Good news for all teenagers and mid-20-year-olds who don’t want to see that they are no longer teenagers: the third season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” has started. From July 16, new episodes on Amazon Prime will be released weekly until September. That means a summer full of drama, joie de vivre, heartache and questionable decisions. For more than two years, fans – to whom I belong – had to wait for new episodes of the successful series. With two new episodes, creator Jenny Han draws the audience: inside the love triangle around Belly Conklin (Lola tung) and the brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno).
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You get grown up so quickly
“Three years later” is written on the screen after the initial scene shows how Belly moves into her student dormitory. Then the three years that we can’t see. She is now 21 years old and is still with Jeremiah – the brother of Conrad, with whom she was also in a relationship. The first two episodes of the third season focus in particular on the college life of the characters and the relationship between Belly and Jeremiah. This lands somewhere between familiar, charged and crisis – without anticipating too much.
The problems with which Belly and Co. are confronted with this season differ significantly from those of the previous seasons. Career decisions in particular always play a role. But of course there are also big couple questions in the room. Only the conflicts seem to be a little more serious. Belly, Conrad and Jeremiah have become more adult – and so also the obstacles that the adulthood brings with it.
Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah?
The big question that arises again and again among the fans and looking at “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is: Team Jeremiah or Team Conrad? Which of the two brothers goes better with Belly? With who should she run happily into the sunset at the end of the series? Episode 1 and 2 make it really difficult to be somehow on Jeremiah’s side – and not only if you already play for Team Conrad.
While Belly and Jeremiah are still studying together at Finch University, Conrad follows his medical studies at Stanford University. And already there it becomes clear that the brothers could not be more different. The series makers: Inside, the greatest effort seems to make the audience: to constantly make it aware of it inside. Jeremiah’s character often has a self -relevant, childish, unreliable – everything that Conrad shouldn’t be. This seems to be mature, calmer and more satisfied. Go to therapy to work on yourself. The ambivalence seems almost clearer than in the first two seasons. Almost as if Jenny Han want to cheer on all Conrad. Again and again the brothers are compared – often in comparisons that they also do about themselves.
An overturning of the events
So much has happened in the two episodes published so far that you don’t know exactly where to start at all. It is not even necessarily “fast-paced”. As a attentive: R spectator: You shouldn’t actually miss anything about what happens on the screen. The parallel plot lines all lead together in a large plot – boredom does not arise.
Several moments are lined up in which you can also fall down your jaw. Interrupted by scenes in which you get tingling sensation in your stomach because they are either beautiful or exceptionally uncomfortable. The beginning of the third season contains everything you dream of a coming-of-age series: it is dramatic, kitschy, sneaky, exciting, devastating, sad and romantic. You are almost willing to say: It’s perfect.
Chapeau to the music supervisor
With the musical accompaniment, the makers have hit the mark again – as in the past seasons. Nobody knows his target group as well as the heads behind “The Summer I Turned Pretty”. Already in the first two episodes, all currently relevant pop girls are united. First runs “Hot to go!” From Chappell Roan, you can hear “You’re Losing Me” by Taylor Swift and “Lacy” by Olivia Rodrigo. And Ariana Grandes music also has her moment.
For some scenes, however, the music selection has become literally. Sometimes you ask yourself whether the viewer is not believed to understand a scene without being directly matching song texts. And yet: You can’t really get upset about it because it works perfectly for the fans at the same time. It is not uncommon for me to point hectically on the screen because a song was played that I not only know but also love.
Where does the lightness go?
The first episodes of “The Summer I Turned Pretty”, admittedly, have little to do with summer. At least when it comes to the lightness and lightness that you hope for from a summer. While the plot quickly shifted to the cousins beach in the past seasons – the place where Belly and Co. spend their summer – the first two episodes from season 3 do not yet play on a white sandy beach with a cozy wave noise.
This is also reflected in the general mood of the consequences. The typical summer feeling that you know from the series is still a long time coming. The problems of the characters are larger, the drama more serious, and the decisions that need to be made result in significantly greater consequences. The characters have grown up. Despite everything, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is and remains a flagship teenage series. And so the first two episodes of the third season do exactly what to do: entertain. And how they do that.