I am Team Conrad
- Michelle Bambawale
- Oct 17
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 18
I’m embarrassed to admit that, as an almost 60-year-old woman, I spent the summer of 2025 looking forward to Wednesdays to watch The Summer I Turned Pretty (TSITP), a coming-of-age love triangle set on the stunning beaches of Massachusetts. The show came complete with rich white lifestyles, trust funds, country clubs and beach houses.
I was not alone in my obsession. The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 reportedly reached 70 million viewers on Prime Video in its first 70 days, with a significant surge in the week following the finale.
Over the summer of 2025, peaking in early September, I was burning up with Conrad fever. I couldn’t sleep, worrying: Would Belly actually go through with marrying Jeremiah before even graduating college? I hadn’t read the books and didn’t want any spoilers. In spite of my commitment to Team Conrad I also did not participate in all the angsty online wars between Team Conrad and Team Jeremiah and the Belly hate. It was a searing summer. I waited, chewing my nails until the season finale and was swept away by the euphoria of the “Belly and Connie, baby!” moment. Infinity. Whatever.
Escape V/s Reality
In 2025, the real world seemed to be both imploding and exploding. In Goa and across India, the law-and-order situation had disintegrated, activists and protestors were being beaten and locked up, and trees continued to be cut.
Across the world, the climate crisis had escalated to a full-blown emergency. Indigenous communities were being wiped off the map, along with entire species of plants and animals.
Gaza was a warzone. Fascism was on the rise. Democracy was under attack. Women’s rights were being trampled. Algorithms controlled our thoughts and actions. Propaganda is ubiquitous, it is hard to differentiate between what is real and what is fake news. Artificial Intelligence is manipulating our everyday lives, taking over both art and human engagement.
Against this reality, TSIP was pure escapism. Sweet, young, joyful fluff: beaches, pools, surfing, partying. Since I’m being honest and laying my guilty pleasures bare, I rewatched the first and second seasons last week to catch up and continue wallowing in the longing of young love.
The plotline is a strange triangle: one girl, two brothers, all childhood friends. I was motion sick with her going back and forth between them. But TSITP was tightly written, cleverly cast, and beautifully made. The angles, slow-mo shots, close-ups, music, beach bods, surfboards — all dreamy. Pure television magic.
Background and Setting
Belly (Isabelle Conklin) is our main protagonist. In Season 1, she celebrates her 16th birthday “the summer I turned pretty." Season 3 ends with her turning 22 in Paris.
Her mother, Laurel Park (a Korean-American writer), is divorced from John Conklin, a history professor. They co-parent Belly and her older brother Steven. Laurel and Susannah Fisher (née Beck) have been best friends since college and have spent every summer together at Susannah’s beach house on Cousins, a fictional town on the Massachusetts coast. Susannah’s husband, Adam Fisher, is a rich, entitled finance bro. They have two drop dead gorgeous teenage sons Conrad and Jeremiah.
Jenny Han, the author and co-producer of the series, masterfully manipulated my emotions and magically recreated the characters from her books for the small screen. She even does a Hitchcock: a cameo in each season. Her Korean-American identity is stamped on the show, in the characters, food, and cultural touches.
Popular Plotlines That Worked for Me
Female friendships – the strength of womanhood.
Susannah and Laurel are a powerful testimony to long-term friendships from giddy teenage crushes to careers, child birth and parenting. They stay committed to each other in sickness and in health. One hilarious scene in Season 1 has them high on gummies, getting the munchies, and giggling as they raid the kitchen.
We also see Belly and her best friend Taylor as another testimony to female friendships.
Mother–daughter relationships.
The show explores the depth and breadth of a mother daughter relationship, how co-dependant we are, how our daughters need us and how much we need them, the constant push and pull. Belly calls Laurel in her darkest and drunkest moments. They argue, estrange, and reunite. Laurel doesn’t support Belly’s impulsive decision to marry Jeremiah, but she shows her love in ways only mothers can like gifting plane tickets to “give her wings.”
Cancer, death, loss and grief.
Not an elegant beach house, best friends and beautiful kids can protect you from cancer. Susannah’s illness and death rip through this charmed world, crashing in the painful finality of death. TSITP held a mirror to how friends, husbands, children and communities’ cope with this hideous disease and coming to terms with life after Susannah.
Property problems.
Not just in Goa or India but across the world families fight over who inherits, and the decisions to keep or sell childhood homes and memories.
Family feuds.
The fragility of family. The trauma of parenting teenagers, brothers fighting over a girl, sisters fighting over paternal love and property, cheating husbands.
Dances - the Deb Ball and Prom.
Every romantic television drama builds to a big dance. Do women really dream of shopping, sexy gowns and slow dances, or are we just told we should? The deb ball despite being a ridiculous country club extravagance, outdated, privileged and patriarchal got us to smile.
My man Conrad nailed the Deb Ball in Season 1 — he stepped up. But in Season 2, he disappointed at the prom: no corsage, no post-prom hotel plans.
The music.
Very Gen Z, lots of Taylor Swift, but it worked, even for me.
Key characters
Laurel, I identified with her for multiple reasons, we are women who followed the "get a degree, get a job, get married, have children early" script. We want our daughters to think about their choices, to take their time. I found myself screaming at my screen, “Belly, you are too young, don’t get married, finish college, get a job.” Since Laurel writes, I empathised with her procrastination, self-doubt, fear about the reviews and the importance of promoting your book.
Susannah was blonde, attractive, kind, with a million dollar smile that lights up her dreamy blue eyes, a talented painter, gardener and hostess, but even she can’t fight cancer. She was the heart of the show, she holds everyone together, stocking up on food, baking, arranging blue hydrangeas in every room, painting their portraits, taking annual photos of the four kids together. Susannah loves Belly as her own, and always wanted her for one of her boys. It is her house that presents the ideal summer backdrop. In season 2, her half-sister Julia calls her “a modern-day Daisy Buchanan.”
Belly is confused, competitive, crazy, loves volleyball and both Fisher brothers. Jeremiah is her best friend, but Conrad is the love of her life. You can feel her dilemma as she dithers.
In the season finale she is finding independence, speaking French, living on her own in a bright Paris loft, knows herself and the city and gets a grown up bob.
Taylor, my favorite character, was sassy, loyal, and vulnerable beneath her bravado. She calls Belly out and stands by her. Taylor has a complicated relationship with Steven and is often the parent to her single mother Lucinda.
Denise is a smart, badass, always sniggering at the finance bro, nepo baby order of things. I did call the Jeremiah - Denise romance early on, as in my grander plan, I wanted Steven to end up with Taylor and Belly with Conrad.
Steven: Good Asian cliché, the High School valedictorian, graduated early from Princeton, loves playing video games, is a geek, slick, a little too cocky. The whole Steven-Taylor relationship is explosive with constant fighting, cheating, literally a car crash.
Jeremiah is a golden retriever, lovable but clueless. Handsome, flirty, frat boy inclusive (he kisses both boys and girls), but emotionally selfish. Your heart breaks for him as he lived in his big brother’s shadow. Conrad was smarter (Brown, Stanford, med school), accomplished (football, surfing, playing the guitar), caring and thoughtful (cooking, baking, shopping, roof work). His relationship with his father is toxic, Adam does not help by continually comparing Jeremiah to Conrad.
Adam, has a difficult relationship with his wife Susannah and sons. He lives the elitist country club life and believes money and the right connections can buy you anything. To complete the cliché he cheated on Susannah with his secretary while she was going through chemo. Laurel is the only person who takes him on.
Conrad, moody, brooding, brilliant and beautiful. An early scene in season 1, has him sulking, smoking pot, sitting by the pool, getting into fights on the beach, making out with popular girls, not committing. Conrad did have his redeeming moments, he steps up to help Belly win the charity volleyball tournament, and danced with her at the Deb Ball when Jeremiah was grieving. In season 2, he took his big brotherly responsibility too seriously, trying to protect Jeremiah. In season 3, he is not honest about his love for Belly, never telling her how he feels, hiding out in California to avoid being around Belly and Jeremiah, believing he is giving them space. Over the last season in the Beach House, in every other shot, you catch him looking longingly at Belly with his smouldering eyes and quivering lips. I kept yelling, "tell her, tell her, now, before it's too late, she's going to marry your brother!" Only the night before the wedding when he overhears that Jeremiah cheated on Belly during Spring break does he finally confess that he has always loved her. His ill-timed declaration blows up the wedding, his relationship with Jeremiah, Belly, and both families.
Conrad can't get over Belly and in season 3 works on rebuilding her trust by writing letters, sending care parcels including her precious polar bear Junior Mint, that he won for her on the boardwalk arcade ring toss game, when she was twelve years old, and sour patch kids that she loves. In the season finale, he finally shows up in Paris unannounced to be with her on her birthday, setting the scene for them finally getting back together.
What Didn’t Work for Me
Season 3 dragged. It was excruciating. Why Paris? Why is Paris always the ultimate destination for self-discovery? In the books, Belly goes to Spain, why not stick to that? Or even better: Korea, to connect with her roots.
Algorithms, memes, reels and shorts
Once the algorithms figured out I was Team Conrad, there was no going back. My feed is an homage to leather-strap-watch Conrad, preppy-Conrad, wet-hair-Conrad, shirtless-Conrad, tuxedo-Conrad, grinning-Conrad, surfing-Conrad. Enough to keep me firmly on Team Conrad, at least until the movie comes out or another sweet, young, innocent love story helps me forget the world we live in.
All images taken from https://thesummeriturnedpretty.fandom.com/wiki/The_Summer_I_Turned_Pretty_Wiki
Ufff!! I now need the time to watch three seasons on a binge. and let my best up old heart flutter some 😈 thanks for this , Mich!! Enjoyed reading it so, so much!
Haha need to check if Bharat is dressing up like Conrad these days. Oh the lives of the rich and beautiful - always a pull. You've piqued my interest although I have very little patience to go through them but who knows, I may just join you and team Conrad.