The Summer I Turned Pretty, released on Amazon Prime Video, is exactly what it promises to be: a cheesy romantic comedy with lots of teen drama, fancy parties (there's literally a ball in the show) and protagonists who are horrible at making healthy decisions. What I liked the most is how light-heartedly it takes itself — it never tries to be anything other than entertaining, it never delves into emotions too deeply and never makes you forget the fact that all its male heroes have abs.
The show traces the summer of a soon-to-be-16-year-old girl, Belly, who navigates intense feelings for her childhood crush, who is also her mother's best friend's son, Conrad. She has liked him for more than half her life and her feelings for him are summarized poignantly by her mother: for Belly, Conrad is like the Sun — when he shines, the stars are in darkness. Sadly, her feelings are never reciprocated and her love remains unrequited till this fateful summer. The difference this summer is that Belly has had a glow-up that suddenly makes her ten-fold more attractive to the other sex, a fact that everyone on the show keeps reminding her of. The show is literally about the summer that Belly turned pretty (according to conventional beauty standards, of course) and everyone from her mother to her best friend keeps reminding her of her 'changing body'. There are multiple uncomfortable conversations around Belly and her bathing suits and the teenager is sexualised from the get-go. It felt like she was being shamed for growing up.
Now that she's suddenly attractive, three guys are into her and the show steadily progresses into a weird love quadrilateral that ends up taking the shape of a triangle due to certain circumstances. There are many teenagers in the show, and yet somehow, everybody is into Belly. Belly has intense chemistry with all her male friends, especially Conrad, and the show-makers play a cruel game of 'will-they, won't-they' with the audience. Personally, I think the young, angry brooding male jock is overused in Hollywood, but Conrad still manages to be charming when he's being a complete jerk. His younger brother Jeremiah is my favourite character on the show — he's the kind of guy who will play rock music at a ball dance rehearsal because he wants to! There's a lot of booze, make-out scenes, beach parties and unnecessary background music in the show. It's almost as if the makers were afraid of silences — every popular TikTok song from the last 2 years has been featured on the show and they have completely overused good Taylor Swift songs.
The show makes the audience play fill in the blanks with family dynamics, relationships and even names, sometimes — it took me at least three episodes to figure out that Beck and Susannah are the same people. The Summer I Turned Pretty has a really good-looking and beach-loving cast (like Outer Banks), a build-up that peaks at the Debtutante Ball (like She's the Man), a love triangle (like The Vampire Diaries) and a hero who's made to feel poorly about his social standing (like The Titanic). It's honestly unsurprising that the show was unsurprising.
Along the way, the show also touches upon themes of estranged family, drugs, alcoholism, cancer, infidelity (several times), peer pressure, first times, financial troubles and single motherhood. If you think this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you're quite wrong because despite biting off more than it can chew, the show manages to hold its own. Some shows are just so bad they end up becoming good and it seems like The Summer I Turned Pretty is one such show.