that one girl who reviews

After season two of Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty came to a close, it became painfully clear that I was only continuing the show with the sole purpose of hate-watching these characters and their awful decisions. 

While the premise of the show is intriguing (who doesn’t love a good love triangle?), the execution is poorly done and the acting doesn’t help. 

Lola Tung, who plays Belly, is one of the only actors on the show who gives a memorable performance and yet, it’s often overshadowed by her character’s incessant need to selfishly make things all about herself.

While this can most definitely be attributed to the all-consuming idea teenagers have that everything revolves around them, it’s hard to look past it when a big chunk of the season focuses on the loss of Susannah, played by Rachel Blanchard. 

Belly even goes as far as invalidating her mother and brother’s grief throughout the show, claiming that they “don’t care” or “weren’t there for her.” While it doesn’t seem like the intent was to make her insufferably ignorant, Jenny Han certainly does so with the way Belly recklessly deals with everyone’s feelings. 

Aside from the glaring personality flaws of the main character, Christopher Briney, who plays Conrad, and Gavin Casalegno, who plays Jeremiah, unsuccessfully convince the audience that they’re both pining over Belly. 

Briney and Casalegno deliver performances that leave much to be desired and are more reminiscent of the early Disney Channel acting that would satisfy a ten year old who just wants to know if Miley chose Jake or Jesse. And even that acting was better than whatever is happening on The Summer I Turned Pretty. 

Han also fails to captivate the audience with the soundtrack. While the songs may look pretty on a Spotify playlist, they’re often thrown into the show randomly, leaving the viewer jarred when a singer is suddenly speaking while Belly is having one crisis or another.

There’s also an intense amount of Taylor Swift. While I love her music just as much as the next person, the inclusion of nine songs in an eight episode season seems entirely too much and takes away from the way some of the songs actually elevated their scenes. 

In fact, one of the highlights from the show comes from Blanchard herself during a flashback scene with Tung and Laurel, who’s played by Jackie Chung. Belly reluctantly visits a dying Susannah, who’s wish is to see Belly happy with one of her boys. 

The scene is an emotional gut punch with Blanchard and Tung seamlessly bouncing off one another until the tears start flowing. Swift’s “Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” a devastating track about loss, completely paints the rest of the picture, creating one of the best scenes of the entire series.

Which makes it so hard to believe that we could go from something like that to a scene outside Belly’s volleyball camp where Jeremiah says “You’re not going to go cheer your girl on?” in the cringiest way possible. It’s almost as if Han is trying to make him the physical embodiment of awful TikTok thirst traps, but worse because the writing is so evidently done by a 40-year-old woman trying to impersonate a couple of 17-year-olds. 

It’s unclear when the third season will begin production due to the ongoing strikes, but it is confirmed that The Summer I Turned Pretty will be returning. 

While I wish I could say that all of these negative qualities have turned me away from watching the next season and I suggest you do the same, I would be lying. Watching The Summer I Turned Pretty is like witnessing a car wreck that you just can’t pry your eyes from.