It’s often said that the romcom is dead. Kiss goodbye to the crisp charm of Nora Ephron’s freshly sharpened pencil bouquets in the fall, embrace the era of musings on love as nothing more than a maths equation. Then along comes gripping teen romance The Summer I Turned Pretty and it gets us at the first Taylor Swift track.
Across its 26-episode run, the adaptation of Jenny Han’s trilogy of novels has won the hearts of millennials who have been desperately yearning for a nostalgic watch to fill the void of 00s romcoms. Reminiscent of rose-tinted love stories of their youth, before dating apps, catfishing and ghosting entered their vocabulary, the show’s potency has been such that Prime Video even issued a warning asking viewers not to use hate speech towards the cast. It isn’t real, no matter how visceral it feels, and the streamer didn’t even wait 24 hours to let fans know that a feature film finale is on the way.
