The Summer I Turned Pretty: Why S2 Failed to Capture the Magic of S1
'This is a hundred percent your look, Connie, baby.'
The series adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty first hit Amazon Prime on July 2022 and quickly rose to fame amongst tweens and teens all around the world. Any fan can now agree that the show’s simple and nostalgic intro – the twinkling hum of bells, submerging in the cool, summer water – brings you back to a certain universal, unspoken magic of summers.
School’s out, along with the stress that comes with it. When you go to Cousins Beach, you leave all your problems behind. Real life can wait, because now it’s just you, the salty wind and the soft sand beneath your feet.
The first season starts with our main protagonist, Belly, going off to Cousins Beach where she spends all her summers. This time, though, there’s an air of hope that things are going to be different. Belly is sixteen now – she’s all grown up and she’s not the same little girl her family friends, the Fisher brothers, remember her to be.
Belly embraces her femininity through a modern-day deb ball. Dressing up in pretty outfits, having fancy little tea parties and taking dance classes – I mean, how fun is that? Of course, we also get to witness the accelerating progression of her teenage love life. She’s making new friends, trying new things and finding excitement in all that. There’s just something so dainty and innocent about it all.
The theme of season one is hope and delicate beginnings and personally, it embodies the spirit of summer.
And let’s not forget about the aesthetics of it all! Who wouldn’t want to spend their summers in a place as gorgeous and pristine as Susannah’s beach house? Through all the ups and downs of Belly trying to navigate girlhood, or her frustrations of trying to figure Conrad out, she still lives in the bubble that is Cousins Beach. How terrible could your problems really be when you have a beach for a backyard?
We do get a glimpse of Susannah’s cancer which, I admit, is a problem even the backdrop of sunny beach boardwalks and soft ambience of crashing waves couldn’t mask. Still, there is hope in the end for things to get better when Susannah decides to try treatments after all.
Returning to season two, we’re not only anticipating plot, but we’re chasing the vibes! We can’t wait to step inside leave-all-your-problems-behind Cousins Beach. Though we quickly learn the theme of season 2: aftermath. Susannah’s death, Belly not being on speaking terms with Conrad and Jeremiah, tension with her mom, Laurel. In fact, the premise of this season is centred around the beach house going on sale. The literal embodiment of their picture-perfect summer is at risk of disappearing. Talk about bursting the bubble.
But I do have to give credit where credit is due: season two went for a different vibe, a different stake. In place of season one’s youthful nostalgia, season two played with a more wistful nostalgia.
There was definitely more mischief and adventure – a flashback of Conrad and Belly sneaking back to the beach house during winter, the group sneaking into the clubhouse for a place to crash, Belly and the boys being stranded at a motel during a bad storm.
The magic of season one is its ode to girlhood, its sweet and child-like lens on summer. It’s the memory we encase in a glass box and store on the top shelf, where it glistens perfectly, not to be touched by all the other messy memories you’ve collected over the years. Season two – being the messy memories – is innately incapable of being that glistening magic, and that’s okay.