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The Summer I Turned Pretty S3: Stuck Between Summer and Adulthood

 

The Summer I Turned Pretty S3

There was something comforting about The Summer I Turned Pretty when it started. It was a coming-of-age story about first love, family, grief, and the strange realization that childhood is slowly disappearing. Even when Belly was frustrating, her choices felt believable for a teenager trying to understand herself.

By the third season, though, everyone is older—and somehow, they don't seem to have moved very far.

Season 3 is easily my least favorite of the series. It isn't that the show suddenly becomes completely unwatchable. There are still emotional moments that work, and some characters get surprisingly good arcs. But the story that once felt like a bittersweet exploration of growing up now feels increasingly stuck in the same romantic drama.

Growing Up Is Hard

The season jumps ahead in time, immediately reminding us that these characters are meant to enter a different stage of their lives. Belly (Lola Tung) has opportunities ahead of her, including an internship in Paris. And yet, once again, her romantic life seems to take over everything.

At some point, I genuinely had to ask: is she really considering giving up an opportunity like that because of a relationship?

The problem isn't that Belly doesn't know what she wants. That could actually be a very realistic portrayal of young adulthood. The problem is that the show keeps treating her uncertainty as romantic drama instead of really exploring it.

She doesn't seem over Conrad (Christopher Briney) even when she agrees to marry Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). She doesn't seem particularly sure that she wants to be with him. And yet somehow the solution is... marriage?

That felt less like emotional growth and more like a very long detour.

The show has always understood Belly's fear of being alone. In the first season, that made some of her questionable decisions surprisingly relatable. But by now, I wanted to see her learn something from them. Instead, she seems to keep circling the same problem.

The Wedding Is Where Everything Falls Apart

The wedding storyline was probably the point where I stopped taking the romance seriously.

These are young people making enormous decisions while still behaving like teenagers, and the show rarely gives their choices the weight they deserve. There is a wedding, then there isn't a wedding, then there are more emotional conversations, and somehow the consequences never feel quite as serious as they should.

And then there is the beach house.

For me, the beach house has always been much more than a piece of property. It represents the childhood, the family, and the summers that shaped all of them. The second season already made that clear, with the house becoming the center of so much conflict and emotion.

That is why I found it frustrating when other arguments seemed to receive more emotional weight than the house itself. Jeremiah can have a meltdown over a $750 cake, but changing the venue barely seems to matter? I'm sorry, but the beach house is symbolic. The cake is just cake.

Some People Actually Grow

Interestingly, the character whose story I enjoyed most this season was Taylor (Rain Spencer).

Losing her mother's salon forces her to deal with responsibility in a way that isn't romantic or glamorous. She has to grow up because life gives her no choice. And that makes her development feel much more genuine than some of the central romantic storylines.

Taylor can still be Taylor—dramatic, impulsive, and occasionally completely crazy—but there is a new sense of responsibility underneath it. She feels like someone who is actually moving forward.

Jeremiah also surprised me.

He has always been impulsive and emotionally unstable, and this season gives us plenty of reasons to wonder whether Belly shouldn't simply run in the opposite direction. Yet, by the end, he finally seems to be becoming a man rather than the spoiled boy we've seen before.

That was one of the endings I genuinely liked.

Belly and Conrad Are Still Stuck

And then there is Belly and Conrad.

I understand why the story was always going to come back to them. The ending was never particularly difficult to predict. But knowing where the story was headed didn't make the journey satisfying.

The biggest problem is that I don't think either of them has changed enough.

They are better separated for much of the story, and when they come back together, I kept wondering whether they were actually choosing each other or simply returning to a relationship that had been unfinished for years.

Even the Paris storyline, which should have represented Belly becoming independent and discovering who she is away from the Fisher brothers, felt strangely artificial to me.

And that is ultimately what disappointed me most.

The Summer I Turned Pretty began as a story about growing up. Season 2 was already more frustrating, particularly because the love triangle felt repetitive, though the show still had enough emotional depth to keep me invested.

Season 3 pushes that repetition too far.

There are still moments that remind me why I liked the show in the first place. The pain of Belly, who wishes her mother could be there for an important moment, is genuinely touching. Growing up really is hard, and the series still captures those small moments of loss.

But growing up also means moving forward.

And by the final season, I couldn't shake the feeling that Belly and Conrad were still standing in the same place, looking back at the same summer, while everyone else was trying to figure out what came next.

Maybe that is the real tragedy of the final season: the characters finally grow older, but the story doesn't always know how to let them grow up.

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