Belly’s Summer Just Got WILDER: A Heart-Shattering Twist Awaits in Cousins Beach! 💔🌊
Close your eyes and picture it: Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah, tangled in a love triangle that’s burned hotter than a July bonfire, now standing at a crossroads that could torch their futures forever. The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 4 trailer just dropped, and it’s serving heartbreak, secrets, and a mysterious stranger who’s about to flip Cousins Beach upside down. Will Belly’s heart finally choose? Or will a shocking revelation rewrite their destinies? This summer’s not just pretty—it’s downright unforgettable.
(Brace for tears, gasps, and all the feels that hit like a rogue wave.) Who’s Team Conrad, Team Jeremiah, or Team Chaos? Spill your hot takes below and click for the teaser that’s got us ALL screaming! 👇✨
The golden haze of Cousins Beach has always been more than a backdrop for The Summer I Turned Pretty—it’s a living, breathing pulse of nostalgia, heartbreak, and first loves that refuse to fade. Just days after the emotional tidal wave of Season 3’s finale on September 17, Prime Video unleashed a 1:45 teaser for Season 4 on September 20, signaling that Isabel “Belly” Conklin’s journey is far from over. The tagline—“This summer will never be the same”—sets the stage for a seismic shift, with Belly, Conrad Fisher, and Jeremiah Fisher caught in a storm of new faces, buried truths, and a love triangle that’s evolved from teenage longing into a raw, adult reckoning. As the trailer’s haunting cover of Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” swells, fans are already drowning in speculation: Is this the summer that breaks them all, or binds them forever?
Based on Jenny Han’s bestselling trilogy—The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009), It’s Not Summer Without You (2010), and We’ll Always Have Summer (2011)—the Prime Video series has spun a frothy beach read into a cultural juggernaut since its 2022 debut. With 25 million viewers for Season 3’s premiere week alone, the show dominates among women aged 18-34, fueled by Swift-soaked montages and a love triangle that’s sparked social media wars fiercer than a nor’easter. Season 3, which stretched beyond Han’s books with an 11-episode arc, saw Belly at 20, navigating her engagement to Jeremiah while grappling with Conrad’s gravitational pull during a soul-searching Parisian detour. The finale’s flash-forward—a tear-streaked Belly and Conrad, hands clasped on the Cousins porch years later—seemed to seal their endgame, leaving Jeremiah loyalists reeling and hashtags trending with millions of mentions.
Yet the Season 4 teaser, unveiled during a Prime Video Instagram Live with Han and showrunner Sarah Kucserka, suggests closure was a mirage. Picking up six months after the finale, the story thrusts Belly into her post-college life as a fledgling journalist in Boston, while Conrad, now a medical student, and Jeremiah, chasing a startup dream in California, orbit her from afar. The trailer opens on a deceptively serene note: Belly, windswept in a knit sweater, biking through Cousins’ dunes for a summer reunion at the beach house, now under threat of being sold. “Some places hold your heart hostage,” she narrates, her voice cracking as she flips through a scrapbook of Polaroids—snapshots of bonfires, stolen kisses, and Susannah’s radiant smile.
The calm shatters fast. Enter Elise Bauman as Lila, a sharp-tongued real estate agent with a cryptic connection to the Fisher family, whose arrival to appraise the house unearths a secret tied to Susannah’s will. “You don’t sell a legacy without a fight,” Laurel snaps in one clip, her eyes blazing as she confronts Lila at the kitchen table. Meanwhile, Conrad’s late-night study sessions are interrupted by a text from Belly—“I found something. Meet me at the lighthouse”—hinting at a discovery that could rewrite their history. Jeremiah, sporting a scruffier look and a tech-bro hoodie, crashes the reunion with a bombshell of his own: a business deal that could keep the beach house intact but drag him back into Belly’s orbit. “I’m not here to lose you again,” he tells her in a rain-soaked boardwalk showdown, his voice raw over crashing waves.
The trailer’s gut-punch comes in flashes of chaos: a car skidding off a coastal road, a hospital waiting room where Steven grips Taylor’s hand, and a stranger’s voice whispering, “You can’t trust what Susannah left behind.” A fleeting shot of Belly clutching an old letter, tears streaming, suggests a betrayal buried in the Fisher family’s past—perhaps tied to the late matriarch’s hidden affair teased in Season 3’s Paris flashbacks. “Hearts will break, secrets will be revealed,” the teaser promises, and fans are already dissecting every frame. Social media posts screamed: “If Lila’s a Fisher cousin messing with Belly’s head, I’m DONE.” Another speculated the letter unveils a half-sibling, racking up thousands of engagements in hours.
This pivot to Season 4 wasn’t always the plan. Han and Kucserka insisted as recently as March that Season 3 was the trilogy’s capstone, faithful to the books’ epilogue where Belly and Conrad marry. “We gave them their porch moment,” Han told a trade publication post-finale, referencing the iconic scene. But fan fervor—petitions hit 75,000 signatures by September 18—combined with Prime Video’s hunger for its top-performing original nudged a renewal. Announced quietly in August, Season 4’s 10-episode order, set to film in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Boston starting November 2025, leans into uncharted territory. “The books ended, but life doesn’t,” Kucserka teased on a morning talk show. “Belly’s 22 now, chasing dreams and ghosts. The stakes are grown-up.”
The cast, a tight-knit crew since their 2021 table read, is all in. Tung, now 22, called the renewal “a love letter to fans” on Instagram, sharing a selfie with Briney and Casalegno in matching Cousins Beach hoodies. Briney, whose Conrad has evolved from moody poet to grounded healer, hinted at a “darker” arc: “Conrad’s fighting his own demons this time—not just Belly’s heart,” he told a magazine during a September 19 junket. Casalegno, meanwhile, leaned into Jeremiah’s reinvention, posting a cryptic surfboard snap with “Jere’s not the kid brother anymore.” Off-screen, the trio’s bond—forged over late-night script debates and Swift karaoke—grounds the drama. Tung admitted to a fashion outlet that filming the Season 3 finale left her “sobbing for real” as she channeled Belly’s choice to prioritize herself.
Production tales add texture to the hype. Season 4’s shoot will trade Paris’s romantic glow for Boston’s gritty charm, with a rumored flashback to Susannah’s college years at Tufts, potentially featuring a younger Laurel (recast with Sophia Ali for retro scenes). Wilmington’s beaches will double as Cousins again, though a hurricane scare during Season 3’s shoot had crew scrambling to protect sets. The budget, bumped to $8 million per episode, fuels practical effects like a climactic regatta sequence teased in the trailer, where Belly and Conrad crew a sailboat in a storm—symbolism not lost on fans. “That boat’s their whole vibe: sinking or sailing,” one online commenter quipped, their post upvoted thousands of times.
Han’s influence, rooted in her Korean-American lens, keeps the show’s soul intact. Belly’s heritage, woven subtly through family recipes and Laurel’s tough-love wisdom, grounds the melodrama, while Susannah’s ghost—via letters and flashbacks—haunts every frame. The soundtrack, a Swiftie’s dream, remains a weapon: Season 3’s “How Did It End?” needle drop drove millions of music streams, and Season 4’s “Evermore” cover by Maggie Rogers is already climbing charts. Critics, giving Season 3 an 83% approval rating, praise the show’s knack for balancing soap with substance, though some online voices gripe about “stretching the triangle too thin.” A viral post read: “If Belly picks NEITHER, I’m rioting, but props for keeping us hooked.”
The teaser’s deepest cut lies in its new faces. Bauman’s Lila, described in casting calls as “charismatic but guarded,” stirs suspicion with her too-perfect smile and a locket mirroring Susannah’s. Another addition, Mateo Luna as a Boston editor mentoring Belly, hints at a rival love interest—or a red herring. “He’s trouble, but the good kind,” Tung teased online, sparking thousands of shares. Steven and Taylor, now navigating long-distance with him in New York, get their own arc: a clip of Taylor tossing a ring box into the ocean screams trouble in paradise.
With a tentative June 2026 premiere, Season 4 aims to bridge the trilogy’s nostalgia with a bolder, post-grad vibe. Prime Video’s bet—backed by 100 million total streams across three seasons—banks on the show’s grip on younger viewers’ hearts. Han, juggling a related franchise reboot, called Season 4 “Belly’s graduation into womanhood” in a streaming platform interview, hinting at a potential series endgame unless ratings demand a fifth. “We’re not milking it,” she insisted. “Every summer has to earn its place.”
As the teaser fades on Belly staring at the ocean, a letter clutched like a lifeline, The Summer I Turned Pretty doubles down on its promise: Love doesn’t just break hearts—it rewrites them. Fans, brace for a season that’s less about picking teams and more about picking up pieces. In Cousins Beach, the tide always turns.
