Here’s my theory: if someone can laugh well on camera, they are good at acting. Crying is easy, but laughing naturally—especially one of those doubled-over, tears-streaming-down-your-face laughs—is as tough to crack as a Mensa test. And Lola Tung’s Belly Conklin nails the laugh in Amazon Prime Video’s original series, The Summer I Turned Pretty. And it’s not just her; the acting in the series is top-notch. The brooding Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney) could give Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff a run for his tortured lover vibes. And this is one of those instances when Conrad’s brother Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) looks as good as he acts.
For those of you who are above 34, are not a romance junkie, or are, for some other reason, unversed with the Belly-verse, The Summer I Turned Pretty is about 16-year-old Belly’s summers spent at the beach house belonging to her mother’s best friend Susannah, in the town of Cousins Beach. Over a period of five years, as Belly blossoms into a young woman, so does her love triangle with Susannah’s sons Conrad and Jeremiah, which becomes as messy as a bloodbath in a Quentin Tarantino film.
Just as notable as the acting are the production, the music and the fashion. Resort wear never looked as good as the denim cut-offs and crop-tops in the show. In fact, there is some amount of experimentation—sundresses with loafers, silk shirts and crocs—that the Cousins gang pulls off beautifully. And, of course, heartbreaks are never real unless they take place to some stirring Taylor Swift tracks, as they do in TSITP.
Unlike many teen shows, TSITP puts a premium on the side plots. One of the best is the friendship of Susannah and Belly’s mother Laurel. They call themselves “blood sisters”, share inside jokes about boys and booze in their college days, and treat each other’s children as their own. It is the only realistic relationship in the show and, as a result, the one you envy the most. You don’t wish for a boyfriend like Conrad because you know they don’t exist. You do, however, wish for a friend like Susannah because they do exist, or at least you hope they do.
But none of this is the real reason why TSITP has struck a chord with thousands of women across the world. It is not the reason why Vogue, Elle, The Guardian and others are trying to decode the show’s popularity. It is not why fans of Team Jeremiah and Team Conrad are engaged in a social media slug-fest. It is not the reason why I spend hours watching these online videos, the irony being that the more I search them out, the more the internet feeds them to me, so much so that every third or fourth post on my Instagram feed is something related to TSITP. My world, currently, is being drowned in a downpour of hot and high-strung youngsters.
Of course, part of the charm is the escapism. In your world of mundane problems, like where to get the best multi-grain bread, Belly’s troubles seem aspirational—how to choose between two gorgeous boys who are wildly in love with you. And let’s face it; life is hard—an endless continuum of looming deadlines, malfunctioning home appliances and screeching children. Into this mix, what is wrong if you add some popcorn romance of a bunch of hormonal kids who have no clue what they are doing? It helps that Jenny Han, who wrote TSITP books and is now the showrunner of the series, knows romance like a nuclear scientist knows, well, nuclear science. Sometimes it feels like she has a trademark on the mind of a teenager, so sequestered in their own world of high drama and low self-esteem.
There is also the fact that teen dramas today are made with a lot more nuance and depth than they were a decade or two ago. Unlike the earlier ones like Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill and The O.C.—which mostly dealt with the first-world problems of white heterosexual kids—shows today like TSITP, My Life With The Walter Boys (the second season of which just released on Netflix) and Never Have I Ever layer the narrative with issues of race, identity, gender and mental health. Some of it is tokenism, like the non-binary character of Skye in TSITP or the homosexual relationship between Nathan and Skylar in My Life With The Walter Boys, which is as diluted as a badly-made protein shake. But some of it is real—like the South Asian representation in Never Have I Ever.
This is, of course, not to say that there are no drawbacks, the main being that these shows—featuring teens in their first bloom of youth—make you feel like you are a hundred years old. With their beach bods and flawless skin, they look like they live on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. But let’s be honest: didn’t we all find our parents a little ‘weathered’ when we were teens? And now that we are their age, we don’t feel so old, do we? Although, part of the allure of teen dramas is that these kids never grow up. They live in a perennial world of short skirts, pool parties and drunk confessions. And that is as it should be. Imagining Belly and Conrad as 40-year-olds with a paunch and a mid-life crisis just kills the buzz, doesn’t it?
But the primary appeal of teen dramas is that they have made a cottage industry out of one emotion: longing. The window dressing is different—My Life With The Walter Boys, for example, is all about small-town shenanigans while Gossip Girl is set in Manhattan’s glamorous Upper East Side. But beyond this, each of these teen dramas is about the commodification of longing. Without those soulful looks and the will-they-won’t-they suspense, how would the makers have been able to stretch out each season for over 10 episodes? So, no matter whether Belly chooses Conrad or Jeremiah in the end (please let it be Conrad), TSITP will always have a place in my heart. Yes, the particulars of the plot might fade from memory. I might forget the melodrama and some of the cringe dialogues (eminently forgettable), but I will never forget how the show made me feel. Because love is perpetually trendy. Longing is one emotion that will never go out of fashion.