Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cruel Summer’ Season 2 on Freeform / Hulu, Where A Brand New Cast Gets Wrapped Up In A Brand New Mystery

The second season of Freeform’s Cruel Summer features a completely different cast from the first season, and a new mystery – the death of a teenager in the quaint town of Chatham, Washington in the year 2000 – to solve. But the main conceit of the show, which I suppose you can now call an anthology since we’ve swapped out all the major players, is the are the time jumps that offer clues to all of the character’s relationships as they unfold during the summer of 1999, the winter of 1999, and the summer of 2000 when the body is discovered. As it jumps around, we slowly start to piece together how and why this major character’s death happened.

CRUEL SUMMER (SEASON 2): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Words are typed across an old computer monitor:

“The events that are about to unfold take place on or around:

July 16, 1999

December 15th, 1999

July 16th, 2000.”

And then we cut away as Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” starts to play. Yep, it’s definitely 1999.

The Gist: Like the first season of Cruel Summer, season two braids together three different time periods to tell one story, and though they’re all only six months apart, they are easily distinct from each other and play important roles in the storytelling timeline of the show.

In the first timeline, taking place in July, 1999, Megan (Sadie Stanley), her mother Debbie (Kadee Strickland) and sister Lily welcome exchange student Isabella (Lexi Underwood) into their Chatham, Washington home. Debbie thinks it will be good for Megan to have a new friend and be exposed to the worldly Isabella, who is the daughter of diplomats who live abroad, but Megan, a smart but reserved computer science nerd, is perfectly happy to spend all her time coding and hanging out with her best friend Luke (Griffin Gluck). A festival that the locals call the Bloom is happening, it’s a temporary burst of bioluminescence in the water, and as Megan introduces Isabella to her friends, Isabella takes a liking to Luke and asks Megan if she’d mind if she hoos up with him. At this point in the story, Megan and Luke are just friends, but Megan’s simmering resentment that Isabella is not only a new, unwelcome part of her life is exacerbated by the fact that she’s moving in on her closest friend.

In the December 1999 timeline, which is visually represented with a bluish filter washed over every scene, Megan and Isabella have become best friends, and Megan is high on life: she’s been accepted to the University of Washington with a full ride, and she and Luke are now dating. Everything is perfect, or so it seems. Debbie and Luke’s father Steve (Paul Adelstein) are also romantically involved, and he’s working on a high profile development in the town, so he uses the opportunity of his annual Christmas party to schmooze investors. Everyone from the town is there, and when Steve gives a speech, he tells the crowd he’s going to play a Christmas movie for everyone to watch. What plays instead is a sex tape starring Isabella and Luke. Megan walks out of the party furious, and now everyone knows that Luke and Isabella screwed her over.

And then there’s the July 2000 timeline, which is clouded by a yellow-green filter: everything looks hazy and mysterious, Megan now wears dark eyeliner and an eyebrow ring and has slicked back hair. In this timeline, Megan seems panicked as cop cars seem to be everywhere she looks and there’s a rumor that a body has been found in the lake. She drives out to a secluded cabin in the woods where she cleans bloodstains off the floor and finds a fake ID belonging to Isabella on the ground nearby. (The ID shows the name “Pat Highsmith” – an obvious nod to author Patricia Highsmith, writer of murder thrillers like The Talented Mr. Ripley, among other things.) She watches as the sheriff’s boat hauls in a body in a bodybag. For a minute, it seems like the body might be Isabella’s but not: It’s Luke’s. Sadie must have had something to do with, given her behavior… right? That’s the mystery. Poor kid survived Y2K, but he couldn’t survive what came next.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? With its flashbacks, mysteries, and high school drama, Cruel Summer has elements of Pretty Little Liars mixed with the often dark, broodiness Veronica Mars and the retro aspects of Firefly Lane.

Our Take? The way that Cruel Summer weaves its three timelines together is a clever way to position this (murder?) mystery, and the time jumps are clearly depicted – there’s no question where we are in the story as the filters and tone of each timeline is very distinct. And the way each relationship changes in the course of each timeline (Sadie and Isabella’s evolution from chilly rivals to besties to possible accomplices in murder, Sadie and Luke’s childhood friendship-turned-romance-turned-oops-now-Luke-is-dead) means that there’s a lot of intriguing story that will unfurl in order to explain it all.

If the rest of the season is as strong as the first episode, we’re in for a solid mystery. There are other details that will surely factor into the story and either provide clues, motives, or red herrings, too: a mysterious and possibly unhinged man who lives in the woods and likes to shoot guns in the middle of the night (he used to be a programmer at Apple!), one of Sadie and Luke’s friends who uses a camcorder to record everything his friends do “cinema verité” style (did he film their sex tape?), and businessman Steve’s ambitious, maybe even ruthless, attempts to develop every inch of Chatham, that will no doubt help color the story. And even though I take issue with “the ’90s” being a period genre for TV and movies now, I appreciate the specificity of the needle drops that are scattered in the show like the Spice Girls’ “Spice Up Your Life,” and Sugar Ray’s massive hit, “Every Sugar Ray Song Sounds The Same To Me.”

Is Isabella’s arrive the cause of this town’s problems? To quote one of the biggest hits of 1999, she’s certainly some kind of beautiful stranger. And it seems like thanks to her, Sadie has developed a taste for danger.

Sex and Skin: Some PG make-out sessions, and we get glimpses of a sex tape between Isabella and Luke which consists mostly of panting.

Parting Shot: As Megan watches Luke’s body being being identified in a bodybag at the water’s edge, Isabella shows up next to her and tells her “We have to get our stories straight. Megan nods, almost catatonic at the shock of it all.

Sleeper Star: Lexi Underwood is one of the primary stars of the show, but she adds an excellent air of mystery as the confident Isabella, the girl who claims she’s a “student of life,” but what that really means is she studies people, not books, and perhaps she understands how to manipulate them.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Seriously, you coming here has been the best thing that ever happened to me,” Megan tells Isabella during a scene taking place in December, 1999. The two teenagers are, at this point in their friendship, besties, but a line like that can’t hold true for long on this show.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The talented cast, clever mystery, and ’90s nostalgia are a winning combination. For these summer girls, 1999 might be cruel, but for the rest of us, the show is the perfect summer escape.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.