Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Season 2 on Prime Video, In Which The Jenny Han YA Series Gets Moody

Jenny Han’s young adult series about a young girl who finds herself in a love triangle with two brothers during the first summer she looks and feels like a woman is back for a second season. The Prime Video original has teased that this season will be chock full of jealousy and the first episode also leans on themes of grief and moving on. Does the series warrant a revisit?

THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY — SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We’re immediately reacquainted with the love triangle between Belly (Lola Tung) and her two childhood best friends, brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). Belly is laying out, daydreaming about everyone’s satisfaction that she and Conrad are finally together…then she wakes up in class, and a voiceover shatters the illusion, announcing that Susannah, Conrad and Jeremiah’s mom, is dead and nothing would be the same.

The Gist: Back in The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 1, Belly lived up to the show’s title and had her post-pubescent glow-up that finally garnered attention from her longtime crush Conrad and his brother Jeremiah, and the dust of the love triangle is now settling around her. Told in two timelines — one directly following the events of season one and the other a year later at the start of another summer — Season 2 follows Belly, her brother Steven, her mom Laurel, Conrad and Jeremiah learning to live in a world without Susannah, who succumbed to cancer between seasons.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? With a strong half-Asian female teen protagonist navigating love, school, and family, you might be reminded of the Netflix breakout XO Kitty (which makes sense as they both come from the mind of novelist Jenny Han).

Our Take: The first season of The Summer I Turned Pretty rested a lot of its charm on the things unspoken — Belly’s glow-up, her obvious and unrelenting crush on family friend Conrad, and his brooding exterior that made him hard to read — but Season 2 is hellbent on having the characters wear their hearts on their sleeves.

In the season opener, Belly is dreaming of the beautiful and idyllic summer vacation home where all of the above came to a head while she’s stuck in her real life many miles away, quietly failing her classes and grieving her second mother figure. But she’s done hiding her feelings — she openly admits to dealing with a death in the family to her guidance counselor and later screams at her brother about her broken heart. The show is better for it, allowing all of the characters (not just Belly; Conrad is much more vulnerable this season) to examine the heaviness of their trauma and move through it honestly.

The show makes a choice to kill Susannah; though it was inevitable, her absence in the present-day timeline is noticed. Part of the first season’s success was the time it spent with Susannah and Laurel, devoting time to the adult friendship that felt more like a sisterhood. Without it, the series stands to lose some of the wisdom that was imparted by her character.

Season two also employs a dual timeline, and one of the detractors of the premiere is that it’s not always clear which one we are operating in. Typically shows utilize color grading or costuming to indicate space and time, and The Summer I Turned Pretty only utilizes a subtle ethereal chime effect to indicate when we’re swimming in Belly’s memories.

The tone of the second season of The Summer I Turned Pretty is quite different from that of the first. It’s moody, flitting between the hopefulness of Belly’s fall with the utter grief of her present summer, instead of leaning on the sunshine of Susannah’s beach house. If the premise of this story is a woman’s coming of age, this second season is her first taste of adulthood — and it’s going to be a doozy.

Sex and Skin: There’s nothing explicit in the season opener, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be some sex and skin later on.

Parting Shot: After a year of iciness between them, Jeremiah finally calls Belly. But it isn’t to rekindle a friendship; it’s to inform Belly that Conrad is gone.

Sleeper Star: Taylor’s new boyfriend Milo does a lot with his little screen time — including singing ‘90s classics like “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith and “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit. Hopefully he sticks around for awhile this season, even though Steven is clearly pining for Taylor.

Most Pilot-y Line:: “Escaping into your dreams is easier than living with your memories,” opines Belly as she remembers the summer her life turned upside down (after she turned pretty).

Our Call: STREAM IT. The frothiness of the first season is replaced by real grief and adult emotions, but it’s a welcome change in Belly’s journey to adulthood.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, Teen Vogue, Paste Magazine, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.