idea and executing it with skilled efficiency (there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to reinvent the wheel, after all.)
Whereas “XO, Kitty” was fizzy and buoyantly fun, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” aims for melancholy with an aesthetic sheen. Sometimes, the Instagram-ready cinematography and beachcore surroundings verge on parody, like a Nancy Meyers movie made for TikTok. Han’s penchant for voiceover often intrudes on the easy-going nature of the story, feeling more like an excuse for the author to get a few extra words from her novels onto the screen.
Flipping between past and present (the series is pretty faithful to the novels in that regard), we see Belly’s struggles at school as her grades fall and she falls into a state of apathy and growing isolation following Susannah’s death. Jeremiah’s hope for his mother’s cancer trials ache against the outcome we’ve already been told. The wistful nostalgia of summers past weaves in-between the harshness of modern day, although don’t expect any major plot twists here. As with the first season, this isn’t about soap opera dramatics or quip-ridden bitch fights. Everything is thoroughly relatable, especially to that core audience of young women who have probably read the books (it’s no surprise that the show’s popularity on Amazon led to a boon in Han’s book sales on the same platform.)
Still, the season is at its best when it focuses on Belly, giving space to her emotional strife and the oft-derided difficulties of being a teenage girl in a world where you’re positioned as something between a sex object and a punching bag. Capturing the best qualities of her novels, Han is never less than serious in delving into Belly’s fight to grow up. She feels like a proper teenager, not a focus-group model or 29-year-old trying to be hip. What that means, however, is that the romance plots simply can’t hold a candle to these themes. This is no knock on the young and talented cast, who have suitable chemistry and make you care about their feelings.
It’s understandable why Han gives the romantic elements equal emotional weight. To do otherwise would be condescending. Love triangles, however, are a love-it-or-hate-it trope that are tough to pull off with any real sense of heat or tension. They were practically mandatory in young adult fiction during the time Han was first published. Even if you haven’t read the books, you’ll know immediately who Belly truly desires and how this will all pan out. The battle between Conrad and Jeremiah for Belly’s affection inevitably wears thin over the course of this long season (one wonders if the series would have benefitted from shorter episodes, akin to “XO, Kitty,” rather than pad out proceedings for over eight hours.)
When it allows itself to be a quiet, serious-minded but unpretentious teen drama, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is one of the best examples of its genre. That aching realism of adolescent turmoil is seldom portrayed with such care, and even less so without being drenched in cloying sentimentality, which Han mercifully avoids. Adults will find much to enjoy here, but it’s a refreshingly teen-aimed show that wants young women to find themselves amid its mixture of nostalgic fantasy and real-life angst.
If Jenny Han wishes to stick to TV, then nobody will blame her following her current streak of streaming successes.
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 2 premieres with the first three episodes Friday, July 14, on Prime Video.