There’s something about summer love that just excites the senses. Think puppy love, endless days and that heart-in-your-throat kind of uncertainty. Anyone who’s seen The Summer I Turned Pretty gets the drift. But when all is said and done, you’re hit with a truth bomb like Belly (Lola Tung): summer love can be as messy as it is captivating.
The final episode of the hit Amazon Prime Video series wrapped in the latter months of 2025, and it makes sense that fans of the show feel like they’ve lost a treasure. The shows on this list are pretty much cut from the same cloth. They promise you a good time with some romantic tension, but what they’re really about is the aftermath. They’re about how choosing to love a person changes your friendships, scrambles your entire family, and makes you question who you even are. The summer ends, but the drama it drums up? The less said about it, the better, so let’s write about it instead.
1. My Life With the Walter Boys (2023 – Present)
My Life With the Walter Boys follows Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez), whose life has just fallen apart. Her parents and only sister just died in a tragic car accident, and now she has to move to rural Colorado to live with her new legal guardians, the Walters. Unlike her relatively small family, the Walters have seven sons and a daughter, and Jackie’s just trying to figure out how to live again while she tries to fit into this wild, noisy family. The show is less about finding love and more about finding out where you fit in after your old world is gone.
Consider this one essentially TSITP 2.0, but arguably bigger and messier. Still, there are lots of similarities between the two shows. For example, in Season 1, Episode 10, “Happily Ever After,” Jackie chooses Alex (Ashby Gentry), the safer and more stable option. But she still ends up kissing Cole (Noah LaLonde), showing how unresolved her feelings really are and why the love triangle refuses to settle. Sound familiar? It’s Belly choosing Conrad (Christopher Briney) while still tied to Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), all over again. That cringey, awful feeling of wanting two people and knowing you’re about to hurt someone no matter what. The show doesn’t let her off the hook either, it digs into every grimey detail of how her wishy-washy heart causes real problems for everyone in that packed house.
2. The O.C. (2003 – 2007)
So a guy named Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) gets saved by Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), a rich lawyer, and then moves into the mansion he shares with his wife and son in Newport Beach. Sounds like a fairy tale, right? Wrong. It turns out the kids with the perfect pools and fancy cars are even more messed up than he is. The show’s about pretending your life is perfect when, in reality, everything beneath the surface is cracking.
Most fans enjoyed this series in large part due to the comic relief provided by Adam Brody’s Seth Cohen, and rightly so. But the core of the show is Ryan Atwood and Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton). They were “the couple”, and watching them implode due to family pressure, jealousy, and just plain bad luck, is brutal. Everything about their relationship echoes several themes from TSITP, especially how a summer fling (their meeting was totally a summer fling) gets crushed by the harsh realities of the real world.
3. Dawson’s Creek (1998 – 2003)
This is the grandfather of overthinking your feelings, and where it started for most of us. Two best friends, Dawson (James Van Der Beek) and Joey (Katie Holmes), think they’re destined to be together. Enter the overachieving best friend, Pacey (Joshua Jackson), who actually gets her. It’s a whole lot of talking about feelings on piers, in bedrooms, and in video stores. Seriously, they never stop talking.
The entire series builds to one key moment: Joey choosing Pacey in Season 3, Episode 23, “True Love.” It’s not just a choice between boys. It’s her choosing a new path for her life and blowing up the childhood fantasy she’s clung to for a long time. TSITP does this constantly with Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah. Once you make a choice like that, there’s no magical rewind button. Needless to say, your friend group is never the same again.
4. One Tree Hill (2006 – 2012)
The series follows two half-brothers, Lucas (Chad Michael Murray) and Nathan (James Lafferty), who start off hating each other for reasons tied largely to their father, Dan Scott (Paul Johansson). What’s more, they’re both into basketball, and eventually, the same girls. Their hometown of Tree Hill is small, so every fight, every hookup, every betrayal echoes for years. The show chronicles their lives from high school craziness to adult problems, and nobody gets to forget their past.
If you want to see what the long-term damage of a love triangle looks like, then this show is a must-watch. Watching Brooke Davis (Sophia Bush) love Lucas while knowing that part of him will always belong to Peyton Sawyer (Hilarie Burton) is the definition of heartbreak. She lets go at some point, but the show enables that pain to simmer for several seasons as you watch Brooke eventually build herself up, the scar of being second choice always there. It’s exactly the lingering hurt that Jeremiah deals with in TSITP.
5. Gilmore Girls (2000 – 2007)
Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) is a smart girl with a big plan: go to an Ivy League school, become a famous journalist, and have a perfect life. She lives with her cool mom, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), in the picture-perfect town of Stars Hollow, which seems like the ideal place to build on those dreams. Everything feels safe and cozy like a warm cup of coffee.
But then she goes and ruins things by having an affair with her married ex, Dean (Jared Padalecki). That choice goes beyond the realms of a simple “mistake.” Somehow, this one decision leaves a huge dent in her perfect-student identity. And it’s the show telling us that even the girls with the best plans can make terrible, messy choices for what feels like love. Like Belly, those choices start to change her identity long before she, or the audience, really sees it coming.
6. Outer Banks (2020 – Present)
On the surface, this one comes across as a chill beach show. But don’t be deceived, it’s a full-on treasure hunt adventure where the poor kids (the Pogues) are at war with the rich kids (the Kooks). There are storms, boat chases, and a lot of running from bad guys. Romance happens, but often in between life-or-death moments.
The love story between John B. (Chase Stokes), a Pogue, and Sarah (Madelyn Cline), a Kook, is the definition of choosing sides with a dash of Romeo and Juliet-ery. When Sarah decides to run away with John B., she’s essentially burning her entire old life, which includes her family, money, and safety, to ashes. It’s love as an all-or-nothing gamble, which is totally the energy Belly brings when she dives headfirst into the Fisher Brothers’ drama.
7. Surviving Summer (2022 – 2023)
Summer Torres (Sky Katz) is a troublemaker who gets sent to live with a family friend who runs a super strict surf school in Australia after one too many screw-ups. She thinks she’s just serving time, but the discipline of surfing and the tight-knit town start actually to change her. Who knew?
Summer’s walls are built sky-high. Watching her slowly let them down with Ari (Kai Lewins), the local surf star, is everything. It’s not that she turns soft, she just decides, bit by bit, to let someone see the real her. It’s a conscious, scary choice to be vulnerable. And just ust like Belly, it’s a risky choice she has to make to have any chance of growing up.
8. Friday Night Lights (2008 – 2011)
In the small town of Dillon, Texas, high school football is basically a way of life. As a result, the pressure on the players is immense. But if you take a beat and look past the football plays, you’ll see that the show’s really about the quiet, real-life struggles of the people in that town. It’s one of the most enjoyable and relatable TV shows of its time.
Just look at the relationship between Julie (Aimee Teegarden) and Matt (Zach Gilford). It’s sweet and genuine, but gets worn down with everyday stuff like her dad being the coach, his family problems, and the stress of college plans. Most onscreen relationships tend to end with a bang, this one doesn’t. It just… fizzles out because real life is too heavy. TSITP leans into this phenomenon all too well: it’s not just the big, dramatic moments, but the weight of family illness and expectations that strain Belly’s relationships.
9. Everwood (2002 – 2006)
A famous doctor moves his two moody kids to a tiny mountain town after his wife dies. He’s just trying to start over, but everyone is still quite sad and angry about the tragedy. It’s a slow, gentle show about people helping each other heal, even when they don’t want to.
This show is the king of “bad timing.” Amy (Emily VanCamp) and Ephram’s (Gregory Smith) whole story is them being a total mess for each other while they’re both seriously grieving other people. They can’t get it right because their hearts are still broken from the pain of losing the people they love. Belly’s story with Conrad, at least at the beginning, is exactly this. Trying to force a love story while dealing with a family tragedy is like building a house on a shaky foundation.
10. Gossip Girl (2007 – 2012)
The early 2000s were all about pleated skirts, expensive handbags, and attitude for days thanks to the inhabitants of the Upper East Side. Gossip Girl shines the spotlight on a group of teens with unlimited credit and even more drama. Their lives are a cycle of glamorous parties, brutal schemes, and hooking up with their best friend’s boyfriends. Yes, it’s over-the-top, but that’s the entire point.
At its core, this show is about choosing chaos. Serena and Dan’s relationship runs on a different kind of mess. He’s the Brooklyn outsider, she’s Upper East Side royalty, and their romance keeps collapsing under trust issues, class tension, and a big reveal that no one saw coming. Then there’s Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), who knows Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) is a disaster. He’s a liar, a playboy, and often breaks her heart with his shenanigans. And yet, she goes back to him every single time because the intense drama feels more real than anything calm and stable. It’s the darker cousin to TSITP’s truth: sometimes we pick what hurts us because the chaos is familiar.
So, if you’re stuck on the brother drama, My Life With the Walter Boys is undoubtedly the one you should watch. If you want more of that beachside vibe, watch The O.C., and if you want to watch the fallout from love triangles last for years, binge One Tree Hill.
