Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and Netflix’s To All The Boys are both adaptations of YA book trilogies by Jenny Han, and each is about a teenage girl experiencing romantic love for the first time, but one is better than the other. The To All the Boys film franchise concluded in 2021 with the second sequel, To All the Boys: Always and Forever, which saw its protagonist Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and love interest Peter (Noah Centineo) getting ready to leave for college. The Summer I Turned Pretty season 1, released in June 2022, depicts the events of Han’s book of the same name, adapting the first part of its trilogy.
The Summer I Turned Pretty season 1 follows high schooler Belly’s (Lola Tung) during her summer vacation, which she considers to be the best time of year. She always spends the season with her mother, Laurel (Jackie Chung), and brother, Steven (Sean Kaufman), at her mother’s friend Susannah’s (Rachel Blanchard) summer home in Cousins Beach. Belly’s favorite part of the yearly tradition has always been her time spent with Susannah’s sons, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and Conrad (Christopher Briney), the latter on whom Belly has had a crush for years. But with her believing that Conrad doesn’t reciprocate her feelings, Belly decides to take part in a debutante ball, which leads her to new friends and romantic interests.
While similarly focusing on shy teenage girls whose romantic fantasies aren’t acted upon, the comparisons between the adaptations of The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All The Boys stop there. The first installment of the latter, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, always has Lara Jean and Peter as the main couple, while Belly has multiple potential love interests in The Summer I Turned Pretty season 1. Also, the To All The Boys movie series is concentrated on Lara Jean and Peter's love story and their character development, making its story more contained and therefore ultimately the better Han adaptation of the two.
To All The Boys shows how Lara Jean and Peter’s relationship changes through the years and depicts how they both have to work toward the goal of being together and staying together, despite their interests sometimes bringing them physically apart. In The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly’s potentially romantic relationships with Cam (David Iacono) and Jeremiah are often overshadowed by her overpowering feelings for Conrad, but no bond is properly developed between Belly and any of the three boys in season 1, despite her making a choice of one of them in The Summer I Turned Pretty’s ending. While that decision is hinted at throughout the seven episodes of the show's first season, the characters never seem to work toward this outcome.
In addition to character development, To All The Boys manages to use familiar romantic comedy tropes without necessarily having them turn into clichés. Meanwhile, by focusing on a love triangle where two of those involved are brothers, The Summer I Turned Pretty season 1 relies a lot on one of the oldest tropes in the romance genre. But instead of building upon it, the show treats one of the bonds as narratively less important than the other.
To All The Boys’ references to rom-coms and their tropes might produce some cheesy moments, but Netflix's movie trilogy is always well-paced and its story never feels prolonged. The Summer I Turned Pretty season 1’s odd pacing could be counteracted by the show’s on-point pop culture references and astounding soundtrack, but when comparing other parts of the stories and their romantic focus, To All The Boys ends up working better than The Summer I Turned Pretty.