New Taylor Swift Songs Can’t Revive ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’
It’s no spoiler to say that, over the course of The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2, there are a whopping nine different Taylor Swift needle drops. (If you were looking to be surprised, don’t shoot the messenger—creator Jenny Han revealed this in a teaser for the show.) There are more T. Swift songs in the Prime Video show’s sophomore season than there are episodes.
Since it premiered last year, The Summer I Turned Pretty has become the one-stop-shop for previews of Swift’s new rerecordings. Last season, Swift premiered “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” in the show, while both “Back to December (Taylor’s Version)” and a new take on Folklore’s “August” are featured in trailers for this season. But does the show itself actually live up to the sweeping, life-altering romance Swift muses about in her chart-topping songs? The first season certainly did. The second, not so much.
Han, who wrote the original series of novels and created the streaming adaptation, has become a rom-com superstar. Last summer, we called her the “Gen-Z Nancy Meyers.” She has since created XO, Kitty on Netflix, a spinoff series of the fluffy and delightful To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before that was nearly as good as its predecessor. Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty books were a slower, more dramatic trilogy than TATBILB, which certainly showed in its fizzy, slow-burn first season. Unfortunately, though, the second season has moved away from the splendid Cousins Beach and, in turn, wilts like a flower. The show has such a strong potential to bloom into something so beautiful, but it lacks the proper sunlight to do so.