The Summer Legions of Adults Copped to Watching The Summer I Turned Pretty

A few weeks ago I was at a party chatting with a bunch of other adult women about adult women things: work, apartments, dating, Bravo-lebrities. Then, all at once, a marked shift in the discussion: The TV show The Summer I Turned Pretty somehow came up, and the rooftop erupted into squeals. It wasn’t long before we revealed our allegiances: Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah. (I’m somewhat indefensibly in the former camp.) Everyone seemed at once over the moon and a little bewildered that this was what we were talking about. It was my first inkling that I’m not the only grown-up out there who’s become hopelessly infatuated with a dreamy Amazon Prime drama about a teenage love triangle.

It happened again the other day, when I was on the phone with an old friend. She confided in me self-deprecatingly that my call had interrupted her viewing of the latest TSITP episode. There was no need to be embarrassed, I assured her. I then spent the rest of our conversation resisting the urge to hang up and fire up Prime right then and there now that I knew a new episode had dropped.

I thought I was the only one, but it turns out we, the adults secretly watching the romantic misadventures of a girl named Belly (yes, Belly), are legion. These are the confessions of an adult Summer I Turned Pretty fan—and an invitation to join our number. As the show’s second-season finale releases this week, making both seasons of the show fully bingeable, now is your moment. It’s the perfect time to join the fray, not least of all because August is the most thematically appropriate time to watch TSITP and a generally boring time of year just waiting to be filled with a new obsession.

Before I go further, a précis: Based on a trilogy of young adult novels by Jenny Han (author of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and the creator and co-showrunner of the series), TSITP is the story of Isabel Conklin (played by Lola Tung), a teenager whose whole deal can be summed up by the fact that she chooses to go by “Belly,” a word that many teenage girls would rather join the Witness Protection Program than be associated with. She is goofy and gawky until, one summer, she shows up at the beach house she’s been going to all her life and takes off her glasses to reveal that now she has become Hot Girl, the destroyer of worlds.

Destroyer of the world of one set of brothers in particular: Belly’s family stays every summer in an idyllic seaside town called Cousins with another family, which has two sons, the aforementioned Conrad and Jeremiah. Older brother Conrad (Christopher Briney) is a brooding Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-the-’90s look-alike, and younger brother Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) is a bisexual golden retriever of a boy. They both notice Belly’s enigmatic beauty, straight out of a One Direction song, and the show is mostly about her flitting between them, trying to decide between the older brother she’s always been googly-eyed over and the younger one, who is actually nice to her. (This is why my being Team Conrad is indefensible.) Eventually we find out that the boys’ mother faces a serious illness, complicating the dynamic substantially. Belly also has a cute older brother of her own named Steven, and a best friend named Taylor, both of whom have their own romantic entanglements, sometimes with each other. The whole thing is set to a soundtrack that will have you nodding in appreciation at Jeff Bezos’ deep pockets—Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo for days.

TSITP has been a hit, topping Prime’s most-watched chart, and it’s already been renewed for Season 3. Is it really news that a bunch of adults are part of the audience? Stories about teenagers are a mainstay of entertainment, and shows like Euphoria and the original Gossip Girl were cultural phenomena before Belly was so much as a glint in an Amazon exec’s eye. But TSITP is no Euphoria, and it’s no Gossip Girl either—this show is earnest as hell, and doesn’t seem as if it was necessarily screaming “crossover” when it got greenlit. The show it most closely resembles might be Dawson’s Creek, which was also a breakout hit in its day—and it’s possible some millennials are tuning in because the show makes them feel nostalgic for Dawson and other teen series of the late ’90s and early 2000s. (The Season 2 soundtrack contains a Romeo + Juliet reference that plays specifically to this crowd.*) Whether or not you watched Dawson, though, it feels as if this show is millennial women’s secret crush. The reluctance to fully own up to watching it may have something to do with how effectively it conjures the feeling of teenage summers, the giddy moments surrounded by endless-seeming lazy days, the great and terrible possibility of it all. It’s all so viscerally teenage that you may find yourself asking, Wait, is it too late for me to have a summer I turn pretty? Which might lead directly into, once you remember your age, Uh, am I allowed to be here?

Well, friend, take it from me: You are allowed to be here. And something I’ve delighted in over the past few weeks is stumbling upon other adults posting about TSITP on social media, so many of these posts carrying an undertone of “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but … ” For example, there’s the TikTok whose text reads “Im a grown 30 year old woman … how does this show about a teenaged love triangle with a girl nicknamed a body part have such a hold on me”? In the comments, even older viewers piped up: “Girl I’m 37 and watched all three until 2:30 am last night lol,” “Same 45 here I think cause we all had a Jer and Conrad” (I wish), and “Right?! I’m 52 for god sake!” Another TikTok cruelly and correctly highlighted how millennial viewers still identify with Belly and the younger characters on the show, despite being closer to their parents’ ages. An especially robust subgenre of adults’ social media posts about TSITP is commentary about Belly’s utter messiness. Witness this man on TikTok suggesting that a more appropriate name for the show would be “The Summer You Turned Into a Ho” or this mother gasping disapprovingly over Belly: “She gives very mixed signals!” Another excellent mode of TSITP posts are the adult men who have been caught in the act appreciating, or at least getting invested in, the show’s plot: In this charming clip, a woman films her 29-year-old boyfriend persuading another male friend to watch it; in this one, you can watch a couple reacting to the show in real time, the camera capturing on their faces both the disgust and the more meta enjoyment over having such a strong reaction to a show for teens.

We’re in the midst of a very girly moment. As some trend pieces have pointed out, this is the summer of “girl dinner,” Barbie’s world domination, and Taylor Swift Eras Tour mania. TSITP may lack the pervasiveness and ridiculously high production value of the latter two behemoths, but it inevitably fires the same pleasure synapses in audiences’ brains. A phrase I’ve been seeing a lot this summer is women describing themselves as “just a teenage girl in her 20s,” proclaiming that as they reach adulthood, their interests and mindset haven’t evolved as much as they thought they would. TSITP is “teenage girl in her 20s” personified. But it’s also teenage girl in her 30s, teenage girl in her 40s, and so on, because teenage girl is a state of mind that transcends age (and possibly gender). There are real questions to ask about whether this is regressing or infantilizing, which is part of why I suspect that not all the adults watching TSITP have fully gone mainstream. Maybe it’s better that way: It can remain a secret handshake among those of us who know. We may look like adults going about our adult business, but it’s nice to know that, in all likelihood, someone else in the subway car or in line at the grocery store is also Team Conrad—or Team Jeremiah.