Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Summer I Turned Pretty season 3 finale.
Jenny Han sees all: the accusations of filler episodes in The Summer I Turned Pretty season 3, the intense screen time calculations for certain couples, the discourse around Belly as the villain of the series.
She presses on anyway; the hit Prime Video show will soon be a movie, continuing the world she built with the books she wrote over 15 years ago. The ever-growing amount of fan reactions is only evidence of how impactful her words have become.
Below, The Summer I Turned Pretty's creator, co-showrunner, and author Jenny Han answers our burning questions about how season 3 of the show came together.
Jenny Han: I am having a really hard time remembering, but it was either soon after season 2, just thinking about the story, or it was beginning of the writer's room in season 3.
JH: Oh, yeah. I already knew. Yes. It was already mapped out before. But I would say that was my vision for it, but everything took a minute to fall to place, so now it's for sure, since it's in print.
JH: If it had fallen through, then I would've had to add on to [season 3]. But I think that the season is about Belly and Conrad coming back together and what needed to happen in order for their reunion to happen. So I know that people were like, "Oh, we barely got any time with the two of them happy, and we wanted episodes of them as a couple." But the journey really was about the reunion, so I didn't want to do a five-minute montage at the end of the season. I thought the movie felt more fitting.
JH: You know what? It's a really interesting question because I think that… okay, I'll start by saying I think it's that way with books a little bit now, too. If you're reading it from an e-reader, you check and see how many pages are left. When you read a paper book, you can see visually, okay, I'm at the halfway point, but you're not necessarily counting the pages. But now that everything is digital, people are much more precise with that. I had said, I think early on, that we had a couple of super-sized episodes, and then people were like, “Why aren't they two hours long?”
I said that I think without realizing that a lot of people don't know that most hour-long shows are like 44 minutes, is kind of the sweet spot. That's how they have been historically with commercials. Then streamers carried that over, that they tend to like it to be less than 45 minutes ish. So we had quite a few episodes that were over an hour. So my mind, an extra 25 minutes, 20 minutes percentage-wise is super-sized. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. Maybe I shouldn't have called it super-sized without realizing or thinking about that people weren't aware of it.
JH: No, I don't think so because there's shorter episodes, I think, that still pack a punch. I can speak for myself on my episode that I directed. I was like, "This is important. This is important. And the fans want to see this." So I was like, "Can we please have it be longer?" … Prime Video was very generous with that and didn't push back too hard on having the long episodes.
TV: The episode you mention, the Conrad-centric one, it felt like another case of what you were saying, fans took super-sized episodes to mean two hours, and all narrated by Conrad, and only Conrad is in the episode. I'm curious what it feels like to have fans set their own expectations and then when something doesn't meet their expectations, it's like, "Well, that's not what I said. That's not what the goal was." How do you reckon with that pressure?
JH: I think people always have their own expectations of TV. I think the difference now is that you could, because of social media, you can hear everybody's dissatisfaction. And also, it's interesting because I saw people say that they heard other reactions to something, and then that already put them in a negative place before they watched it. Then it becomes a little bit of the echo chamber. Then they said, "Oh, then I watched it again and I had a different feeling about it." So I think there's pluses and minuses to the big community watch, because you do hear other thoughts and you go, "Oh yeah, that's interesting." Something that may not have occurred to you in both positive ways and negative ways.
JH: I think to me, what a filler episode means is an episode that doesn't move a story forward in any way. I saw some people were like, "Oh, this episode was filler." And it was the episode after the wedding aftermath. I would say, to me it's not filler because this is the episode where Belly makes the decision to stay in Paris. So it does drive the story forward, and then you see Conrad going back to California, and Jeremiah breaking from Belly in those last conversations. A lot of stuff happens in it, but it's not necessarily action-packed. Historically, I feel a filler episode has meant more something kind of fun for the audience that doesn't drive the story forward.
JH: Yeah, I think about that. Not just from a financial standpoint, but from wanting to really honor the music and for it to be some place in a meaningful moment and give it its due. Sometimes if it's like a scene where you can't really hear the music, because there's a lot of conversation or it's in a restaurant, then it's really more for the mood and the vibe. But then if you're going to spend a lot of money on something and you're also asking a big ask of an artist, you want to be able to say, this is a really important scene for the story.
JH: No, it was not. It was “Oh! Darling” by the Beatles. Well, there's a few that I fought for, and I wouldn't say fought as in I was fighting with [an artist] It was that I really wanted it, and then I wrote a note for Melyssa Hardwick, our music supervisor, [who] would make calls on my behalf and really try for it. And for “Oh! Darling,” in that scene there was supposed to be no dialogue in it. So I was playing music for Sean [Kaufman] and Rain [Spencer] in the scene just to vibe to and to set the scene, but it wasn't meant to be... It was going to be a musical moment that wasn't going to be that song.
[Then] their reunion felt really joyous to me, which didn't really fit in with where our other characters were. So I didn't want it to be in the montage, I wanted it to be a separate scene. But when we shot it, I had played, “Oh! Darling,” and so it's very obvious to me the way that Sean's dancing, and it would be very hard to put something else there, just from the way he's moving to the music. So I was really nervous whether or not we would get that from The Beatles. They said yes. I was really excited. It's a huge honor.
JH: I love the character of Taylor, and so getting to see more of her world and where she comes from was important to me. I think that we got to understand her a little bit better and why she is so protective of Belly, and we see how deeply she loves people. But I think for Steven, he wanted that kind of friendship from her in a way that she'd always been in a romantic place with him. And then also had fears of being heartbroken by him or rejected by him.
So I think she has those issues around romantic love, and it causes her to be more protective and defensive, and she isn't the way that she is with Belly. Where I would say that her love for Belly is really unconditional, and you see throughout the whole show how important that friendship is to her and the way that she can be very jealous when Belly makes a new friend, because she really prizes that. That's why I love that scene so much, is that they can finally come together and he can be vulnerable with her, and she can be vulnerable with him, and then there's trust.
JH: Writing the movie has been actually joyful to me. So fun. I would say that I know that the fans want to see Belly and Conrad together as a couple, and I guess I could say that that's something I can promise to them, and it's partly why I'm doing it, is to be able to experience that with them in the present time.
JH: I think the fans were hoping that we had already shot it, but we haven't. And frankly, I'm glad that we haven't because I really want to see that maturity in the characters and not feel like it's immediately after. So that was important to me.
JH: I think that to me is a very human thing. He was being strong in the moment when he says, "You got to go to Paris, and I want you to have that." But I think it's perfectly relatable that deep down, he's not necessarily happy about it, but he wants it for her. So when they are going to get married and she decides not to go, then he kind of admits that … I think that you can see in [Belly's] eyes that brief flash of disappointment, and I think he's ashamed of that little weakness he had. But I think it does show growth to be able to recognize it and say it to somebody.
JH: Well, I think that she knows how much weight Susannah's words have held for her in a way. She knows how much Conrad loved his mom. It's all sort of bound up together. So it's kind of like, if she hadn't died, would we be here and would you want me so much? Because she knows how much Susannah loved her. And so in a way, is there something to that as well?
I think it's just her own insecurities too, because we as the audience can see how much he loves her and we can see that he has for a long time, even before he knew it. But she doesn't know that. She only has the information that she has, and she knows her feelings for him and that she's always loved him. But she had such an open heart with him, where she was standing in front of him openly offering her heart to him. Then a couple times really hurt her, like the first time after they almost kissed. She's saying she broke up with Cam, and he's like, "Why?" And she got over it, but I don't think you forget those hurts.
Then in season 2, when you see her with tears in her eyes, saying, "I thought we loved each other." And then he's looking right back at her and saying, "We did." But he's not saying “I do” in this moment. She's really young, and I think she's absorbing all that and then carrying that with her. So she's not sure. And she's scared. She knows too that if they go down that road, there's no turning back. And it's scary because you can mess up all over again. I think that's the hardest part of growing up is realizing that you're going to continue to make mistakes … she really doesn't want to hurt other people. So it's a lot to say yes. I think it's a huge act of bravery for her to go after him and say, "I choose you." And know that that means it's going to hurt somebody and it's going to hurt Jere, potentially going to hurt herself and the family, but she does it because she really does love him and she's willing to take the risk.
JH: I think the fans can be really hard on women in general. I'm not the first to say it, but I think that in the era of prestige television, you see these complicated heroes, the anti-heroes like a Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and you see them literally murdering people or beating up women, but people really love those characters. But then you see them being really harsh on Carmella [Soprano] or Betty [Draper] for not being a good mom. I think we as a society maybe judge women harsher and are quicker to want to forgive the male characters. And I think it's totally great to forgive Conrad, but I also think people should be forgiving Belly as well.
