“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.”
At some point after the first season of The Summer I Turned Pretty came out, it was universally accepted amongst my nucleus of girlfriends that we wanted, one day, to co-own a house where we could languish our summers away in together. Never mind the fact that none of these conversations produced any sort of financial game plan or a joint high-yields savings account. Our ability to actually materialize this sun-bleached, home-owning dream wasn’t the point—it was the fantasy of living in a world where friends became sisters, and sisters could feasibly spend entire seasons growing old together and raising their kids side by side.
Now that we’re knee-deep into the third season of Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, Cousins just doesn’t feel like how it used to. That’s not just because the fandom’s ship wars have reached a new breaking point (I should know, as the last girl sailing the sinking Ship Jelly). It’s because the charm that radiated all throughout season one dried up as soon as Susannah died, leaving an irreparable void. For me, a huge draw of the show was the friendship between Susannah and Laurel. Their love story—from young girls who met in college to best friends whose families treated each other as family—often ran a parallel track to the central love triangle between Laurel’s daughter, Belly, and Susannah’s two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah. Sometimes, I was more interested in what the moms were doing than which brother Belly would pick.
With Hollywood’s nasty habit of treating any actress over the age of 30 as disposable, it felt delightfully rare to witness a story that portrayed women in the midst of their midlifes as people worthy of their own stories. Laurel and Susannah laughed, fought, danced, gossiped, dressed up, smoked pot, and found hook-ups. In other words, they made midlife look fabulously fun. Watching season one was like looking into a portal that reflected a future I could only dream to share with my own best friends (sans the terminal cancer diagnosis, of course). With Susannah’s season two and season three presence strictly relegated to flashbacks, that tender element of “peak girlhood” is now fundamentally missing from the show.
So here’s my official plea to Jenny Han, the author of the original The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy and now showrunner of the Prime Video series: Please, oh please, make a prequel series about Laurel and Susannah. There is plenty of canon material that could be explored in a hypothetical prequel (How did Laurel and Susannah meet each other? When did Laurel get over her first impression of Susannah as another “stuck-up rich girl”? What made them want to date and, eventually, marry their respective husbands?) and a lot of unanswered questions about their own respective stories (Who was that person Laurel said she had only ever felt “fireworks” for in the first season? And when did Susannah’s relationship with her sister sour past the point of no return?). Besides, some of the most compelling television ever made focused almost exclusively on friendship and sisterhood—Sex and the City, Insecure, Fleabag, and Broad City, just to name a few. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, they were girls together.
The Summer I Turned Pretty cast members have even voiced their interest in watching Susannah and Laurel’s origin story onscreen. “To see them in their younger years getting to know each other, that would be my dream by far,” Sean Kaufman, who plays Belly’s older brother Steven, said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. Lola Tung, who portrays Belly, echoed that sentiment: “A young Laurel and Susannah would be really cool. Like in the college years or something would be awesome.”
If this prequel idea ever gets off the ground, it wouldn’t be the first time that Han has dabbled in spin-offs based on her own work. After adapting To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before into three films on Netflix, she worked with the streamer to create XO, Kitty, a show about Lara Jean’s younger sister.
“For me, it’s always story first, and what drives me is being really excited, creatively, to do something,” Han told Variety on the possibility of continuing The Summer I Turned Pretty universe.“So, if the right idea came along, then I would jump at the chance. But it just has to be right. We’ll see if something comes to me or not…. I would have to be really excited about it and have an idea that, to me, felt it had its own legs and its own merits, not just doing something to do something.”
If Kaufman and Tung don’t use their leverage to persuade Han to create Laurel and Susannah’s show, then here’s hoping for miracles!
You Might Also Like
4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora
The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
