New Taylor Swift Songs Can’t Revive ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’

It’s no spoiler to say that, over the course of The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2, there are a whopping nine different Taylor Swift needle drops. (If you were looking to be surprised, don’t shoot the messenger—creator Jenny Han revealed this in a teaser for the show.) There are more T. Swift songs in the Prime Video show’s sophomore season than there are episodes.

(Warning: Light spoilers for The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2 follow.)

Since it premiered last year, The Summer I Turned Pretty has become the one-stop-shop for previews of Swift’s new rerecordings. Last season, Swift premiered “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” in the show, while both “Back to December (Taylor’s Version)” and a new take on Folklore’s “August” are featured in trailers for this season. But does the show itself actually live up to the sweeping, life-altering romance Swift muses about in her chart-topping songs? The first season certainly did. The second, not so much.

Han, who wrote the original series of novels and created the streaming adaptation, has become a rom-com superstar. Last summer, we called her the “Gen-Z Nancy Meyers.” She has since created XO, Kitty on Netflix, a spinoff series of the fluffy and delightful To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before that was nearly as good as its predecessor. Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty books were a slower, more dramatic trilogy than TATBILB, which certainly showed in its fizzy, slow-burn first season. Unfortunately, though, the second season has moved away from the splendid Cousins Beach and, in turn, wilts like a flower. The show has such a strong potential to bloom into something so beautiful, but it lacks the proper sunlight to do so.

The original Summer books conjured the feeling of capturing lightning bugs in cupped hands, pouring back lemonade after a day spent lounging by the pool, waking up to the smell of salt air and cicadas, and, on top of all of those beach-y pleasantries, having a fling at summer camp. While it wasn’t able to mimic that exact same magic, Season 1 had almost the same amount of summer fun. Lola Tung starred as the perfect Isabel “Belly” Conklin, who, when we first meet her, is an awkward teen. But when she loses the braces and glasses, she has a summer that forever changes her while staying at the house of her family friends, the Fishers. After spending a summer trying to impress her forever crush Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney), Belly now has to make a huge decision: Is she still into the same guy after 16 years, or has she moved onto his younger brother, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno)?

Quite a bit has happened in between the events of Season 1 and Season 2—almost too much, in fact. Belly and Conrad decided to pursue a relationship outside of Cousins Beach, attending one another’s proms while trying to make long distance work. That didn’t end too well. Belly is left feeling hopelessly out of love while Conrad broods in college. Belly’s mom, Laurel (Jackie Chung), is working on a book titled We’ll Always Have Summer (not-so-coincidentally the same title as Han’s final book in the Summer trilogy) about Belly, the Fisher boys, and their mom, Laurel’s best friend Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), on their annual visit to the Fisher family beach house. Susannah has passed in between seasons—though we still see her in flashbacks—after a recurrence of breast cancer, leading to some feelings of confusion and emptiness among all of the main cast.

All of these details are told through short flashbacks throughout the season, which can be, at times, quite confusing. It’s helpful to have read the second book—and all the books, for that matter, because although the first season is easy enough to follow, the books are far better than the show. But from the jump, all we really know about Belly, her brother Steven (Sean Kaufman), Conrad, and Jeremiah this season is that they’re hurting. And it’s not just due to Susannah’s passing—the love triangle between Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah has led to some hurt feelings and unsaid feelings. The first half of the season is an unsettling look at what went wrong, taking the characters away from the beauty of Cousins and into a darker, more melodramatic storyline. It takes a while for The Summer I Turned Pretty to find the sunny beach—and when it finally does, the characters are still pretty mopey.

The teens and their love triangle gets attention in every episode, but most of Season 2 actually focuses on the beach house in Cousins—though only an episode or two takes place there. What once belonged to Susannah now has been willed to her half-sister, the bitter Julia (Kyra Sedgwick), who is trying to sell the house with the help of her quiet teen Skye (Elsie Fisher). No matter how much Conrad and Jeremiah—who have finally agreed to look past their conflicting affections for Belly to save the house—doth protest, Julia doesn’t remember her half-sister fondly, so Susannah’s house will have to go. The kids then strategize to impress Skye with a fun carnival day, because if Conrad and Jeremiah can’t convince their aunt not to sell, maybe Skye can.

The carnival trip is one of the season’s high points, and by Episode 5, finally, Summer is nearly back in full swing. Another intriguing moment comes when the series steps away from Belly’s point of view to focus on Jeremiah, who professes his everlasting feelings for Belly through soul-bearing narration. This is a rare, exciting use of the male gaze, in a show that mainly focuses on its heroine’s crushes—we get to see exactly how one of those crushes feels about her. Still, it’s hard to look past the fact that both leading men (Briney and Casalegno) are struggling in the acting department, lacking emotional resonance and, more importantly, chemistry with Tung. Tung does laps around the pair of guys, which is really a shame. She deserves her Noah Centineo!

Tung does a lot of the heavy lifting in Summer Season 2, but so do the needle drops, which are often more exciting than the lead romances. Are they distracting? Yes. But do I love to see first kisses set to tunes by T. Swift and other pop goddesses? Absolutely. A handful of notable indie darlings and pop superstars round out the soundtrack, which would’ve absolutely demolished me if I were the same age now as I was when I read the original books, more than a decade ago.

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But that’s exactly why The Summer I Turned Pretty will never achieve a wider audience like To All the Boys. It’s a show clearly made for kids and younger teenagers. Most of us older viewers have outgrown Summer and the sheer amount of sticky-sweet pop songs it uses throughout Season 2. (We love the songs—but do we need a dozen huge needle drops per episode to keep our attention?) Because the source material’s appeal is so lasting, the series had the chance to resonate with adults too—unfortunately, by Season 2, it seems to have squandered that potential