The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2 Review: A Teen Love Triangle Gets Predictably Messy
- Likable ensemble cast
- Sweet romantic flashbacks
- Unbalanced love triangle overpowers everything else
- Serious second book syndrome
Where the first season of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" took place in the midst of a hopeful, idyllic summer on the beach — albeit one with its occasional bouts of drama — the second season takes a much more melancholy route. The tenor of the show has massively shifted, and it ends up creating a serious emotional drag on all of the characters and their relationships with one another. Although it doesn't quite capture the charm of the first season, it's still a solid guilty pleasure with a likable cast of rising young stars.
Set one year after its predecessor, we get bits and pieces of the aftermath of what happened last summer. Belly (Lola Tung) and Conrad (Christopher Briney) successfully start a relationship, then break up after a disastrous prom. Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) spends the year sulking and avoiding both his brother and the girl he considered to be one of his best friends, even going so far as to request that they let him know if they were going to be coming to family gatherings together, so he wouldn't bother to turn up. And worst of all, Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), the bright light in the series, died from cancer that returned late in the previous season. Her death casts a pall over the entire series, sapping all the characters of their energy and hope for the future.
When Belly calls Jeremiah on a whim and learns that Conrad has gone missing, she sees an opportunity to do something productive to help them. They track Conrad down to Cousins, where they learn that Susannah's half-sister, Julia (Kyra Sedgwick), is preparing to sell their vacation home. Together, they work to save the place where they spent their childhood summers — and along the way, more than a few feelings are caught.
A chaotic love triangle
If there is one word to describe the second season of "The Summer I Turned Pretty," it's "messy." Belly's decision-making skills are fully out to lunch, as she once again gets caught between the two boys who are both desperately in love with her. You can get away with dating one brother and then realizing you actually want to be with the other approximately once in your life — after that, it kind of feels like you might just be messing with everyone's emotions. The romance is muted because we're acutely aware of the fact that even if one of these couples goes the distance, they're destroying any hope of maintaining a cordial relationship with the third person, whom they still presumably care deeply about.
But the love triangle between Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah is indeed at the center of "The Summer I Turned Pretty," and while it's mostly compelling, it also begins to wear out its welcome — especially knowing that this drama is going to play out for a while if the show is renewed for a third season. It might have been better served as a trilogy of films, in the vein of "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" (which, ironically, was also based on a novel series by Jenny Han).
What makes this love triangle especially difficult is that it feels like it's written by an author with one hand on the scale. Although Belly frequently talks about how close she and Jeremiah were as friends, their deeper emotional connection doesn't quite ring true. It makes their burgeoning relationship hard to buy into — especially when both frequently have to resort to painfully melodramatic voiceover narration to express the feelings that they're not capable of displaying on the screen. The chemistry they have together is sweet, but it also feels like Jeremiah is a big flirt and would be equally charming with any girl he's interested in. It's pretty easy to tell which relationship is going to be the endgame even without having read the books, and there's not enough going on to make this season much more than an unnecessary detour.
Do these people even like each other?
There's also a sense that all of the characters lack empathy for one another as they recover from a tragic loss. Aunt Julia, for example, is painted as evil incarnate when she's clearly struggling with her past relationship with Susannah, one that she valued but that also caused her a great deal of pain. Conrad, meanwhile, is described by Belly as having these irredeemable character flaws that threaten their relationship, but he's also just a teenage boy with severe anxiety whose father cheated on his mother while she had cancer, which she then died from. And Belly's mad that he wasn't 100% present for her prom or that he's acting a little withdrawn? Belly's mom (Jackie Chung) is furious with her for struggling at school after Susannah's death, seemingly unaware of the fact that she's swallowed up by her grief and has been completely absent for both of her kids. And this is not even getting into what Belly says to Conrad at his mother's funeral — we don't have the time to unpack all of that. For a group of people who all claim to love one another so much, they don't seem willing to extend very much grace to one another.
Still, despite these challenges, the second season of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" has its moments of magic, most of which come when the kids loosen up a little bit and are just allowed to be a group of friends again. Belly's brother, Steven (Sean Kaufman), and best friend, Taylor (Rain Spencer), continue to be utterly charming sidekicks, and their on-again-off-again relationship results in the best diss track this side of "Scotty Doesn't Know" from "Eurotrip." The addition of Elsie Fisher as Skye, the estranged Californian cousin of Conrad and Jeremiah, is delightful, as their arrival in Cousins gives the gang an opportunity to relive all of their favorite memories of the beloved beach town. Although it doesn't quite live up to the addictively lovable first season, there's enough in "The Summer I Turned Pretty" to make it worth watching for fans of the original — even if all signs point to stormy seas ahead for our chaotic teen protagonists.
"The Summer I Turned Pretty" Season 2 premieres on Amazon Prime Video on July 14.