There’s a scene from The Summer I Turned Pretty’s recent Entertainment Weekly shoot that stays with me, from the beach where the cast reunites just days after wrapping up the final season. Lola Tung, Gavin Casalegno, and Christopher Briney all stand in the sun doing the same thing they’ve done for years: pretending not to be pretending. Tung laughs. Casalegno stares. Briney, off to the side, skips rocks. He waves. They wave back. It’s not scripted, but it might as well be.
TSITP always feels like a memory you can’t quite place. A dream you’re not sure you lived through, or a scene you watched unfold on someone else’s Instagram story.
Now, with Season 3 unspooling weekly on Amazon Prime Video, that dream is finally ending—sort of.
When the show premiered in summer 2022, it was an unexpected hit: a pastel explosion of teen angst and sunlit yearning, perfectly attuned to the post–pandemic hunger for softness. TSITP builds its world on a familiar foundation: one girl, two boys, one beach house. Belly Conklin (Lola Tung), adolescent and aching, returns each summer to Cousins Beach, where the Fisher brothers—moody, magnetic Conrad (Christopher Briney), and affable, eager Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno)—have been constants since her childhood. Throughout the series, the three experience desire, loss, and the illusion of inevitability. There are parties, fireworks, and a debutante ball, but the show’s true driving force is grief—specifically, the death of the Fisher boys’ mother, Susannah Fisher, and the emotional fallout it triggers. Romance may be the bait, but grief is the hook.
By Season 2, though, it gets more complicated. The love triangle hardens into camps. Team Conrad. Team Jeremiah. Team Belly, occasionally, if you dare to be annoying on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The show gets moodier, messier, occasionally even a bit better. And then, silence. A SAG–AFTRA strike–delayed finale. A fandom left hovering at the edge of a story that wasn’t finished.
Now, it is. Or, at least, it promises to be.
Season 3 picks up two years after the last. Belly’s in college. She’s with Jeremiah, seemingly for good. They’ve made it through the honeymoon phase and into something steadier—they sleep in the same bed, know the little things about each other, and treat forgiveness like a form of love. It’s nice. Which is a problem, because nice is rarely what this show is best at.
When TSITP works, it works because of heartache. It works because of heavy decisions that the show lets linger—choosing a necklace, turning away, or driving off too soon. Its best scenes are pauses, not climaxes: the spaces between dialogue. The songs that play while no one says anything at all (like during Season 3, Episode 2, with Sufjan Stevens’ “Mystery of Love” humming beneath Belly and Conrad’s comfortable silence at Christmas).
That heartache hasn’t gone away this season; it’s just gotten harder to see. On the surface, things are settled. Belly gets engaged to Jeremiah, but the silences are still there, and they’re heavier than ever. When Conrad walks into a room, the air shifts. He looks at her like he wants to say something, but he never does. Because he can’t. His brother got there first.
The show plays these moments of heartache quietly, but they feel cataclysmic. The triangle isn’t over yet; it’s gone underground. Belly insists she’s chosen, Jeremiah believes her, and Conrad stays on the edges, steady and devastated. He’s not trying to win her back. He’s trying not to lose everything else. That’s what makes this final season interesting. Not in the “who will she pick?” way—though, of course, that debate still churns on social media—but in the way it pivots from fantasy to consequence. This is no longer a show about falling in love as much as it’s about what happens after you already have.
The performances mirror this unraveling. Tung plays Belly with the kind of conviction that only barely masks doubt. She smiles like she’s trying to make herself believe her own words. Casalegno’s Jeremiah has moments of brightness, but there’s a nervous edge to him now, like he knows he’s holding on too tightly. Meanwhile, Briney’s Conrad barely speaks—but when he does, it’s with a restraint that makes you feel how much he’s still carrying. No one is reaching for anyone anymore, but no one’s really letting go either.
This season finally admits that the show was never about choosing between two boys. It’s about what each of them makes her feel: one safe, one alive. Belly’s stuck between the comfort she thinks she should want and the chaos she never stopped wanting. She’ll walk toward the aisle like she’s sure, while everything else in the show—every glance, every silence, every missed opportunity—asks whether she really is.
That choice is hard. It should be. As show creator Jenny Han says, a good love triangle only works when no outcome feels clean. Someone has to get hurt. Maybe everyone does.
There’s something powerful about how the show sits with that discomfort. It draws out the heartache—letting us watch Belly try to convince herself she’s ready for a supposed lifelong commitment, while everyone around her, including the audience, starts to question her. This isn’t a love story wrapped in a bow as much as it is a slow, painful negotiation with adulthood and its consequences.
TSITP isn’t interested in fairy–tale endings, but in what happens when fantasy runs out—when the ring is on, the dress is picked, and the doubt hasn’t gone anywhere. This season is asking whether wanting is ever enough (while cueing up its Taylor Swift soundtrack, of course), whether choosing someone means you’ve stopped wanting someone else, and whether anyone, at 20, can really tell the difference.
As the season unfolds, the show slows down, almost like it’s bracing for impact. The beach feels emptier. The lighting, a little colder. The characters are older in ways they don’t fully understand yet. And the love story starts to seem less like an open question and more like a wound that hasn’t fully healed.
The story will end where it always does, regardless of who Belly picks: three people, a little sunburned, pretending not to be pretending. With its final season, TSITP veers away from falling in love to ask about staying in love. This season doesn’t offer resolution, but asks us to accept all the little “what–ifs” that come with choosing—the doubt, the quiet, and the consequences of staying.
