The Summer I Turned Pretty: Teen Soap with An Asian Touch

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C+

The new Prime Video series The Summer I Turned Pretty is a young adult romance based on the first of a trilogy of novels by Korean American author Jenny Han. Outside of its young female audience — where it should be a hit — the series is notable as an indicator of the progressively more diverse nature of the entertainment business.

The series follows Han’s success with To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, a movie based on another of her novels, released in the summer of 2018, which Netflix reported was “one of the most viewed original films ever with strong repeat viewing.”

Boys was followed by adaptations of two sequels in 2020 and 2021; a Netflix-produced TV series based on the trilogy is also in production. All of this is a recent development. The idea of a romance with an Asian-American lead wasn’t an easy sell until the issue of minority underrepresentation gained traction on social media. As Han wrote in The New York Times: “Even before the book came out in 2014, there was interest in making a movie. But the interest died as soon as I made it clear the lead had to be Asian-American.”

With Summer, Han has assumed more direct control through her own film production company, taking on the tasks of co-showrunner, writer, and executive producer. You can see her in a brief cameo in episode seven in the background at a country club, where the main character Isabel “Belly” Conklin (played by newcomer Lola Tung) is about to make her entrance at a debutante ball.

The series takes place over the course of the summer Belly turns 16 in the fictional upscale resort town of Cousins Beach (presumably based on Cape Cod). As Belly tells us in intermittent voiceover, she and her Korean American novelist mom Laurel Park (Jackie Chung) have come to the beach mansion of her mother’s best friend Susanna Fisher (Rachel Blanchard) for years.

Fathers are strictly on the periphery here, but Susanna’s two teen sons Jeremiah and Conrad are at the centre of Belly’s concerns because this is the year she has turned “pretty,” and the boys have been checking her out.

Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) is the nice one, playful and flirty with everyone and it seems, according to the rules of the romance genre, destined to turn out to be a jerk. His older brother, the brooding Conrad (Christopher Briney), who Belly has had a crush on since she was 10, is apparently going through something. He has quit football, day drinks and smokes pot and acts sullen and scornful around his mom, a woman who is relentlessly upbeat despite her medical secret.

Susanna is the one who decides Belly should be a debutante, which leads to a dress-buying spree and the suspense of which boy will be her escort on the big night at the local country club. If not one of the Fisher boys, perhaps it will be Cameron (David Iacono) the cute, sensitive guy who Belly made out with and lets hang around her, even though she can’t take her eyes of Conrad?

The series, which owes elements to teen soaps such as The OC and Gossip Girl (plus John Hughes movies of the eighties) is pleasant enough, if blandly formulaic: full of breathless kisses, fireworks, bathing suits, dances, and blasts of mood-supporting pop songs. There’s a lot of teen boozing, hooking up, and cheating, but bathed in an atmosphere of fumbling innocence.

The gender politics could be described as the usual tentative waltz of two steps forward. Everyone’s sex positive and gay positive but both mothers and daughters have anachronistic romantic tastes, ritually watching black-and-white movies like It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story and Sabrina (we have no indication of how the teens react to a 55-year-old Humphrey Bogart mashing on a 25-year-old Audrey Hepburn).

True to the romantic convention, our heroine is drawn to the guy with the mood disorder instead of the considerate guy. Then there’s that anachronistic debutante ball, a traditional event where rich people put their daughters on the marriage market.

On the subject of prettiness, Belly sounds as confused as you would expect in her generational cohort, where self-help affirmations vie with ego-tearing social media and the advertising. “Girls aren’t suppose to know if we’re pretty or not,” she muses to herself. “We’re supposed to wait for other people to tell us before we’re allowed to feel that about ourselves. But isn’t that bullshit because we’re all beautiful in our own way?” (Yes, Belly, that is bullshit, as is the fact that everyone in this show looks beautiful in the same fit-and-slender, able-bodied, even-featured way.)

More coherent is the way the drama shows how racism is entangled with other youthful anxieties. Belly’s nervousness about joining a snobbish new group of debutantes is compounded by the fact that she’s the only biracial Asian-American. And in some ways, they have their diversity quota. There’s one African American girl Nicole (Summer Madison), who is Belly’s rival romantic interest of Conrad.

In a pointed scene, Belly’s older brother Steven (Sean Kaufman) — who is trying to save to go to Princeton — takes a job as a waiter in a country club gambling game, where he endures racist comments by rich white men. Their insults amplify his anxieties about his financial inferiority to his ultra-rich Asian-American girlfriend, Shayla (Minnie Mills).

Overall, there’s nothing too adventurous about a script where a beautiful Eurasian girl must choose between a couple of handsome Caucasian brothers (an echo of Sabrina). To its credit, the series, which has already been renewed for a second season, adds to the sum of positive onscreen and behind-the-camera Asian representation.

If nothing else, the series confirms that white people don’t have a monopoly on creating pleasantly bland popular entertainment.

The Summer I Turned Pretty. Created by Jenny Han. Starring Lola Tung, Jackie Chung, Rachel Blanchard, Christopher Briney, Gavin Casalegno, Sean Kaufman, Alfredo Narciso, Minnie Mills, with Colin Ferguson and Tom Everett Scott. Premieres on Prime Video on June 17.