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There’s something magical about the kind of TV that makes you feel like you’ve been transported — not just to a place, but to a time. The Summer I Turned Pretty has always promised that: sunsets in Cousins, flip-flops slapping against wooden decks, a soundtrack made for late-night drives, and the dizzy feeling of being seventeen with your entire life stretched out like a horizon you can’t quite see yet.

Season three takes that magic and complicates it, in the best way. Because as Belly, Conrad, Jeremiah, and the rest of the Cousins cinematic universe enter adulthood, they discover that life doesn’t pause to let you figure yourself out. Love doesn’t wait, grief doesn’t soften on command, and choices — real, scary, sometimes exhilarating choices — need to be made.

And yet, that’s exactly what makes this season such a delicious escape. Even as it’s heavier than past summers, it taps into a universal nostalgia: remembering what it felt like to be young and at the edge of forever.

Season three drops us four years after the events of season two. Belly is at the end of her junior year of college, and she’s notably still in a relationship with Jeremiah Fisher, with whom she formed a romantic relationship in the final moments of season two. The two are as cozy as ever as they stroll through the idyllic, albeit fictional, Finch College. While the season’s main couple is as steady as two twenty-somethings can be, Taylor and Steven are engaged in an endless cycle of on-again, off-again. While Belly’s arc as the girl with two beautiful brothers competing for her hand has never read as relatable, Taylor and Steven’s ever-evolving and devolving situationship feels much more authentic to the experience of dating in your twenties. Meanwhile, Conrad is on the opposite coast, navigating medical school and the pressure of trying and failing to meet your own high expectations. In the earliest moments of the season, it seems as though our beloved members of the Cousins Cinematic Universe are all exactly where they’re meant to be.

But those tidy storylines unravel as quickly as they’re introduced.

At a frat party, Belly overhears Lacie Barone (to quote my favorite Steven moment of the season… who the fuck is Lacie Barone??) describing a passionate night she and Jeremiah shared during a spring break trip to Cabo. A spring break trip that Belly, Jeremiah’s serious and consistent girlfriend, was conspicuously absent from.

After overhearing the revelation, we see Belly at perhaps her most relatable: blackout drunk, breaking up with her boyfriend outside of a frat house.

The season’s driving conflict is set up during the second episode, when Steven is injured in a car accident, and Belly and Jeremiah reunite at the hospital. The pair stands in the courtyard and stumbles through an emotional apology and forgiveness. In a stunning display of twenty-two-year-old confidence, Jeremiah proposes. And, in a stunning display of twenty-one-year-old naivety, Belly accepts.

While his baby brother gets engaged in a Bostonian courtyard, Conrad drinks in a west coast bar and waxes poetic about the one true love of his life. The woman who, unbeknownst to him, is wearing his brother’s ring on her left hand. And viewers learn that this love triangle is about to take its victory lap.

This time, though, the stakes are higher than ever. There are no more teenage romances at play. Belly and both Fisher boys are in their twenties, and the next relationship could be the one. There’s no more fighting at prom or sneaky rendezvous in your childhood home. It’s time to worry about a shared apartment, credit scores, and work-life balance. Belly is no longer choosing which sun-kissed brother to kiss on the beach. She’s choosing a life partner.

At this point in her life, choosing between the Fisher brothers means either going through with a wedding that her entire family is against or calling it all off and running away with the groom’s brother. 

Whether they found themselves on team Jeremiah or team Conrad, viewers everywhere acknowledged that this summer, the fallout of Belly’s romantic pursuits will be much more catastrophic.

The Summer Belly Grew Up

  Even though Jeremiah’s blue eyes and Conrad’s slutty watch dominate social media commentary of the show, and even though the finale promises to see Belly committed to one brother or the other… the story has always been about Belly. In fact, even without her dreamy and disastrous romantic liaisons, her story is still a good one.

It’s refreshing. Watching Belly wrestle with who she is beyond her love life makes her infinitely more dimensional. Haven’t we all had that “who even am I?” moment at twenty-one? You blow your life up, you lose touch with friends, you wonder if you’re making the right choices, and through it all, you carry the ghosts of who you used to be. For Belly, those ghosts are an ex-fiancé who isn’t speaking to her, and the lovesick ex-boyfriend who drove the final nail into the coffin of her called-off wedding. And sure, that’s never been my particular journey, but I have definitely been a young woman suddenly faced with the fact that my whole life is ahead of me, and that I need to decide what to do with it. 

One of the smartest choices this season made was expanding its geography. Cousins Beach will always be the show’s emotional core, but watching Belly navigate Paris gives the story a new texture. Cousins is nostalgia. Paris is possibility. Cousins is where you remember who you were; Paris is where you wonder who you could become.

That push and pull between past and future is at the heart of Season 3. Belly can’t cling to who she used to be, but she also can’t ignore the people who shaped her. She’s learning that sometimes you can’t choose between the two. Sometimes, you need to find a way to reconcile your past self with who you are now and all of the versions of yourself you’ll become.

When  Belly and Conrad eventually do reunite, during a romantic and steamy night in Paris (thus officially ending the Team Jeremiah vs. Team Conrad debates), it happens a year after Jeremiah calls off the wedding. Belly doesn’t rush from one brother to the other. She rushes to Paris and becomes the kind of woman who can choose a partner without losing herself in the love story. And that’s what I’ve been wanting for Belly since we met her in Cousins three years ago.

That’s the quiet genius of this season: it reminds us that the heartbreaks and hard decisions of our younger years are not blunders to be ashamed of. They’re rites of passage. They’re the blocks with which you build a life. Belly stumbles, but she also learns to stand on her own. And in doing so, she becomes less of a symbol in someone else’s love triangle and more of a heroine in her own right.

The Summer We Really, Really Needed This

What The Summer I Turned Pretty has always been best at is providing a sort of delicious escapism. This season was no different. Even when I was experiencing pull-my-hair-out levels of frustration with the characters– Like during Jeremiah’s wedding cake meltdown or Laurel’s heels-dug-in-refusal to go wedding dress shopping with her daughter– I was still having fun.

I was swooning over the peach stand scene (scoring that scene with Wild Horses was a masterclass in soundtrack production), and blushing during Belly and Conrad’s Parisian tryst. I was watching Belly move into her inherited apartment and remembering unpacking my things into my first apartment away from my hometown with no idea if I would eventually have to move back home tail tucked.

The first two seasons were about the thrill of falling in love. Season 3 is about the complexity of staying in love: with people, with places, with versions of yourself you may have outgrown.

That’s what makes this season feel so sweet. It’s no longer just a fantasy of endless summers. It’s about what happens when the summer ends, and real life begins.

Here’s the real secret: The Summer I Turned Pretty isn’t escapist because it’s flawless. It’s escapist because it reminds us of who we used to be. Watching Belly and the Fisher boys is like flipping through a scrapbook of your own messy teenage years: the crushes that consumed you, the heartbreaks that felt like the end of the world, the friendships you thought would last forever.

You watch, and you’re transported. Not just to Cousins Beach or Paris, but back to your own “firsts.” First kiss, first heartbreak, first apartment, first night lying awake agonizing over your first big decision. The show doesn’t just let you escape your life. It lets you reconnect with a younger version of yourself, one who believed in love so intensely it ached.

Like any season of TV, this one isn’t flawless. The love triangle sometimes treads familiar ground (haven’t we had this same argument before?). And certain subplots like family favoritism, side romances, feel undercooked compared to the main drama.

But here’s the thing: when you’re watching a show like The Summer I Turned Pretty, you don’t necessarily want perfection. You want to feel. You want a show that sweeps you away, even if you roll your eyes once or twice along the way.

And on that front, Season 3 delivers in spades. From Belly’s loneliness in Paris to the bittersweet brotherly reconciliations, from whispered confessions to quiet moments of grief, this season is brimming with feeling. It’s the kind of TV that makes you sigh and think, God, was anyone ever so young?

Final Thoughts

Season 3 of The Summer I Turned Pretty might just be the show’s most poignant chapter yet. It’s not perfect, but neither is being young. And that’s kind of the point.

It’s messy, it’s emotional, it’s filled with moments that make you want to hug your best friend, text your high school crush, or maybe just sit outside and watch the sun go down with your headphones in (and a Taylor Swift song playing).

This was written by our contributing writer, Kate Schifano.