Have you ever had two hot brothers fighting over you?

It is unfortunately not as about you as you think.

Aug 13, 2024

One of the most alienating transitions in my whole life to date has been the disheartening suspicion, denial, then realization that Summer, as an experience… kinda sucks. At least in NYC.

Summer is most respected by those who live by an academic calendar because it’s the year's long freedom. (It’s also when my birthday but that is another thing that also starts to feel iffy the older you get). Every summer, my family and I would wake up at dawn, drive an RV to Montauk, and camp on the beach for a week. There was no electricity or running water (just public bathrooms) but it was heaven. The night sky was filled with stars, shooting and stationary (mythical stuff to city kids). There was lobster, steamers, and so much corn on the cob. Beach. Mini golf. Ice cream. Bonfire. Beach. Repeat.

Don’t get me wrong — 15 hours of daily daylight is magnificent. But summer now means electricity bill anxiety and negotiating if I really need to leave the house when it’s 85+ degrees. June through August in the northern hemisphere is when the Earth exacts its revenge in UV lashings and humidity percentages that feel like walking around inside a mouth. (Yet my willingness to take the J to the A to the shuttle to Rockaway Beach remains absent.)

At the risk of hating too close to the sun, I find myself feeding upon any kind of idyllic summer-themed series in which teens do what teens do in the summer: swim, surf, kiss, get mad at their friends, make up with their friends, unravel a mystery, turn into mermaids, insert themselves in situations they didn’t think through, sneak out at night, learn life lessons — all in the span of a few weeks.

It’s not my experience, but I love a silly teen drama (lite) set in a hot climate, where a body of water is the main character. It makes me nostalgic for a time when the problems I had were not consequential problems at all but low-stakes yearnings, and I felt entitled to the future’s uncertainty as mine to define.

The O.C.

The O.C. started airing in 2003, and the characters were the same grade I was at the time (I think). That first season goes places — it’s 27 episodes of every drama subplot you can think of: felonious teens, orphans, rich family, poor family, troublesome sisters, secretly gay dads, substance abuse, adultery, arson, that one weird guy Oliver, people getting written into and out of the show, teen pregnancy, neighbors and dads getting married, and Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows. Who could forget the gripping use of Imogen Heap’s Mmmm whatcha sayyyyyy in the scene when Marissa shoots Ryan’s brother Trey? THIS was Television.

The Summer I Turned Pretty

Aside from the precious title, I binged this Amajon Prime series from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before writer Jenny Han. If I had this wasian love triangle story when I was a teen, I would probably have been more envious than I already was of Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang in Smallville. KK was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen when I was a teenager. Seeing someone who looked Asian in a romantic lead role rang some new bells in my head — we can be The Girl™ too! I may have felt a whisper of being seen before it was spoiled by my inelegant envy of racialized beauty ideals that allowed for diluted ethnicity to be seen as superior because everything we’ve been taught about beauty came from a white supremacist lens.

Of course, Tia Carrere in Wayne’s World 1 & 2 was always The Girl™, but in my teenage head, being her meant that your whole character appeal was being so hot as to not actually have to do anything but be desired and that that desire itself serves as a major driving plot point (ahh adolescent logic). Tia Carrere’s Cassandra was a bass-playing baddie whose appeal was her music-playing as well as her schwingable babeliness. (OK, mostly her babeliness, but the entire tension of the 2nd film revolves around her burgeoning career pushing Wayne out of the picture, so.)

The main tension in TSITP is that Belly is in love with two brothers she grew up with, spending every summer in the fictional New England coastal town of Cousins. She’s mostly in love with the older brother Conrad, but then Jeremiah reveals his feelings for her the summer she turns pretty (obviously), and then it’s a big ol’ mess. Prettiness will really stir the pot sometimes.

I appreciated how these teens seemed to handle these horny conundrums maturely — namely, they talked them through with kindness. Which from what I knew of teenagers when I was one, this is not a realistic portrayal at all. But someone had to carry the Dawson’s Creek “No teenagers talk like this” torch, I suppose.

Having two hot brothers who aren’t vampires compete for your love and affection is a situation I can identify with, beleeb it or not. They were my elementary school best friend’s cousins (fraternal twins!) and tbh I honestly think they were just so competitive that one was always after what the other wanted. Nothing happened. They lived a few towns over, which when you’re 12 or 13 is inaccessible. (And as boy-crazy as I was then, I was far too insecure for anything non-PG to occur.) But my tween ego was VALIDATED. The diary entries during that time? Incendiary!

Surviving Summer

Rebellious NYC teen Summer gets expelled from her last boarding school and is shipped off to Australia to live with her mother’s friend’s family in the small surfing town her mother grew up in. She develops an enemies-to-lovers thing with the son, up-and-coming surfer Ari, and becomes close friends with the surf team while shaking things up in the small beach town of Shorehaven.

It’s even better when the small town in question has accents and different societal expectations for young women

There’s something just so jarringly exhilarating about the juxtaposition of a thick Brooklyn accent with the Aussie lilt. Also, there are lots of slow-motion surfing montages, surfing competition tension, and a lot of will-they-won’t-they back-and-forth if you’re into that sorta thing.

I tried surfing twice in my life (once in Hawaii, once in Mexico) and it has shown me that surfing is so hard! As I am very bad at it, it’s very satisfying to watch as Summer trains so much just to eat shit time after time, as she becomes just OK enough to eek a win as a sub in a surf heat.

Season two has a petty girl-fight plotline but also a new hot baddy romantic subplot so it evens out (sorta).

H20: Just Add Water

OK, we’re still in Oz. If you don’t know H20 but you’re online, then you probably know “Nauuurrr Cleauuur, the condensation!” We, the internet, have gotten the best Noes thanks to H20.

TL;dr: three best friends swim to some mystical grotto in Mako Island on one particularly moony night and are turned into part-time mermaids. Whenever they touch water, they immediately go half-fish. This is very stressful for teenagers as teenagers are always getting damp. But they develop water-manipulation powers on account of the whole mermaid thing so that’s a pretty cool trade, I think.

I binged all three seasons of this show during the pandemic and it was a sunny balm for my indoor blues. It was a lot of smoothie shop visits, swimming with dolphins, and sleepovers where they black out all the windows every full moon, so they don’t go moon-mad if a single ray falls upon your skin (because mermaids are commanded by the moon). Really puts my problems into perspective.

Dive Club

OK, this is another Australian teen mystery, but this one has the hot guy from Heartbreak High in it (also a v good show, but not beach-adjacent). It seems like Aussie teen shows are either about teens getting into the water, or avoiding water as much as possible. Maybe the plethora of beach towns and teenagers in Australia just make for easy television? Lots of popular US teen shows make the teens too mature (like why were the Gossip Girls wearing strictly designer and always in some private Manhattan club where only minors went to be served alcohol? Why was the Riverdale crew operating a speakeasy? Unrelateable!)

This show is about teen friends who go diving together and one of them — the YouTuber — goes missing after a storm. The rest of the crew try to figure out how and why she went missing, unraveling centuries-old mysteries of the probably fictional island they live on. There are pirates, rumored descendants of the Russian princess Anastasia, a random Eastern European man who arrives to help a bunch of teenage girls solve a missing persons, and did I mention the hot guy from Heartbreak High?

The Wilds is like a Lord Of The Flies (feminine) retelling with a creepy and unfortunate girlboss subplot, where a group of teenage-college age girls is set to visit a rehab-coded wellness retreat. Instead their plane “crashes” on a remote island, and they must fend for themselves. But the crash was orchestrated by an extremely unethical researcher who is trying to determine once and for all if women are more likely to survive in the wild with their inherently collaborative (and less aggro/violent) nature. You get to know each of the girls and what brought them on the trip in the first place, and revel in their individual character arcs of how each one is so different but through life-threatening circumstances (and lots of social friction) they manage to work together to figure out what is going on. Season two, you get to see the other side of the experiment, in which a parallel event is orchestrated but with all boys.

Such a good show, such Drama™, and the ocean is the unfortunate captor as well as liberator of these groups of young people navigating their own identities and the trappings of their places in society. I am so annoyed they stopped after 2 seasons because it left on a cliffhanger! Amazon Prime what the heck!!

When I’m at home, sitting out an oppressively warm evening that brings no relief from a steaming hot day, my only wish is to ignore the passive-aggressive texts Con Edison sends about not using my AC during a heat wave in the expensive comfort of my home, reminiscing about the carefree beach-filled days of my adolescence, solving mysteries and getting entangled with the core group of hot 24-year-olds that have been my lifelong friends until a stranger comes to town… well, again, not my life story. But for 8-10 episodes I can brain drain into an alternate timeline where maybe it feels like it is?

YA TV is a nice break from having to parse “good” TV writing. Not saying it’s bad TV writing, but anything marketed towards young girls is generally deemed shlocky, so. I don’t want to watch TV – my source of hehe haha — and feel compelled to form “smart TV” thoughts about it. Not during the time of the year when the sun bullies me with its skin-searing proximity into staying in the home! (Some people have reality TV for this, but I prefer scripted fiction.)

I revel in feeling charmed, annoyed, and protective over these attractive 20-somethings playing teenagers having teenager problems in semi-extraordinary and not wholly believable circumstances. It is the closest thing I’ve felt resembling maternal instinct (or more selfishly probably, a form of reparenting of my own anxious teenage self).

If nothing else, it is very calming for me, seeing young people learning about themselves through the intricate maintenance of their social circles — something I skipped because my fear of confrontation when I was that age was far greater than my self-worth to stand up for myself or my willingness to tolerate awkward situations. Sometimes that part of me still lurks just below the surface, drifting upwards in the face of a kind of uncertainty I’d rather not claim. Luckily, my adult friendships feel like anchors more than tides. What they lack in drama, they make up for in literally everything. And most of them agree with me that beaches (at least NYC ones) are kind of yucky.