Which! Brother! Do! I! Pick??????

Dorie Chevlen explores the limits of love in the Prime Video series “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”

By Dorie ChevlenSeptember 20, 2025

• Television

WHEN I SAY that the show found me at my lowest point, I am being precise in my language: emotionally, I was days removed from the dissolution of a four-year relationship; physically, I was flat on my back on the floor, having suffered a mysterious lower-back injury likely precipitated by the distress of the first event.

In quick time, the All-Knowing Algorithm started to crunch the supporting facts of this nadir into neat datasets—won’t stop listening to Neko Case, googled three variations of “egg freezing how much hurt???”—and spat out an Amazon Prime Video series based on a trilogy of YA novels: The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022–25). First, it appeared in the form of memes on Twitter, then hot takes on Instagram, and finally, there it was, recommended on my (well, my sister’s) Prime account, which I had only logged into, unironically, to order C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain.

At first, I was not much interested in watching the show. I’d enjoyed author and showrunner Jenny Han’s other book-to-streaming YA trilogy, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018–21), but what snippets and scenes I’d ingested made this new one seem less compelling than that previous endeavor. The logline invited further skepticism: “A love triangle between one girl and two brothers. A story about first love, first heartbreak, and the magic of that one perfect summer.” A huge waste of my time, surely.

But The Machine knew me better than I knew myself, or maybe it just knew that I wasn’t so different from the 25 million people who reportedly tuned in to watch the series’ season three premiere in July. Those numbers—high even for a cable viewership, but jaw-dropping in the age of streaming—may imply something beyond the show. Maybe we’re not so different at all. In any case, I was too low to search for better, so from the floor I watched, laptop propped against my hips, the beautiful faces of these beautiful characters beamed directly into my face. Over the subsequent weeks, my back healed, but even as I managed to sit and stand and walk again, I kept watching. Many of my friends watched it as well, despite agreeing that the show was ridiculous, the characters flat and the writing shallow. These justified critiques are the reason I find myself now puzzling over not just why we watched it but also, and much stranger still—why we liked it.

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The premise of TSITP is almost algebraically simple: Isabel (“Belly,” as she’s called, with not one character snickering over this total absurdity) Conklin (Lola Tung) spends every summer at her mom’s best friend’s beach house, where she is torn between broody, floppy-haired Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney) and his equally handsome but haunted-doll-eyed younger brother, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). There are other characters—Belly’s charming brother, Steven (Sean Kaufman), and her best friend, the remarkably levelheaded Taylor (Rain Spencer). There are also the two moms: Laurel (Jackie Chung), a writer, and Susannah Fisher (Rachel Blanchard), a trophy wife, apparently, who dabbles in painting—each with minor dramas of her own (such as Susannah dying of cancer and psychotically deciding to keep it a secret). But the narrative arc of the show is given to Belly, with her all-consuming and much weightier dilemma: Which! Brother! Do! I! Pick??????

This saga, of course, fits neatly into a long tradition of so many other sibling love triangle stories: Little Women (1868–69), While You Were Sleeping (2017), Persuasion (1818), and the Torah (oh did you forget about Jacob/Leah/Rachel?) occupying the higher-brow end of the spectrum, against the lower-brow 2010s series The Vampire Diaries (astute watchers will note the actor who plays TSITP’s Jeremiah also plays young Damon) and 1954 film Sabrina (which ironically screens at a drive-in movie during the first date Belly humors with a non-Fisher family member). But unlike those other works, TSITP focuses on little else—every plot point serves to either draw Belly closer to or farther from one brother or the other, the lesser characters deployed largely to question or reinforce her choice that episode.

This is in distinct contrast to Han’s other YA heroine, Lara Jean Song-Covey (Lana Condor), who chooses to abandon her on-again, off-again lover in California to chase her future in New York. Instead, there’s a distinct flatness to young Belly’s interiority: the series starts with her at age 15, and by the time it ends, with her 22nd birthday, we’ve learned little about her hopes and dreams for the future (she occasionally mentions studying “sports psychology,” an apparent through line to her having played volleyball in high school). A few end-of-series episodes in Paris, after she calls off the wedding to Jeremiah, seem angled to appease this obvious criticism, and fail to. Belly half-heartedly rebounds with a motorcycle-riding local, works at a bar, and cuts her hair into a bob—like the pain au chocolat she gleefully orders in French, they are delicious, yes, but nutritionally empty. Mostly, she ping-pongs between each Fisher brother—first Conrad, then Jeremiah; then Conrad, then Jeremiah—with different gowns to demarcate each swing, from her sleek white debutante ball gown in season one to a flouncy purple number for prom in season two, an off-the-rack disappointment for her wedding (blessedly canceled) in season three, and finally a yellow Simkhai Kittiya midi for her return to the beach house with Conrad in the final episode.

The simplicity of this plot is part of what makes the series such a clear and deserving hit. Across the United States, women and gay men (and maybe some straight ones, though I’ve yet to meet any) gather in bars to watch the show each week, rivaling the anxiety around a hundred Super Bowls. Between episodes, the debate plays out across the internet, with those favoring Jeremiah hashtagging #TeamJelly, and those with more refined taste urging #Bonrad. And in my group chats, the comments abound nonstop, spanning from jovial insight (“Laurel’s book sounds dumb”) to ethical quandary (“Is it cheating if you spent Christmas with your ex and you didn’t fuck but you were emotionally very cozy?”) and, often, just hyperbolic tweets from accounts urging all of us to “demonstrate some moral clarity.” Endlessly, all of us denounce Susannah’s bizarrely threatening insistence, from an inappropriately young age, that Belly will marry one of her sons. (“I just had to try them both!” one TikToker jokes in a spoof video.)

For her own part, actress Tung has wisely chosen to stay out of the fight. “I’m Team Belly,” she demurred on The Tonight Show. “And I think that I’m all for her following her heart.” Everyone is so woefully media-trained these days that there’s no chance she could say what any reasonable viewer of the show should be advocating for: all of these characters should leave each other alone; they should all meet new people. It’s not as hashtaggable, but we should all be Team Belly Should Run Far, Far Away from These Brothers, Live Her Life, and Absolutely Not Marry Until at Least Age 30.

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Advocating for nuance and emotional measure is the least enjoyable way to watch bad television, of course. And there is so much to enjoy about TSITP. The setting—in the made-up town of Cousins Beach, Massachusetts, though actually shot in the same scenic streets as One Tree Hill’s Wilmington, North Carolina—is postcard gorgeous, as is the cast. And the music budget is so unbelievably limitless that the internet teases the sheer volume of Top 40 hits that punctuate each scene. (The show has featured over 20 songs by Taylor Swift alone.)

Amazon has replenished that production expense easily, no doubt: the series plays out as one long gorgeous ad for just about every product under the sun. Jeremiah barks orders for Amazon’s Alexa to play music on its speakers when he crashes dance rehearsal for the deb ball; Taylor interrupts the sensible progression of a scene to “run to Dunkin’”; and Belly must choose between a box of Sour Patch Kids from Conrad and Swedish Fish from Jeremiah, symbols for how well each brother knows her (Conrad wins, of course). There are long, lingering shots on everything from Pop-Tarts to Sun Bum to AirTags, and that’s just the product placement. The sponsorships are even more ambitious, from Coach to Catbird (where you can buy Belly’s engagement ring from Jeremiah as well as the infinity charm necklace that Conrad gave her, in either silver or gold).

The fans are largely aware of these capitalistic ventures, and use it as further fuel for their fun on social media (one TikTok video with 156,000 likes just features Belly sprinting away in a dress, with the caption “Execs running to make sure there is a product placement in every scene”). The overt appeal to moneymaking, in combination with the melodramatic love triangle and heavy-handed writing … I know that, as a critic, I should be approaching this show cynically. But the truth is, unlike many of my friends, I’m not hate-watching The Summer I Turned Pretty. I genuinely love it. I know it doesn’t deserve that, but then again, love has little to do with what is fair.

I think the show works (and 25 million people can’t be wrong) because most romantics relate to its inherent tension: Conrad can love no one but Belly; Jeremiah can love no one but Belly. For Belly, meanwhile, there are literally no other men besides these two brothers. The viewers know this is a faulty premise. Life doesn’t ask us “Either-or?” so much as it insists “Yes, and.” But still, when it comes to love, rationality fails. In the first season, in one moment of lucidity, after kissing Jeremiah and accepting Conrad’s invitation to the deb ball, Belly asks Taylor, “What am I gonna do? I mean, how am I supposed to fully jump into something with Jeremiah if a piece of my heart still beats for his brother?” How indeed! It’s the central question of the show, and perhaps of romance itself, even if it’s never satisfyingly answered. Because, and this the show knows, when you fall in love, it feels like catching a shooting star—unplanned, improbable, a shock of beauty that steals your breath away. But so many meteors pass through the sky each night—some eclipsed by the moon, some concealed by clouds, but there nonetheless, constantly sprinting above you. Yes, they are miraculous. They are also commonplace. If you gaze in the right direction, you will see another. And another. And another.

Love can be a type of myopia, and all of the characters in this show apparently suffer from it. When Jeremiah spurns Belly on the day of their tacky country-club wedding, he fails to understand this. When Belly admits that she will always love his brother “a little,” and always have him in her heart, he insists, “That’s not enough! I don’t want part of you, Belly. I want all of you.” As if her love were some resource, another neatly packaged product sold by Amazon. Then, in the series finale, Conrad, vulnerable in his postcoital nakedness, commits the same logical fallacy. “I have tried everything not to love you,” he begs Belly. “I’ve changed everything about myself, and the one thing that never changes is that I love you.” Like his brother, he seeks an excision rather than an expansion.

What I wish I could shout at them—and, I suppose, at you and, most of all, at myself—is that there’s space for one woman to love two brothers, and even for her to love some third, totally new person, ideally not related to the family. There is room for a critic to recognize the silliness of the show she’s watching and to love it regardless. In the very last scene of the series, Belly wears the infinity necklace gifted to her by Conrad years prior. She is still frustratingly ignorant of its symbolic value. Though never given the opportunity to test its limits, her heart contains plenty of room, endless room, for her to carry Conrad and Jeremiah, all of their love, and the love of endless future others with her, not bogged down by the weight of all that grace, but rather lifted up by it, filled—stretched to ever greater capacity.