Can’t Wait to See These Freaks Again

Photo: Eddy Chen/Eddy Chen/Prime

For the last three years, along with millions or possibly billions of others, I have been rapaciously devouring The Summer I Turned Pretty, a YA television series with the central premise of “Challengers, for teenagers, with far-reaching incestuous overtones.” Adapted from Jenny Han’s book series of the same name, the Amazon show followed a high-school girl named, and I can’t stress this enough, Belly (Lola Tung), as she got her braces off and had a glow-up and then spent years ping-ponging back and forth between a pair of brothers: The brooding, Young Leo–adjacent, millennial trap Conrad (Chris Briney) and the chaotic-bisexual party lifeguard Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). There was a beach house, there was recurring cancer, there were daddy issues, there was a lot of self-tanner applied incorrectly, and there was a fandom so rabid and out of pocket that Amazon had to publicly ask them to stop bullying the cast online.

Can you blame them? Yes. But also, look at what happened with the Bible. People have been starting wars over that book for thousands of years. The Summer I Turned Pretty was Cain and Abel if they both fell in love with the same girl — the girl who was raised alongside them as a sister, mind you, in a town called Cousins, also mind you — and then duked it out for their entire adolescence and early adulthood, stopping just short of fratricide (and I mean just short). It was Flowers in the Attic meets Dawson’s Creek. It was King Lear, except about a dying woman encouraging both of her sons to marry the daughter of her best friend, whom she was secretly in love with (this is my opinion but it’s also textually supported). Wholesome and twisted, perverse and romantic, divorced from reality and wedded to oceanfront realty, The Summer I Turned Pretty was an addictive show about a bunch of freaks making insane choices and enabling one another.

As of Wednesday morning, it was (briefly) over. After a wrenching yearslong and then minutes-long deliberation that involved forcing Conrad onto a European train at five in the morning, then chasing him onto that train five minutes later, Belly chose Conrad. Jeremiah chose food and I guess Denise (Isabella Briggs) because she was there and they were both single. The sea, ever-churning just outside the beach house, but no longer busy being stared at by Conrad for hours on end, spewed forth an offering of fresh oysters with watermelon mignonette. I prepared to offer up my own written tribute to these characters and then do something self-destructive and confusing every Wednesday thereafter in their honor.

But then, suddenly, it was not over. In the middle of the day, in a real Belly-ass move, Amazon announced it had already green-lit a Summer I Turned Pretty movie. It’s not clear who or what the movie will be about, who will return, and who will disappear into the ether like Belly’s college roommate. But I am already thrilled. I can’t wait to see Jeremiah again, even though I was actively rooting against him for the entirety of the series. I already miss his crispy Justin Timberlake hair and his inchoate sleaziness and the way that he is always whining. I miss how he randomly became an amazing chef at the end of the show after having shown zero interest in cooking until three episodes ago. I even miss how he treated Belly like an object he deserved to inherit and said things like, “I want all of you and I’ve never had that. Not ever!!!” (He may have stomped his foot — gorgeous.) I will always fondly remember when he cheated on Belly on spring break and said it was because she had too much fun on Christmas with his brother. His behavior, increasingly petulant, and his hair, increasingly bleached and crunchy, made it really easy to dislike him. Sometimes that’s nice. I don’t want to think very hard when I’m watching a TV show for children. I’m glad that Jeremiah is, for the time being, safely trapped in Boston, a place I will never go. I hope the movie visits him there, where he has hung up his thottie chef apron and now owns several Dunkin’ franchises. Denise is president of the United States so they are no longer speaking.

I can’t wait to reunite with Conrad, who is the Gen-Z Jordan Catalano except not stupid. A gorgeous androgynous lesbian with a monogamy kink, Conrad is a yearner for the ages. If I am to take the show at its word, Conrad, a wealthy doctor-in-training, has only ever slept with Belly in his entire life. After the first few times, they broke up, and he then pined for her for five-plus years. Otherwise all he did was go to work, get fired from his work, and buy khakis of various lengths. He paused all of that briefly to interrupt Belly’s wedding to his brother, then wrote her unanswered letters for years, then raw-dogged a flight to Paris on a whim, showing up at her doorstep with a vial of old sand in his pocket. He then fingered her on her stairs and said, “The way I feel about you has nothing to do with my MOM.” (That’s actually an important clarification on this show because of the aforementioned incest through-line.) Nobody is doing it like Conrad. And nobody should. However, if he and Belly had not ended up together, I would have lost it. I hope when we see them again, Conrad is on SSRIs and running his own plastic-surgery practice out of the Cousins house, and Belly is the on-site psychologist who convinces everybody to get more plastic surgery.

And I pray to Susannah that we’ll be reunited with the supporting characters. The Summer I Turned Pretty would not have been the same without its Greek chorus of friends and family members saying, “This is a good idea and it makes sense to act on it” to Belly and these boys. We would literally not be here, facing down a film, without them; the central trio would have stayed within the bounds of acceptable human behavior and the show would have ended after two episodes. Taylor (Rain Spencer) and Steven (Sean Kaufman), for example. Very important facilitators, though I could never get entirely onboard with Taylor and Steven as a couple; why does everyone have to be almost related to be sexually attracted to one another on this show? I recognize that the “best friend’s older brother” trope is potent, equally in YA novels as in porn, and I don’t want to kink-shame anyone, but I wish at least one of these characters had ended up with someone who did not know them intimately when they were 5 years old.

But I digress; I look forward to witnessing their evolution. Taylor was the only female character on this show with any fashion sense. No shade to Belly, who was getting there at one point near the end for sure, minus the khaki shorts in Paris. The only time Taylor’s styling was off during the entire series was at Belly’s wedding, where she looked like she had just stuck her head in the ocean and then immediately stuck it in a vat of gel. When we meet Taylor and Steven again, I imagine that Steven will be building AI data centers in Silicon Valley and Taylor will be whitewashing their water usage via her PR firm and occasionally getting plastic surgery at Conrad’s house.

I can’t wait to commune with Belly’s mother Laurel (Jackie Chung), a good mom and a medium novelist. I hope she is sleeping with her ex-husband again and together reexamining why they decided to call their child Belly. I can’t wait to continue to not understand what Steven and Denise’s jobs are (do not tell me). I hope everybody’s lips are still way too pale for their spray tans so they all look a little bit sick all the time. I hope Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), a perfect character, RIP, returns as a ghost, haunting the plastic surgery clinic and messing up people’s facelifts.

And, of course, I can’t wait to see Belly again. The base of the triangle. The face that launched a thousand ships. I already miss her optimism bordering on delusion. I miss how she courted — nay, required — constant drama, only wondering at the very end, “Am I the villain?” Then deciding she was not. I do love that. I miss her occasional practicality, which showed up in moments like the finale, when she got up to pee after sex and said, “I don’t want to get a UTI.” (Despite being fingered on the stairs after a day of tactile sightseeing in Paris.) I miss how she dressed well in Paris, ever so briefly, before she started to dress like a Republican again, which she inexplicably did whenever she was in a serious relationship with one of the Fisher brothers. Her bob was really working for her, though. I understand why everybody was trying to wife this girl up! I’m relieved, at the end, that she resisted the matrimonial pull and was content to just be 22 years old with a hot boyfriend. (I think? That Christmas montage was unclear.) Based on her history of heterosexual extremity, I was concerned, but glad to be proven wrong.

But in the film, I know that will no longer be the case. She will succumb to the heteronormative script as it is the only way forward if she wants to truly grip the beach house and also be the star of a spinoff movie about it. She and Conrad will wed, have their own children, and invite Steven and Taylor’s children, currently living inside an underground Google hub in Mountain View, to the Cousins house. There, they will all insist on continuing the increasingly inbred bloodline by setting them all up to marry each other at 22, then locking them in an attic for years, only to be rescued under cover of night by Uncle Jeremiah, who shows up dressed as tan Santa Clause with a gigantic bag, which he will hide them all in before he brings them back to Boston, where he will give them each a seaside Dunkin’ franchise to operate. It’s what Susannah would have wanted.