7 Shows Like The Summer I Turned Pretty

This article contains discussions of abuse and mental health.

Based on Jenny Han's novel series of the same name, "The Summer I Turned Pretty" premiered in Amazon Prime Video in 2022 and became an instant hit for the young-adult crowd and grownups reminiscing about their golden days alike, and it's easy to see why: it's a sweet, heartwarming, and deeply emotional show about a young girl growing up and falling in love for the first time. 

The series — which was also created by Han herself — focuses on Isabel "Belly" Conklin (Lola Tung), who is very nearly sixteen at the beginning of the story, and her summer vacation at Cousins Beach where she's reunited with childhood friends and brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno). Because the Conklin family always stays with the Fishers, Belly is constantly with Conrad and Jeremiah, which gets complicated; she's always had a crush on Conrad, but she ends up developing feelings for Jeremiah too. Naturally, because Belly is older, they both notice her ... creating a full-blown love triangle.

There are two seasons of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" on Amazon Prime — with a third coming in 2025 — but while you wait for it to return, what are some shows with similar vibes you can enjoy? From primetime teen soap operas to other streaming shows about girls growing up and finding themselves, here are seven shows to check out if you love "The Summer I Turned Pretty."

Released shortly before "The Summer I Turned Pretty," the Netflix original series "Ginny & Georgia" tells the story of the titular mother and daughter Ginny (Antonia Gentry) and Georgia (Brianne Howey) who move to the small town of Wellsbury, Massachusetts and immediately cause a stir. (Ginny also has a younger brother Austin, played by Diesel La Torraca; apparently he's not vital enough to get his name into the title.) Why exactly do they cause a stir? Well, Georgia is only 30 when the series begins and her eldest child Ginny is 15, which means that everyone in the town ends up gossiping. Georgia pretty quickly gets a job at the mayor's office, while Ginny has some trouble fitting at her new school; eventually, they become part of the town, and Georgia even gets married to its mayor Paul Randolph (Scott Porter).

Make no mistake — "Ginny & Georgia" is darker than you might think. The series features a ton of flashbacks to Georgia's troubling past — where she faced abuse at the hands of Ginny's father — and Ginny struggles with some very serious mental health issues. Overall, the show does a solid job of marrying some of its very serious issues with humor and heightened situations, never making light of any of the traumatic lived experiences of either Georgia or Ginny, and like Belly, Ginny is a captivating teen who has to overcome personal insecurities to grow up and discover who she really is. Again, the series is available to watch on Netflix.

Fans of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" and "Ginny & Georgia" are basically required to go back and watch "Gilmore Girls" if they haven't done so already. Set in the sleepy fictional town of Stars Hollow (ostensibly in Connecticut), the series created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino centers around young mother Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her teenage daughter Lorelai "Rory" Gilmore (Alexis Bledel, then a newcomer to the industry). The show kicks off as Rory gets accepted to a prestigious private school, Chilton, but Lorelai, who runs a local inn, can't afford the tuition on her own; as a result, she has to turn to her estranged, wealthy parents Emily (Kelly Bishop) and Richard Gilmore (the late Edward Hermann) for help. They agree to pay for Chilton on one condition: that Lorelai and Rory visit their house every week for "Friday night dinner," bringing the elder Gilmores back into the mix as they bond with their granddaughter and rekindle their relationship with Lorelai.

Throughout seven seasons — and a 2016 revival "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life," which brings the show's beloved characters back for another round — audiences follow Lorelai and Rory as they navigate life, love, and for Rory, both high school and college. From Lorelai opening her own inn to Rory getting into Yale University to the mother and daughter's respective romantic woes, "Gilmore Girls" will make you laugh and tug at your heartstrings ... and both the original series and the revival are on Netflix.

In 2020, showrunner Mindy Kaling — known for writing and starring on "The Office" as well as her own sitcom "The Mindy Project" — introduced the world to Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, the incredibly charming lead actress she handpicked to play Devi Vishwakumar on her series "Never Have I Ever." At the beginning of the series, Devi is still grieving the unexpected and sudden death of her father Mohan (played in flashbacks by Sendhil Ramamurthy), struggling to get along with her mother, successful dermatologist Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan), and beginning her sophomore year of high school. Determined to be different than she was as a deeply troubled and grief-stricken freshman — and keep her grades good enough to get into her dream school, Princeton University — Devi and her best friends Eleanor Wong (Ramona Young) and Fabiola Torres (Lee Rodriguez) decide that everything will be better in tenth grade.

The show ran for four seasons, spanning Devi's entire high school experience — and, obviously, her love triangle with school hottie Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnett) and her academic rival Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison) — but the great things about "Never Have I Ever" really come from the delightfully weird little touches added by Kaling. Niecy Nash plays Devi's therapist (and she's incredible), and the series is also narrated by tennis John McEnroe as Devi's interior voice. (In episodes that focus on other characters like Ben and Paxton, Andy Samberg and Gigi Hadid provide voice-overs.) "Never Have I Ever" is a Netflix original, so queue it up next time you want to laugh and cry in equal measure — you won't regret following Devi through her high school journey.

Another Mindy Kaling original — albeit with an extremely blunt title this time — "The Sex Lives of College Girls" features girls slightly older than Belly from "The Summer I Turned Pretty," but fans of that show will still absolutely love the leading ladies on this college comedy. When Kimberly Finkle (Pauline Chalamet, Timothée's older sister), Bela Malhotra (Amrit Kaur), Leighton Murray (Renée Rapp), and Whitney Chase (Alyah Chanelle Scott) end up rooming together at the fictional Essex College, they overcome their various personal differences and end up bonding as they explore their respective sexualities on campus. In Season 1, one of the most affecting storylines involves Leighton coming out to Kimberly after her first real girlfriend — "Grey's Anatomy's" Midori Francis — breaks her heart, and in Season 2, the entire suite cheers Leighton on as she meets a different girl every night.

"The Sex Lives of College Girls" isn't just about their sex lives, though. Kimberly struggles as a student at Essex on scholarship and finds herself in a dire situation when she gets into trouble and her scholarship is revoked. Whitney, a star athlete, has an affair with her (married) assistant soccer coach in Season 1 and ends up meeting a surprising new guy in her biochemistry class despite being in a happy relationship (not with the coach). Bela is desperate to earn a spot at Essex's comedy magazine The Catullan, but realizes the journey might cost her more than she'd initially hoped. "The Sex Lives of College Girls" is funny, earnest, and just racy enough — and it's available to stream on Max.

"Outer Banks" is definitely way more heightened than "The Summer I Turned Pretty," but if you like watching teenagers — or 20-somethings playing teenagers, at least — behave badly in beautiful locales, then you'll definitely want to check this one out. Within the world of "Outer Banks," there's a huge social divide in the titular setting located in North Carolina; the locals who live at the beach town all year round and don't have as much money are known as the "Pogues," while the rich people who only spend time there during the warmer months are referred to as the "Kooks." With that said, "Outer Banks" has a more specific focus on a group of eight Pogue teens who live in a specific area of the beach town called "The Cut" and all the scrapes they get into as they try and track down their leader John B. Routledge's (Chase Stokes) missing father. As an additional challenge, they often find themselves at odds with Kooks from a richer area known as Figure Eight.

John B. is flanked by his Kook girlfriend Sarah Cameron ("Glass Onion" standout Madelyn Cline), Kook-turned-Pogue Kiara "Kie" Carrera (Madison Bailey), John B.'s best friend JJ Maybank (Rudy Pankow), and the brainy Pogue Pope Heyward (Jonathan Daviss), and the standout cast and twisty plotlines on "Outer Banks" keep the story moving at a delightfully fast pace. If you're all finished with "The Summer I Turned Pretty" and need something a little edgier, "Outer Banks" is available exclusively on Netflix.

"The O.C." walked back in the early 2000s so that shows like "The Summer I Turned Pretty" could run. Created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage — who went on to also craft the next show on this list — "The O.C." introduces audiences to downtrodden teen Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie), who lands in jail after stealing a car in Chino with his brother. Kicked out of his house with nowhere to go, Ryan calls his public defender Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), who brings him home to his mansion in the wealthy California enclave of Orange County (hence the title). There, Ryan meets Sandy's imperious wife Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) – who eventually softens up and regards Ryan as her son — Sandy and Kirsten's quirky, nerdy son Seth (Adam Brody), and Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton), the beautiful but troubled girl who lives next door to the Cohen family.

Along with Rachel Bilson and Melinda Clarke — who play series standouts Summer Roberts and Julie Cooper, respectively — the cast of "The O.C." has incredible chemistry, and it's both delightful and stressful to watch the main quartet of Ryan, Marissa, Summer and Seth fall in and out of love, get into legitimately dangerous adventures (remember the Tijuana episode?!), and overcome insane obstacles like the time Julie, Marissa's mother, sleeps with her daughter's ex-boyfriend. "The O.C." sort of goes off the rails after a certain point in Season 3 — you'll know it when you see it — but still, it's available to stream on Hulu and Max, and it's a vital text for fans of teen shows.

Forget the weird 2021 reboot on Max — the original "Gossip Girl" is the only one worth watching. The series, which is based on Cecily von Ziegesar's book series of the same name — though it's radically different from its source material — stars Blake Lively as the beautiful and mysterious Serena van der Woodsen, who returns to Manhattan and her elite prep school after a year ... much to the dismay of her former best friend Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester). See, before Serena left town, she slept with Blair's handsome boyfriend Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford, now on "The Boys"), and the show's resident bad boy Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) knows all about it, which ends up driving a serious wedge between the two former besties; while she's trying to avoid her old crowd, she goes out on a date with Dan Humphrey ("You" star Penn Badgley), who is unpopular largely because he lives in a huge Brooklyn loft instead of a huge Upper East Side apartment.

"Gossip Girl" is, unlike "The Summer I Turned Pretty," not rooted in reality past a certain point. Characters die and come back to life; Blair gets engaged to a prince with a lisp; Serena announces that she "killed someone" (she didn't). Still, anyone who loves "The Summer I Turned Pretty" has to experience the absolutely insane twists and turns of "Gossip Girl" — or at least enjoy Meester's withering performance as queen bee Blair, who gets all of the best lines. Alongside the failed reboot, "Gossip Girl" is available to stream on Max.

If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.