Shows Like
15 Shows Like The Summer I Turned Pretty — Love Triangles, Sunsets, and Teen Heartbreak
If The Summer I Turned Pretty wrecked you, these shows deliver the same intoxicating mix of summer romance, love triangles, and coming-of-age longing. Ranked and explained.
15 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
Section 1
What Makes The Summer I Turned Pretty So Addictive
It's not just the love triangle. It's the **specific ache of summers that feel infinite but aren't** — the beach house that exists outside real life, the version of yourself you only get to be for those few weeks, and the boys who represent entirely different futures. Jenny Han understands that summer isn't just a setting; it's an emotional state. These shows get that too. [Use our tool: Shows Like The Summer I Turned Pretty](/shows/similar/the-summer-i-turned-pretty) — algorithmically matched
Section 2
The Closest Matches
01
Outer Banks
2020–present
★7.6IMDb
Working-class teenagers on the Outer Banks of North Carolina stumble onto a clue about a missing shipwreck and $400 million in gold. The boy leading the hunt falls for the daughter of the man who may have buried it. Every adult on the island wants the treasure found or wants it buried, and the kids keep ending up in the crossfire. Same coastal setting, same class-divide romance, same heightened summer energy — just with gunfire added.
Why it matters
The OBX setting does the same work Cousins Beach does — it's a world with its own rules, detached from real life, where everything feels heightened. The love triangle in later seasons delivers all the same anguish.
02
Heartbreak High
2022–present
★8.0IMDb
Someone at Hartley High has drawn a map on the school wall showing who's hooked up with whom, and everyone is now a subject of it. The students have to navigate the fallout — the humiliation, the unwanted attention, the truths it exposed — while also just trying to get through school with some dignity intact. Sharper, more diverse, and more explicit than TSITP, but the same commitment to treating teenage emotion as real rather than something to be outgrown.
Why it matters
Same emotional territory — longing, rejection, the terror of wanting something you might not get — handled with more directness than most American teen shows allow.
03
Never Have I Ever
2020–2023
★7.9IMDb
Devi's dad died at one of her school events, she was briefly paralyzed from grief, and now she's determined to become popular and get a boyfriend by any means necessary. She ends up pursuing two boys at the same time — the gorgeous popular one and the academic rival she can't stop fighting with — and makes everyone around her progressively more miserable. The love triangle is the whole show, and it's handled with more nuance than you'd expect. The Paxton vs. Ben debate is as real a fandom divide as Conrad vs. Jeremiah.
Why it matters
Same love-triangle DNA as TSITP, with cultural identity and family grief making it more textured than most teen romances.
04
Ginny and Georgia
2021–present
★7.8IMDb
Georgia Miller moves her two kids to a charming small New England town for a fresh start — her version of a fresh start involves burying some things that need to stay buried. Her daughter Ginny is dealing with the love triangle, the identity questions, and the feeling of never quite fitting, while Georgia's past keeps closing in. The show earned comparisons to Gilmore Girls but has sharper edges and a genuinely dark undercurrent.
Why it matters
Same emotional register as TSITP, same will-they-won't-they energy, but with a mother-daughter dynamic that adds real weight. Season 2 hits the love-triangle beats hard.
Section 3
The Summer Romance Shows
05
Sweet Magnolias
2020–present
★7.7IMDb
Three lifelong best friends in a small South Carolina town are all rebuilding their lives at the same time — a messy divorce, a career pivot, a restaurant they're betting everything on — while new love interests and old ones keep complicating everything. Warmer and softer than TSITP, more about adult women rediscovering what they want, but the small-town romance formula and the deep friendship at the center scratch the same itch.
06
Virgin River
2019–present
★7.4IMDb
A nurse practitioner from Los Angeles takes a job in a remote Northern California town to get away from a grief she can't name, and finds the town isn't the quiet escape she was hoping for — a troubled bar owner, everyone having secrets, and a community that gets inside her defenses before she notices. Six seasons of will-they-won't-they, small-town warmth, and secrets that unravel slowly. Pure comfort television that rewards patience.
07
One Day
2024
★7.5IMDb
Emma and Dexter spend one night together on the last day of university — and the show checks in on them every year, on that same date, for the next twenty years. They're sometimes together, sometimes not, sometimes happy, sometimes wrecked. The show is about two people who clearly belong together and keep finding ways to almost miss it. Anne Hathaway's performance in the final episodes makes the emotional mathematics of twenty years land all at once.
Section 4
The Coming-of-Age Shows
08
Mismatched
2020–present
★7.4IMDb
Dimple wants to be a developer and has no interest in romance. Rishi believes in soulmates and arranged marriage and has fallen for her based on a photo. Their parents have secretly set them up at a summer coding camp in Jaipur. She's furious. He's undeterred. The show is an Indian take on the nerdy-girl-meets-charming-boy trope, with genuinely smart writing about what young Indian women actually want versus what their families expect.
09
Firefly Lane
2021–2023
★7.6IMDb
Tully and Kate become best friends in the 1970s when Tully moves in across the road — the charismatic one and the overlooked one, inseparable for thirty years. The show jumps between their teenage years, their twenties, and their adult lives, showing how one friendship shapes everything else. Less about romance than TSITP and more about the kind of bond you carry everywhere, but the emotional nostalgia and the yearning for who you used to be hit many of the same notes.
Section 5
The Classics That Defined the Genre
10
Dawson's Creek
1998–2003
★6.9IMDb
Joey Potter has been best friends with Dawson Leery her whole life, and now they both have feelings — but so does Pacey Witter, who is funnier and more honest than Dawson and can't quite hide that he sees her better. Set in a small New England waterfront town. The Dawson-vs.-Pacey rivalry for Joey is the direct template TSITP draws from. The Pacey-Joey resolution is one of the most satisfying in teen TV, and it holds up better than you'd expect.
11
The O.C.
2003–2007
★7.7IMDb
A kid from Chino with a criminal record gets taken in by a wealthy Newport Beach family and dropped into a world of million-dollar homes, sailing, and a social hierarchy he doesn't understand. He falls for the troubled rich girl next door. Her boyfriend hates him on sight. The lawyer's son who befriends him is obsessed with comic books and can't get a date. Season 1 is still some of the best teen television ever made.
12
One Tree Hill
2003–2012
★7.7IMDb
Lucas Scott lives in a trailer with his single mom and plays basketball on outdoor courts. His half-brother Nathan is the captain of the school team, the most popular guy in town, and has never acknowledged him publicly. Their father chose Nathan's family and ignored Lucas his whole life. Then their coach puts Lucas on the team, and everything explodes. Nine seasons of romantic drama and the kind of intense adolescent emotion that feels operatic from the outside but completely real from the inside.
Section 6
The New Additions Worth Knowing
13
Along for the Ride
2022
★6.4IMDb
Auden has spent her whole life being serious — good grades, no parties, no drama. Her last summer before college she ends up in her dad's beach town, wandering at night because she can't sleep, and meets a boy who also can't sleep. He starts taking her back to all the things she skipped — riding bikes, eating funnel cake, being a teenager. This is a film, not a series, but if you're reading this list you need to watch it. It has TSITP's exact emotional DNA: coastal summer setting, a girl learning to want things, a boy who pays attention. Based on Sarah Dessen's novel.
14
Cruel Summer
2021–present
★7.4IMDb
The most popular girl in a small Texas town goes missing in the summer of 1993. The same summer, a quieter, plainer girl starts showing up in her social circle — and by the following summer is living the missing girl's life. The third summer is the trial. Three parallel timelines, the same day in three different years, unspooling a mystery about identity and how badly we can misread the people we think we know. The 90s setting adds a layer of wistful nostalgia over something genuinely dark.
15
Tiny Beautiful Things
2023
★7.8IMDb
Clare is in her late thirties, her marriage is fraying, and she's avoiding everything. She becomes the anonymous advice columnist "Dear Sugar" almost by accident, and finds that writing honest answers to strangers' questions about love and loss forces her to look at her own life — including her younger self, who made a series of spectacular mistakes. The show jumps between her present and her past, with both versions of her sharing scenes. Less thriller than TSITP, more emotional archaeology — but past choices haunting the present is exactly the same territory. Based on Cheryl Strayed's real column and memoir.
Section 7
Quick Match Guide
| Want... | Watch | |---------|-------| | Same coastal summer energy | Outer Banks | | Same love triangle, less drama | Never Have I Ever | | More grown-up, still romantic | One Day | | Classic that started it all | Dawson's Creek or The O.C. | | Indian teen romance | Mismatched | | Female friendship + nostalgia | Firefly Lane | | Mystery twist on the formula | Cruel Summer | | Short film version | Along for the Ride |
Section 8
Want More?
- [Full list: Shows Like The Summer I Turned Pretty](/shows/similar/the-summer-i-turned-pretty) — 20+ algorithmic matches - [Teen romance shows](/shows/mood/teen-romance) — love stories for young hearts - [Coming-of-age shows](/shows/mood/coming-of-age) — growing pains on screen - [Summer shows](/shows/mood/summer) — sun, sand, and emotional chaos - [What show should I watch?](/shows/discover) — random recommendation
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