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Amazon’s Prime Video revealed Monday that viewership for the first two episodes of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 3 was up 40% from the comparable Season 2 premiere. The two-part third season launch on July 16 drew 25 million unique global viewers across its first seven days of availability.
Prime Video did not disclose the initial viewership for “The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 2 launch, which occurred July 14, 2023, for comparison, but it should be noted that batch launched with three episodes vs. Season 3’s two.
READ MORE: Amazon TV Boss on ‘Summer I Turned Pretty’ Spinoff Potential and Season 2 Plans for ‘We Were Liars’ and ‘Overcompensating’
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According to Amazon, viewership for the Jenny Han-created YA series has “tripled” from the first week ratings for Season 1, which launched as a binge with all seven episodes at once in June 2022.
Additionally, Amazon boasts that “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is the streamer’s most-watched TV season among women ages 18-34, and the fifth most-watched returning season on Prime Video overall (behind “Reacher” Seasons 3 and 2, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Season 2 and “The Boys” Season 4).
The show has been the top title globally on Prime Video through its first week, and Amazon says more than half of the series’ audience is international, “with outsized performance in the U.K., Germany, and Brazil.”
The weekly rollout for “The Summer I Turned Pretty’s” third and final season has been a point of contention among fans who are dying to find out whether Belly ends up with Jeremiah or Conrad, but Amazon leadership maintains this is their preferred release method for the show, which shifted to a weekly release in Season 2.
“I know they are so eager to see every episode,” Amazon MGM Studio’s head of TV content Vernon Sanders told Variety in an interview Monday. “This has been a strategy that we’ve rolled out with our second seasons and beyond — whether that’s with ‘The Boys’ or ‘Reacher,’ even ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Season 2 was weekly. And we see that the audience, even though they’re craving every episode, we’re able to engage them in a longer conversation. And it’s great for the service, because we have people coming back week after week. But that discussion, the community that gets built by having that shared experience and being in one conversation, we see lots of benefits to it. So when and where it makes sense, we’ll keep doing that.”
As for why the episodes are released at 12 a.m. PT/3 a.m. ET, Sanders says “we were bumping up against some confusing messaging when we launched it at other times.” “So right now, our strategy is, again to drop it at midnight Pacific time, so when people wake up in the morning in certain parts of the world, they can watch and other folks, they’ll already be up when the episodes drop.”
Ahead of “The Summer I Turned Pretty’s” Season 3 launch, Prime Video made the unprecedented decision to warn fans against mistreating each other, or the show’s cast, despite their passionate feelings about the Fisher brothers. Sanders says this move wasn’t made just to moderate the behavior show’s younger-skewing audience, but as an overall “proactive” stance from Amazon after experiencing other toxic fandom behavior across programs.
“We’ve had similar situations in the past with adaptations, where there is a fanbase out there that I think can get rowdy, and it sometimes can blur the line between characters and actors or overstep,” Sanders said. “And so we really appreciate them and appreciate their passion, but we’re trying to be more proactive about setting expectations of what we want to encourage and maybe what we find not appropriate. And I think our creators and our cast really appreciate us taking the proactive stance there.”
