10 Romance Shows Better Than The Summer I Turned Pretty

The Summer I Turned Pretty was a major hit for Prime Video. Based on Jenny Han's novel trilogy of the same name, the YA romance series nailed its escapist elements — coastal setting, nostalgic needle drops, and a central love triangle anchoring the cast of The Summer I Turned Pretty. However, beneath the surface appeal, the writing often leaned on familiar YA tropes without deepening them.

TSITP is fine for comfort, second-screen viewing, but the story and the characters don’t push beyond genre basics. YA romance shows have evolved from earnest, character-driven dramas into glossy streaming-era escapism, with each generation building on the last.

Early touchstones like My So-Called Life and Dawson's Creek established introspective teen romance, focusing on first love, identity, and emotional dialogue. The 2000s expanded the formula with more heightened melodrama and aspirational settings in shows like The O.C. and One Tree Hill, which leaned into love triangles and long-form relationship arcs.

Coming-of-age TV shows resonate so strongly because first love, identity formation, and the intensity of teenage emotions are nearly universal experiences, making the stories easy for audiences to connect to regardless of age. This list curates 10 TV YA romances that capture that same sense of yearning even better than TSITP.

Dash & Lily

2020

Dash & Lily tells a complete, tightly structured love story that never overstays its welcome, making it a stronger romance than The Summer I Turned Pretty. During the Christmas season, two New York City teenagers develop feelings by exchanging notebook messages and dares across the city, allowing their connection to grow through personality and vulnerability rather than prolonged love-triangle drama.

The rom-com tone keeps the story light, but the emotional progression feels intentional and earned. As one of the many excellent TV shows that only ran for one season, Dash & Lily avoids repetitive conflicts, instead delivering consistent character growth and clear romantic momentum. Its charming premise and focused storytelling make the central relationship feel more cohesive and satisfying overall.

Maxton Hall—The World Between Us

2024-Present

Maxton Hall—The World Between Us offers a sharper and more emotionally grounded romance than The Summer I Turned Pretty by building its central relationship around clear social and personal stakes. Ruby Bell, a brilliant scholarship student determined to earn a place at Oxford, enters the elite world of Maxton Hall, where she is surrounded by wealth and privilege.

There she clashes with James Beaufort, an arrogant heir whose life has been shaped by entitlement and expectation. Their enemies-to-lovers dynamic is fueled by class tension and mutual disruption, giving their connection real friction and purpose.

While TSITP gestured at socioeconomic divides, Maxton Hall uses its class divide as an active force in shaping identity, growth, and emotional vulnerability. It has also been renewed for a third season after Maxton Hall season 2, signaling continued investment in its longer, more structured romantic arc.

The Sex Lives Of College Girls

2021-2025

The Sex Lives of College Girls explores sex, dating, and emotional intimacy as part of a wider, more varied exploration of young adult relationships. While it is more of a comedy and ensemble show about four roommates navigating independence in college, romance is central to nearly every storyline, and the title itself makes that focus explicit.

Relationships in the series are used to explore identity, boundaries, and self-worth with more variety and nuance than TSITP. By spreading romantic arcs across multiple characters and experiences, Sex Lives of College Girls creates a more expansive and representative view of young adult relationships.

Outer Banks

2020-Present

Outer Banks stands as a stronger romance series than The Summer I Turned Pretty​​​​​​, even while balancing its adventure-mystery framework. Outer Banks and TSITP both lean heavily into beachy YA escapism, summer romance, and love triangles, but Outer Banks benefits from more propulsive plotting that consistently raises stakes outside the central relationships.

The romance arcs are tightly woven into survival-driven storylines, which gives emotional decisions clearer consequences and keeps character motivations more active. While TSITP often recycles inner conflicts, Outer Banks pushes its couples through external pressure and evolving circumstances that force growth. The result is a more dynamic blend of romance and narrative momentum within a similar coastal YA setting.

Bridgerton

2020-Present

Bridgerton combines emotional spectacle with a more sustainable narrative structure. As a period romance, it fully embraces the heightened stakes, social constraints, and formalized courtship rituals that naturally intensify romantic tension.

Its biggest advantage, however, is its anthology-style format. Each season focuses on a different Bridgerton sibling’s love story, allowing the series to maintain continuity in its world and supporting cast while avoiding the repetition that can weaken ongoing love-triangle plots.

While Prime Video flexed its budget to get many Taylor Swift needle drops on The Summer I Turned Pretty for emotional texture, Bridgerton builds its identity through orchestral pop covers that helped popularize a modern “bardcore”-adjacent sound. The result is a more stylistically cohesive and narratively varied romance engine.

One Tree Hill

2003-2012

One Tree Hill fully committed to emotionally heightened, romance-driven storytelling across a sprawling ensemble. While its overall quality is more uneven than peers like Dawson's Creek or The O.C., it helped define the modern YA romance template: love triangles, slow-burn relationship shifts, and melodrama grounded in character history.

One Tree Hill's nine seasons sustained romantic stakes over a much longer narrative arc than TSITP, allowing relationships to evolve, fracture, and re-form in ways that feel earned. TSITP inherits many of these structural instincts but often resolves or reconfigures its central triangle without the same long-term accumulation. The result is a more durable, emotionally expansive romance engine.

Never Have I Ever

2020-2023

Never Have I Ever balances coming-of-age storytelling with sharp comedic writing and intentional character work. Created by Mindy Kaling, one of the most influential women in TV, the series explores similar first-love and identity themes, but with more consistent tonal control and clearer character arcs.

It also stands out for its more conscious use of race and representation, centering an Asian American lead whose romantic storylines are shaped by cultural expectations, grief, and personal ambition. While it lacks the escapist beach setting of TSITP and is largely grounded in a school environment, that groundedness allows the relationships to feel more immediate, lived-in, and emotionally specific.

Dawson’s Creek

1998-2003

Dawson's Creek revolutioned teen TV dramas, essentially helping define the modern template for earnest young adult love-triangle storytelling. As a foundational series in YA romance TV, it established the emotional vocabulary that so many later shows, including The Summer I Turned Pretty, continue to draw from: conflicted friendships, shifting romantic allegiances, and heightened introspection about first love and identity.

What sets Dawson’s Creek apart is the consistency and depth of its character-driven dialogue, which often treats teenage emotions with unusual seriousness and nuance. Its central love triangle — Dawson, Joey, and Pacey — becomes the emotional backbone of the series.

The relationships evolved slowly as friendships fractured and realigned, with Joey’s shifting feelings for both boys driving long-term tension and payoff. That gradual accumulation makes each romantic turn feel earned and consequential across seasons.

TSITP modernizes the formula with a glossy aesthetic and streaming-era pacing. However, Dawson’s Creek remains the quintessential earnest teen romance archetype that shaped the genre’s expectations in the first place.

Heartstopper

2022-Present

Heartstopper delivers a consistently well-crafted and emotionally resonant depiction of young love. Based on the graphic novel Heartstopper by Alice Oseman, the series stands out for its sensitivity, authenticity, and focus on emotional communication, allowing relationships to develop with clarity and care rather than melodramatic reversals.

While it adopts a softer, more grounded tone than many teen romances, that restraint is part of its strength, giving even small moments of connection significant weight. It has also achieved substantial cultural impact as a modern benchmark for LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream YA storytelling, helping redefine what inclusive teen romance can look like on screen.

Following two highly acclaimed seasons, Netflix is concluding the story with a feature-length finale film called Heartstopper Forever, scheduled for release in 2026, underscoring its status as a carefully structured and celebrated romance narrative.

The O.C.

2003-2007

The O.C. delivers an iconic and structurally influential version of the same coastal teen romance formula found in The Summer I Turned Pretty. Set against the backdrop of affluent Newport Beach, it combines beachy escapism with high-stakes emotional drama, making it one of the defining blueprints for modern YA love-triangle storytelling.

What sets The O.C. apart is how tightly it integrates romance with character development and class tension, allowing relationships to evolve through social displacement, family conflict, and shifting loyalty rather than repeated romantic resets. The pairings feel consequential, with choices that reshape friendships and long-term arcs.

The central dynamics are anchored by Ryan and Marissa’s turbulent, often tragic relationship, which drives much of The O.C.’s emotional stakes. This is balanced by the on-again, off-again pull between Seth and Summer.

While TSITP echoes many of these tonal elements, The O.C. executes them with greater narrative momentum and cultural impact. Its legacy endures two decades later as one of the most influential teen romance dramas ever produced.