'The Summer I Turned Pretty' is about teen love. Its biggest fans might be millennials.
The show, which focuses on the love triangle between two teen brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah, and their longtime female family friend Belly in an idyllic summer beach town, became all that Vicky, 33, could talk about. Eventually, once Vicky had run out of TikToks, Instagram Reels and BuzzFeed articles that dissected the teen drama, her husband had a proposal: She could make her own show to talk about it.
Casey, who had a background in podcasting, offered to produce it. That's how Better With Glasses, a recap podcast about The Summer I Turned Pretty, its group of fictional Gen Z teens and their exploits in Cousins Beach began.
As it turns out, Vicky was only solo podcasting for one episode. Casey was quickly won over by the show too.
'He watched it so much that he started to care about it,' Vicky tells Yahoo, and Casey soon joined her as a cohost to offer a male viewpoint.
Almost immediately, the Pazzalias, now both 36, began to receive long, detailed DMs and emails from millennial listeners thanking them for sharing their perspectives. Because of them, they wrote, they no longer felt silly or alone as adults obsessing over a TV show about teens.
'The podcast gave them a sense that it's OK [to talk] about [The Summer I Turned Pretty] like it's super important,' Casey tells Yahoo Entertainment. '[They said], 'It's so nice to feel seen [because] I couldn't really articulate to my friends, my family, my husband why I was so obsessed with this young girl and the boy she chooses [to be in a relationship with].''
The TV adaption of Jenny Han's young adult book series of the same name is a classic coming-of-age story of a girl who grows up within the prism of a love triangle. Belly (Lola Tung) has spent every summer at the beach house of her mom's best friend, Susannah Fisher (Rachel Blanchard). Like the first book, Season 1 begins during the summer that she turns 16 and finds herself torn romantically between Susannah's sons. Conrad (Christopher Briney) is the boy she has always loved, who's finally paying attention to her. Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) is the boy who has always been there for her and lets her love him.
This love triangle is the central arc of the show. It follows in the tradition of teen dramas of the late '90s and early aughts that came before it, including Felicity, Dawson's Creek and Gilmore Girls, which millennials grew up watching. These shows heavily emphasized romantic entanglements between the characters, a plot device used to grow and retain audiences.
The Summer I Turned Pretty proves that a good love triangle still does. According to data from Parrot Analytics, the show's viewership more than tripled from Season 1 to Season 2, which premiered in July 2023. In the show's second season, Belly was finally forced to make a decision between the brothers, and as the show became more popular, fans declared fierce loyalties to Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah online.
On Reddit threads about the show and in outlets like Esquire and Slate, millennials were admitting to being as 'hopelessly infatuated' with the Gen Z drama and wondering if anyone else their age felt the same way.
The answer was a resounding yes.
One such fan was 32-year-old Kara Crevier, who decided to launch The Summer I Started a Podcast after the second season premiered. Crevier thinks the millennial investment in Belly's story is a direct result of how the show takes the books to 'another level.' Its pitch-perfect depiction of summer days spent swimming (and flirting) in the pool and summer nights spent stealing kisses and pining for your crush at parties taps into viewers' nostalgia for their own summers past.
'[The] summer vibe is really well curated throughout the entire show. … You kind of feel like you're transported onto a summer vacation when you're watching it,' Crevier tells Yahoo. '[It] brings me back to a time when I didn't have work responsibilities … or the responsibilities of life.'
That feeling isn't lost on its cast members either. Jackie Chung, who plays Belly's mom, Laurel, tells Yahoo, 'People are nostalgic for that time when they are experiencing that first love and blossoming in their life.'
Chung finds nostalgia to be an element that has always drawn older generations to teen-focused storylines. From her perspective, what really makes the show special is the room that it gives the adult characters to become full people, especially Laurel.
In most teen shows, Chung finds that adult characters typically exist primarily 'as a parent in relation to the teen or child on the show.'
The Summer I Turned Pretty stands in contrast. Yes, Laurel is a mother, but she's also still a woman exploring romantic relationships and searching for love, just like her own teenage daughter, while also striving to reach some of her career goals. She's doing all of that while making mistakes and learning from them, just like her daughter.
'It's helpful for people to see someone [like Laurel] who is a bit messy and still figuring it out but also loving her family and taking care of them,' Chung tells Yahoo. That way, when they enter adulthood, they will hopefully feel less pressure to have everything figured out because they see that growing up never ends.
This complexity within the writing of the series is one of the reasons that Crevier loves the show.
'I think I really enjoyed the story of the books, but I really love how the show expands on the different characters,' Crevier says. For example, the teen characters in the show are struggling with timely themes like sexuality, identity and finances, which are largely absent from the books. The adults are also more complex. As in the book, Laurel is navigating the grief of her best friend's cancer diagnosis, but in the show she's also embracing her own strength when she dips a toe into dating after divorce and navigates her career as a writer.
The depth of the adult storylines is one of the reasons that Rachel Gonvales Parkes, a 36-year-old mom of two, is also a fan.
'I love that they also show that parent dynamic of what happens when you're going through divorce, drama and hardship,' she tells Yahoo. 'You don't get that in the book. The books [are] really focused on Belly.'
For Gonvales Parkes, it's also the messiness of both the teen and adult characters that makes the show relatable. As a viewer, she sees herself in Belly as a teenager, even though in her real life, she's stepped into the role of mother, like Laurel.
Ultimately, Casey thinks this duality plays heavily into the show's multigenerational appeal. Millennials who are no longer teens and are also not as likely to be parents to teenagers, exist somewhere in the middle, so they can relate to 'both perspectives.'
It's this relatability that has created a devoted, unabashedly obsessed millennial fanbase that is eager for the show to return for Season 3 after two years. So much so that some are gathering in person to celebrate its release.
Ahead of the series' third and final season, which premieres on July 16, the Pazzalias are traveling to Wilmington, N.C., where The Summer I Turned Pretty is filmed, to meet with fellow millennials at a meet-up they've planned in connection with their podcast, called Better With Glasses Fest. They've organized a fan weekend, held July 11-13, that includes activities like a filming locations tour, live podcast taping and scavenger hunt.
'We [aren't] really expecting huge, huge [turnout], but we knew that it would draw an intimate crowd of people who are like this [millennial fandom] is our family,' Vicky says.
Even though Vicky is Team Conrad, she hopes that no matter how the show ends, millennials will continue to be Team Belly, supporting the character through her misjudgments and missteps. After all, they have the experience to know it's all part of the journey.
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