They say that relationships are all about timing, but a relationship with two brothers is all about being in the right place (the beach) at the right time (literally any time, actually; there will always be a brother on the beach). If the winds are blowing in your favor, then you might end up locking down the love of your life. However, you’re just as likely to get sucked into a years-long dirge of insisting that you’re dating your best friend while he actively plots against your happiness and devalues your autonomy at every turn. Not that there was ever any way to escape complete emotional devastation: We’re talking about ping-ponging between siblings like their DNA might hold the key to immortality—or at least to a swanky beach house. There’s just no right way to fall in love with two brothers. (But there is a right way to kiss them—separately.)
I assume that at the end of every episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty, a television show about young people ruining their lives and kissing on beaches in equal measure, author/showrunner Jenny Han sets down her quill, pats herself on the back with a wad of cash, and rests assured that she has, once again, driven every viewer to the edge of psychosis with her insistence upon seeing TSITP’s sibling love triangle to its bitter, bone-chilling end. Surely that is why, of all the Taylor Swift songs Han has squeezed into her three-season incestuous teen love epic, she’s yet to fork over the necessary cash from her apparently Scrooge McDuck–sized musical budget to license “Today Was a Fairytale”: because even she knows that every day of Belly Conklin’s life is a fucking nightmare.
First of all, the people the main character of this shitshow loves and kisses most in this world call her BELLY, a childhood nickname for Isabel that has lasted firmly into adulthood. And as viewers, we simply have to … take that on. To watch The Summer I Turned Pretty is to spend hours of your one precious life watching two young men with husky-dog eyes, alpaca haircuts, and the same bronzer they used on Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born repeatedly whine about their gorgeous shared girlfriend, Belly (or Bells if you’re nasty and personally trying to give me GERD). It’s all “Meet my girlfriend, Belly;” “Bells, you have to forgive me for cheating on you;” “Oh no, Belly can’t come to the phone right now because I’ve trapped her in a co-dependent relationship built from the ashes of grief and my mother’s hydrangeas;” “Marry me, Belly, it’s the only way we’ll prove them all wrong about … something.”
I mean, this young woman is well on her way to getting a degree in sports psychology. Is she going to roll up to the Philadelphia Eagles stadium in a few years with business cards reading “Belly, PhD”? A pretty good name for a ramen bar, or a foodie tracking app—but a strange one for a young woman who titularly turned pretty the summer she turned 16 and then immediately started wreaking havoc upon the town of Cousins Beach.
Anyway, body-dysmorphing nicknames aside, those hours spent watching TSITP are still all worth it—because I loved Weapons just as much as the next witch, and Sinners was a great time at the movies, but this year, the best horror film is a television show about a trio of young people actively taking a torpedo to their entire family structures in the name of young love, watched almost exclusively by not-young people who can barely comprehend the atrocities they’re seeing play out across their screens. Which is not to say that we haven’t experienced scary stuff in YA adaptations before: Harry Potter has kids leaving potions class to go do war; The Hunger Games is a series about the government making kids kill each other for entertainment; and Twilight does that thing where Jacob imprints on a CGI baby. But what’s happening on TSITP is so much scarier than a dystopian future or a wonky LDS allegory. Dating Jeremiah Fisher is a real-world atrocity—and it’s happening to my good friend Belly Conklin right now.
Season 3 of TSITP isn’t so much like watching a trainwreck as it is like watching the aftermath of a trainwreck where the victims (who are also the train conductors) keep willingly lighting themselves back on fire with lighter fluid, refusing to acknowledge their clear mistakes and instead choosing to engulf themselves in more and more flames…
Unfortunately, I am obsessed with that self-immolating trainwreck. I cannot stop watching. Each week, I wait impatiently for the self-immolating train to wreck again, wondering if this could possibly be the week that the fire mercifully dies. Because I realize now that the self-immolating trainwreck has taught me to consume it with the same kind of debilitating, bewildering toxic love that it’s taught me to expect. Slowly, I’ve come to understand—and then, fear—that The Summer I Turned Pretty has transitioned in Season 3 from what was once a romanticized beachy teen love triangle into a very real warning—and then, a threat—about what happens when you lose yourself in order to sustain the love of a person who will never give it back in the way you deserve. It is a living, breathing, not-graduating-from-college, not-studying-abroad-in-Paris nightmare that Belly has written and directed herself, with the help of her two best friends who are also like her brothers—and who are also her boyfriends, and who are also, in fact, actual brothers.
I guess that part—the part where childhood friends who insist that nothing is more sacred than the family you choose, but who also repeatedly do the most damaging things possible to one another—is a little less relatable. But the part of Season 3 where we watch a young woman curb her ambitions, her motivations, and her entire personhood to nurture a relationship that refuses to grow because it is built on a foundation of immaturity and puka shell bracelets—that part is as horrifyingly universal as the show’s incestuous approach to the good old-fashioned love triangle is baffling.
So, when an adult woman watches this show that is by all means for teenagers and about teenagers, and then, say, screams about it with her other adult friends for a few hours every week … it’s actually an act of cathartic, intellectual introspection. TSITP is for multiple generations of viewers who feel an immense amount of relief to be well past the phase in their lives when they may have theoretically overextended their bandwidth for a toxic brother-brother throuple, but who can still revel in a little schadenfreude from the psychological gulag playing out on screen. Why is it that these people act like there is only one house on one island that matters; only one season of the year within which to find love (and turn pretty) with the one person you’ve been in love with for eternity (and then also, his brother). Belly has been to other houses! She goes to college, and has made at least one friend! I swear I’ve seen her briefly retain consciousness during autumn, and Christmastime is like some kind of Cousins summertime wormhole. But, no matter what, it always comes back to obsessing over this multi-million-dollar home and the chucklehead teenage boys who now own it in full.
Generally speaking, I think Belly just likes to romanticize the most random things: “For me, everything good, everything magical, happens between the months of June and August.” OK, girl. That is a really lovely way to experience childhood. But at some point, you become the one bringing 50 pounds of groceries to the beach house, and paying those summer electricity bills—and that is slightly devastating but that is life. If you don’t allow life’s inevitable progression to devastate you a little bit from time to time, then you will end up letting your ex-boyfriend’s brother propose to you as a means of retaining the good old days and, also, somehow, recovering from him cheating on you, which he’ll later confess that he did out of spite because he found out that you spent a day doing cozy crossword puzzles (not a euphemism) with your ex-boyfriend who is his brother.
Needless to say, when Belly updated her view on life in Season 3 to say that she decidedly wanted Jeremiah “for all seasons, not just summer,” that was … not a jump she was entirely prepared to make. These kids are quite literally destroying their personal lives because they can’t just go out and meet another person. And they have no adult supervision because, well, one mom died, one mom is overwhelmed by the grief of that death, and if I may quote my now-nemesis Belly “Bells” Conklin once more: “The fathers come and visit, but this is not their place. They don't belong to it. Not the way we do, the mothers and the kids.” OK, Nicole Kidman in The Others, settle the hell down. This isn’t even your house. I don’t want to be all “those boys need a strong male role model in the home,” but clearly they could’ve used some examples of emotionally intelligent men allowed inside this sacred space! Now these overgrown children are incapable of communicating feelings beyond “I love you,” “I don’t love you anymore (but I’m lying, can’t you see that I’m lying???),” and “House, house, house, I love house.”
And it is tearing them asunder. They are trudging through life like the sunk cost fallacy is engraved on their found-family crest. They have no self-preservation instincts, and I’m starting to think that Cousins Beach has a gas leak of some kind!
Or … perhaps more logically … I can hold two truths at once: Being an adult who watches TSITP means relating almost entirely to the mothers (not the dads, GROSS, EWW, get out of here, no MEN allowed!). It means thinking those words that your mom thought before you, and her mom before her: “If that young woman would just listen to her mother, she wouldn’t be having so much trouble.” Mostly, it means being captivated by Laurel and Susannah’s friendship, and weeping pretty much anytime they’re on screen together, talking about being “immovable objects” while permanently holding back tears because they either already know Susannah is dying, she's actively dying, or she’s already dead. Jackie Chung and Rachel Blanchard make you feel every ounce of the joy it would be to have children the same age as your best friend and raise them together as family, and then how devastating it would be to suddenly lose that.
But also … Susannah was kind of a problem. She was a wonderful woman who created fun and familial tradition everywhere she went. She also willfully pushed a romantic narrative onto her two sons and her best friend’s daughter that only became more incentivized upon her death, especially given that many of her final words tasked them with taking care of one another while also upholding the magic and possibilities of Cousins, permanently trapping them in a co-dependent love triangle that would never, under any circumstance, end well.
And bless her heart, Belly really does try to keep that gas-leak magic alive. She tries so hard that she fully falls in love with and dates Conrad during her junior year of high school. But when he’s so depressed about his mom dying that he keeps trying to Old Yeller her and one time forgets her corsage in his dorm, she breaks up with him at prom, and then screams “I hate you” at him at his mom’s funeral a month later because she sees him—her ex-boyfriend!—laying in the lap of another girl who was comforting him after he had a panic attack because his mom just died.
So, yeah, Belly overcorrected on that one. She tried a little too hard, and wound up making out with Conrad’s younger brother right in front of him and then dating him. So after one more round of I-love-you-nots, Conrad slowly distanced himself while Belly followed Jeremiah to college to watch proudly as he accidentally failed to graduate because he didn’t read his emails. And in the millennial dog whistle heard ’round the world, Belly became the next in a long line of girls who didn’t go to Paris because she didn’t want to be apart from her mediocre boyfriend—I mean, fiance, because they’re engaged now for absolutely no (good) reason.
But Season 3 doesn’t just play out like a horror movie because they accidentally did an “Oops! All Villains.” These kids have always been detrimental to their own wellbeing. The real problem emerges in the form of a counter to their immaturity, from the most unlikely place: California. Conrad Fisher, former brooder and future Stanford-educated doctor, returns from the three-year time jump a legitimately changed man. Or rather, just … a man, for the first time ever. And wouldn’t you know it, people are now trying to kick Conrad out of his own house that was not made for men simply because he finally had the courage to confess his undying love for the bride the night before her wedding with his brother, who Conrad just found out cheated on their shared girlfriend/sister.
But Conrad can’t help it. He did the work, combed over the bangs, and actually grew up a little. He started going to therapy, and working on understanding why he feels like he has to silence his own pain in lieu of everyone else’s. He biffed it with his brooding in Season 1, sure, and was legitimately struggling to breathe through anxiety and depression in Season 2—but the Conrad we see in Season 3 is a grown-up version of the Conrad that Belly originally fell in love with. And now she’s engaged to his brother, who everyone hates. You can understand why she was so angry during his last (but certainly not final!) beach-set love confession. Conrad has re-entered the Cousins scene living out the opening beats of a rom-com: he’s literally doing roof work in jeans and a crisp white tee like Noah from The Notebook; he’s cooking Belly well-balanced meals; and he clearly has enough access to his trust fund to cancel a cross-country flight to California approximately every three days over the course of Season 3.
Belly, meanwhile, is just trying to make it to Final Girl status in the horror film that has become her life. The moment she “evicted Conrad from her heart” at the end of Season 2, she just couldn’t resist going to investigate what was making all that racket in the basement while everyone around her screamed not to go down there. And, lo and behold, there was Jeremiah, waiting—waiting to pick fights with her when he feels inferior, to have sex with other women when he feels inferior, to blame Belly for all of it when he feels inferior, and to then insist on buying a $700 wedding cake with his $0 income. How did we get here? More importantly, how does Belly get out? I’m sure rom-com fans assume she’s almost in the clear; just a couple more Parisian montages of her finding herself and it’s on to the rest of her life with Conrad. But horror fans—including the adults who choose to endure this show—know that just around the corner lies the most horrifying TSITP reveal yet (yes, even more horrifying than Jeremiah’s little apple-eating villain monologue in his black revenge blouse): There is no happy ending here.
Conrad may wear sassy suede jackets now, and knit shirts that lay perfectly on his slightly high-waisted slacks, and Belly and Jeremiah may have finally called their wedding off—but, realistically, a rekindling would be ill-advised. These siblings and basically-pretty-much-a-sibling have hurt each other, rejected each other, betrayed and misled each other countless times. They may be single, but they are not doing well. Here is just a quick summary of all the places Conrad has privately crashed out because his brother started dating his LOML: beside a vending machine, behind a seafood tower, in a parking lot, in another parking lot, in the back seat of his brother’s car, in the front seat of his own car, at his brother’s bachelor party, at his brother’s rehearsal dinner, on the beach, on the beach again, in front of his clueless dad several times, and on the beach one more time.
And here is a list of places Belly has crashed out after she told her fiance that his brother said he still loved her the night before their wedding, which led to them breaking up moments before they were supposed to walk down the aisle: every arrondissement in Paris, where she traveled to overnight in high-waisted jeans on a flight she booked at the airport. (As I said, this person is unwell.) And I know that this show isn’t for me, and I’m expected to cheer when Conrad eventually shows up in Paris, having magically made things better with Jeremiah, the slate clean, ready to begin again. But Belly is still literally 21 years old, and this old broad would like her to see, I don’t know, a dozen more butts that she’s never ever seen before, before she heads back into the toxic fumes of Cousins Beach…
But that might never be an option. There may be something so magical (read: terrifying) about Cousins that it simply can’t be denied. Maybe, if you don’t express your true feelings long enough, and hard enough … if you wander out to the beach late enough, and often enough … if you just believe that it is only possible to love one man in one family in one house—and also, sometimes his brother—then it doesn't matter how many times you said you hated him, or how many times you’ve had sex with, been engaged to, and been cheated on by his brother. It doesn’t matter that you’re 21 and you should be in the club, or at least at a nice wine bar. Maybe, because Susannah wished it so, this horror show will go on forever and ever. (Cue “Begin Again (Taylor’s Version),” do not pass go, do not inhale if you smell gas.)
