How Did The Summer I Turned Pretty Become a Smash Hit?

It’s often been said that we live in a time of Too Much TV. The increased number of platforms available for new programming has made the act of keeping up with modern entertainment a literal impossibility. The benefit of choice has meant that networks and streamers are fighting harder than ever to get those large viewership numbers that arguably don’t exist anymore. There are exceptions, but they’re rare. Few could have predicted that one of the major hits of 2025 would be a teen romance on Amazon Prime that spent most of its life being a minor success.

The Summer I Turned Pretty, based on the novels by Jenny Han (who also takes on showrunner duties here), has a pretty basic set-up. Isabel ‘Belly’ Conklin — yes, that’s what they call her throughout the entire series — is a teenage girl who has spent every Summer with her family at the gorgeous beach house of the Fishers. There are two Fisher brothers, Jeremiah and Conrad, and as the three of them grow up together, they experience the messy realities of first love, heartbreak, and finding your true self. Sounds pretty standard, right? And it is, which is what’s helped to make it one of the most talked-about shows of 2025.

In its third and final season, the show became an organic word-of-mouth hit. According to Deadline, the series drew in a massive 25 million viewers globally within the first seven days of its third season premiere. The traditional weekly release model kept it in the headlines and at the heart of memes across the internet. People took sides: Team Conrad versus Team Jeremiah. Even my local ice hockey team in Dundee made Instagram content about it! Amazon has spent untold billions of dollars on things like The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time, trying to reverse-engineer their own massive IP akin to Game of Thrones, and what actually did it for them was a young adult romance full of Taylor Swift songs. I’d say you couldn’t have predicted it, but honestly, I think we could have.

Jenny Han started writing YA romances at a time when the category of young adult fiction was exploding in popularity. The Twilight series had concluded—and the movies were money-making machines—and the paranormal boom was giving way to dystopian fare thanks to The Hunger Games. Han was not unique in her status as a writer of contemporary YA romance, free of monsters and the apocalypse. She followed in the footsteps of genre pioneers and was, in many ways, rather traditional in her no-frills approach. But readers loved her romantic tales with relatable heroines, handsome but complicated heroes, and high-stakes emotional situations. The Summer I Turned Pretty is more melancholic than her other series, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which became a trilogy of hit Netflix movies, although both are bound together by young Asian American protagonists with optimistic ideas of love who are just trying to figure out who they really are in the midst of adolescent toil. Maybe you couldn’t relate to Bella Swan, but you definitely could with Belly.

If Han’s work had anything in common with her contemporaries, it was the inclusion of the good old-fashioned love triangle. Belly was torn between brothers Jeremiah and Conrad for three books, her own Edward/Jacob scenario. But, at least in my opinion, the conundrum felt more evenly split with Han’s series. It wasn’t like Twilight, where it was obvious from page one that Bella would never choose Jacob, thus puncturing any kind of tension and making all of the competitions in the marketing campaigns pointless. Fans certainly fought over which Fisher brother they preferred — and if you read the books, to which the series has remained pretty faithful, you knew who was endgame — but each option had a lived-in quality with its own dynamics and emotional stakes. Yes, there’s a fantasy to having two cute guys fight over you, and the show had fun with that without relinquishing character or Belly’s own personality.

Ultimately, there’s a simple message at the heart of this success: stuff by and for women sells. Young women remain a dismissed market despite oodles of evidence showing how powerful their spending power is. They can make a hit through word-of-mouth, memes, and fanfiction, advertising budgets be damned. As the entertainment world sees Trump’s anti-DEI agenda as an excuse to abandon even the vaguest hints of inclusivity and once again tries to pander to right-leaning white men as the be-all and end-all of culture, The Summer I Turned Pretty did its thing and then some. There’s elegance in its simplicity. How often have we complained that Hollywood doesn’t make stuff like this anymore?

The Summer I Turned Pretty just aired its series finale, but Jenny Han has hinted that she isn’t done with this story just yet. It may very well be that we get a sequel show or spin-off, much like how the To All the Boys movies has its own one, XO, Kitty, which has become another hit for Han on Netflix. Certainly, I don’t think Amazon will want things to be over so quickly, not now that they’ve got a bona fide hit on their hands, and one that’s considerably cheaper to produce than The Wheel of Time was. Sometimes, we just want a good old-fashioned love story.