Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 3, Episodes 1-3.
While “The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 3 raises the stakes on the love triangle between Belly, Conrad and Jeremiah, creator Jenny Han said crafting the on-again, off-again relationship between Taylor and Steven was one of the hardest storylines to crack.
“That might have been one of the most challenging parts of writing the season, because there’s so many places they can go, and we did have that time gap,” Han told TheWrap of Taylor and Steven’s relationship ahead of the Season 3 premiere. “We wrote a lot of story that we never even see on screen, just so that we knew what the history was, and we knew where the fault lines were … in the relationship.”
Han first went outside the lines of her book trilogy of the same name in Season 1, when she included a romance between Belly’s childhood best friend, Taylor (Rain Spencer), and Belly’s brother, Steven (Sean Kaufman), which saw the pair kiss while Steven had been dating Shayla. By the end of Season 2, Taylor and Steven appeared to be pretty locked in as a couple.
“It’s a really rich story with a lot of backstory to it, even before the third season, because we knew that Taylor had a crush on Steven since they were little, and she was Belly’s best friend but she never told him or anybody,” Han said. “To me that’s always such juicy fodder for a relationship … the ‘she fell first, he fell harder’ — I think they kind of epitomize that.”
While Taylor and Steven seemed pretty solid at the end of Season 2, the opening scenes of Season 3 revealed that they had broken up by the time Taylor started her freshman year at Finch. Though Belly later catches a glimpse of them kissing. After a two-year time jump, the show picked up with Taylor and Belly finishing their junior year while Steven had already graduated Princeton early. Taylor and Steven’s relationship had just gotten more complicated, as both were cheating on their respective partners with each other — that is, until, Belly finds out.
Taylor and Steven’s trajectory is shifted by another new element from Han’s book: Steven’s car accident, which happens just after an argument with Taylor. The accident helps Taylor realize she’s ready to give their relationship a true shot, but, by the time she’s ready to tell Steven, he’s resolved to cut their relationship off.
Season 3 also expands the role of Taylor’s mother, Lucinda, which was one new element from the books Han had highlighted, saying, “it’ll be really fun for the viewers to see Taylor’s relationship with her mom.”
Lucinda intervenes in Taylor and Steven’s relationship in Episode 3, when she asks Steven to take a look at the books for her salon, which results in an upsetting call between the exes as Steven tells Taylor her mom’s business is in trouble. While Taylor tells Steven it was inappropriate for her mom to involve him in her business matters, the new storyline might open the door for Steven to help out Taylor and her mom down the line.
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 3 releases new episodes Wednesdays on Prime Video.
