How The Summer I Turned Pretty has brought out the worst in its fans

Conrad or Jeremiah? That has been the question on every fan’s lips ahead of the series finale of “The Summer I Turned Pretty”.

Few would have predicted that the love-triangle teen drama between Isabel “Belly” Conklin and two brothers, set in the too-good-to-be-true fictional beach town of Cousins, “would eventually become the source material for a Taylor Swift-approved, viewership-topping, crash-out-inducing television series”, said C. T. Jones in Rolling Stone.

Now in its third and final season, Amazon Prime Video’s "The Summer I Turned Pretty" (TSITP), based on Jenny Han’s bestselling trilogy published between 2009 and 2011, has evolved from a “relatively unremarkable show amid a sea of romance offerings to an era-defining piece of media” driven by a wave of fandom.

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‘A certified phenomenon’

For the uninitiated, the show’s premise is “faintly preposterous”, said The Economist, “but its popularity is real.”

It has topped Amazon’s charts in the US, Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany, among other countries.

“That devotion has spilled off-screen and into the real world,” said Elle, “inspiring ‘TSITP’-themed watch parties, bachelorette trips, dinner parties, and even bar nights.”

Most of all, the “hype” has been “fuelled by social media, particularly on TikTok where fans of the books speculate about the ending of the TV series”, said the BBC. Legions of devotees post memes and create videos of the couple they want to see together. #TeamConrad has 13.5 billion views on TikTok.

“‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ is especially appealing to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z because it’s tender, layered, and psychologically rich,” Deborah Robbins, a therapist who specialises in relationships and attachment, told Elle. “It blends nostalgia, emotional intensity, and romantic fantasy in a way that taps into our earliest understandings of love and longing.”

It also connects adult viewers to the TV they grew up on, she said, highlighted by the fact its main audience is women aged between 25 and 54.

Perhaps a part of what turned season three into a “certified phenomenon” is that each episode is released weekly, said Lauren Aratani in The Guardian. “The wait encourages anticipation, what feels rare in an era of endless, bingeable content online,” and is also “proof that old-fashioned scripted TV shows” can still “have pull over younger audiences who are increasingly drawn to platforms including YouTube”.

‘The summer we started acting normal online’

But what the final season of “TSITP” will mostly be remembered for “is driving some of the most bonkers and unhinged online energy in the history of the internet”, said Jones in Rolling Stone.

Amazon has taken the unusual step of asking fans to stop hurling insults, and even death threats, at actors who play characters they do not like.

“The show isn’t real but the people playing the characters are,” reads a message on the show’s TikTok account, adding: “The summer we started acting normal online.”

“There have always been toxic sides of fandom in certain corners of the internet,” said Jones, but what is different about “TSITP” is “the aggressiveness of the reaction when put next to the reality of the source material”.

“Viewers have lost their hearts to Jeremiah and Conrad. It seems they have lost their heads, too,” said The Economist.