Lola Tung attends the French premiere of the third and final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty in Paris on Wednesday. Tung has spoken out about problematic reactions that some fans have had to her character’s behaviour on the show.Michel Euler/The Associated Press
Coming-of-age teen drama The Summer I Turned Pretty ended its three-season grasp on viewers on Wednesday, finally answering the unrelenting question – Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah?
While I’m not going to tell you which brother the leading lady chose, fans online seemed happy overall with the fairy-tale ending. Despite rejoicing in Belly’s final decision, however, viewers haven’t always supported her character, treating her at times like an outright enemy on social media.
Audience backlash to Lola Tung’s character (and that of Gavin Casalegno, who played, Jeremiah) was so strong that Prime Video issued several statements surrounding the treatment of cast members online, and Tung herself has addressed the intense responses to her character’s actions.
To be fair, it’s no surprise that viewers are so invested in the series. The third season, especially, has sent this infatuation into overdrive, with more than 25 million viewers worldwide tuning in to the two-part premiere, a 40-per-cent increase over the same timeframe in Season 2. Despite being billed as a YA show and focusing on the lives of 16- to 22-year-olds, it was especially popular among millennials. Amazon says the last season was the most-watched among women between the ages of 18 to 34.
And I’ve been one of them. Since the first season, based on the books from author Jenny Han, premiered in 2022, I’ve been all in. I’ve hosted TSITP themed parties with my friends, listened to recap podcasts and excitedly explained the premise of the show to my unsuspecting first dates. The show has transported me, at 32, back to the giddy promise and terrifying uncertainty of being a teenager.
For Dr. Lisa Bradford, a Toronto-based psychologist, the draw to shows such as TSITP from this age demographic makes sense, because that uncertainty about life never really goes away. “People are dealing with relationship issues at every age,” she says. “There’s this idea that we all struggle with identity issues at every stage of life.”
But despite relating to this uncertainty, we continue to criticize young women on TV for how they choose to navigate it. We’ve seen this treatment of female characters before. From Girls’ Hannah Horvath to Gilmore Girls’ Rory Gilmore, people love to hate a heroine who doesn’t subscribe to their expectations.
But while previous coming-of-age shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls saw female characters facing criticism for their frank sexuality and overt selfishness, years later, we’re now able to rewatch that show and truly understand its complexity, not to mention give the characters – and young women as a whole – some grace.
Or at least we thought we were. Because, almost a decade after Girls ended in 2017, the same age demographic that was criticizing Dunham’s Hannah is now doing it to Tung’s Belly.
These responses to TSITP are not necessarily a case of audiences not understanding Belly’s experience or lacking empathy for her, says Bradford, but rather a reaction to the unstable time we’re currently in. With political upheaval in the U.S. and ongoing conflicts globally, millennials are looking for some sort of escape from the horror of every day life.
The cast of The Summer I Turned Pretty.Michel Euler/The Associated Press
This not only means immersing ourselves deeper into fictional worlds as a means of forgetting, but also using these worlds to help us feel better about ourselves.
Bradford refers to responses to TSITP’s heroine as moralization, a “holier than thou” defence mechanism. Millennial viewers are watching a life phase they’ve already lived through, “so I’m going to judge it and devalue [it] and feel better,” she explains.
Often, it’s not malicious, but a way of thinking in black and white, right and wrong that gives a sense of clarity and control in a world that’s very uncertain and ambiguous.
But there’s another reason we continue to comment on and judge Belly’s escapades – because we can see ourselves in them.
In many ways, Belly and her Gen Z peers aren’t so far from where millennials are now. We’re less likely to own a home or have settled roots, less likely to be married or in a serious romantic relationship, more likely to still be living with our parents, and nowhere near as financially secure as we’d like to be, or as the generations before us have been at our age.
In essence, we’re kind of a mess, which is why judgement of characters such as Belly feels not only hypocritical but may actually be rooted in judgement of ourselves.
These shows and characters are a sounding board for the human experience, and in watching Belly flounder and eventually flourish on screen, we not only have a more interesting show to tune into but can continue to learn from her mistakes and give ourselves leeway as we inevitably keep making our own.
This is something viewers of TSITP’s predecessors reckoned with. As one viewer of Girls, writer De Elizabeth, wrote in a 2017 essay for Teen Vogue, the version of New York and millenial-dom put forward in the show was “a rabbit hole into a world of self-reflection and personal reckoning,” and the characters’ on-screen mistakes were a message to the viewer that “it’s okay if you make mistakes, too.”
And that sentiment still stands. The idea that there’s one way to be is unrealistic for a 22-year-old, but it’s equally unrealistic for a 32- or 42-year-old. So, maybe we should show Belly some compassion and extend some to ourselves while we’re at it.