The first comment beneath The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Instagram post from Wednesday—candlelit shots of Belly and Benito in a café, captioned “Paris era unlocked”—got 20,276 likes within a few hours and said it all.
“Listen Benito,” a fan wrote. “I’m sure you’re a nice guy. But we don’t have time for this.”
It was the perfect crystallization of the low-key horror millions of TSITP fans have been feeling over Belly’s trip abroad. I’ve been having silent conversations with women I don’t know in the grocery store for weeks: Jeremiah’s going to tell her not to go, isn’t he? another mom might beam to me in produce, to which I, putting anything but peaches in my bag, would beam back: Of course he is. Not only that, but she’s going to choose either him or Conrad over the experience and her own personal potential, activating decades-old frustrations amongst us TV fans who have been hurt by Paris over and over.
Paris? you say, if you were born after 1998. What did Paris do to you? To quote Sabrina, a constant muse for TSITP (Belly’s desk shot, in episode 10, is a direct homage to Audrey Hepburn in the film), “Paris is always a good idea.” That is, unless you’re an American TV heroine, or someone who loves her. Somehow, right at the moment millennial women were becoming adults, Paris emerged as the official travel destination of girls punking out on themselves for a boy. The place that earnest, striving women our age went to discover with lightning speed that no, they didn’t want bread and excitement and cheese and romance and fashion and art. They wanted that mid guy back home, forever, they’ll take whatever flight you have!
First there was Rachel Green, in the Friends finale, getting off the plane for Ross. We loved that, we wanted that—Paris didn’t feel like an affront to opportunity yet, maybe because Rachel’s ascendance at Ralph Lauren wasn’t exactly earned. But the template had been set, Paris was marked as a shorthand for the pinnacle of female achievement—only the most stylish, successful, and generally it would be summoned there—and established as the option only a truly singular love could outshine.
Except that four years later, on The Hills, Lauren Conrad passed it up for a guy with frosted tips and sleepy vibes. When Conrad, who starred in the reality juggernaut, was offered a summer job in Paris on-camera, she was portrayed as deciding to live at the beach with her boyfriend instead. Since then, the storyline has been debunked: Conrad said in a retrospective that she actually turned down the trip because she was exhausted from filming the show itself. And in the end, despite the fact that the show shot a scene depicting Conrad’s colleague, Whitney Port, on a flight there, no one ever went to Paris. None of this matters. Conrad’s status as “the girl who didn’t go to Paris” is cemented in the psyches of everyone who came of age on her timeline.
And there are other Paris moments that hit different after having time to age like a good red. The Devil Wears Prada was another piece that meant for us to cheer when our heroine eschewed the City of Light; should an aspiring journalist skip the chance to network with powerful people and expense room-service frites to [checks notes] try to win back an underemployed chef who recently uttered the line, “I wouldn’t care if you were pole-dancing out there all night, as long as you did it with a little integrity”? Probably not. But the swell of the score told us we were supposed to like that Andy left Paris.
Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, 2006
20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection
Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, 2004
Pascal LE FLOCH/Getty Images
And when Carrie Bradshaw up and moved there, on Sex and the City, we knew the drill: We were not to take this seriously. Paris was just a holding place until Carrie’s real fate—a man who had put a damper on literal decades of her life—swooped in to pull her back home. (Read against this, Emily in Paris seems almost like SATC creator’s Darren Star elaborate do-over, an acknowledgement that Paris is a better place to start something than to finish it.)
Belly’s trip to Paris initially seemed most spiritually linked to Carrie’s. It comes late in the game of her story, on the heels of heartbreak, and felt like a place to kill time before she made a final Fisher-boy choice. There’s almost a built-in dramatic irony to Paris as a setting at this point: The character thinks she’s about to reinvent herself, but we the audience—after so much experience with French cold feet—know better. She’s going to fail.
And then something crazy happened, in The Summer I Turned Pretty episode 10: Belly didn’t fail. In an episode that might be mistaken for quiet, so close to the end, Jenny Han and Co. made time for Belly to beat the final boss that is Paris. Step one: Unlike Rachel Green and Lauren Conrad, Belly went. Step two: Unlike Andy Sachs, she didn’t let other people’s toxicity clutter her vision. Step three: Unlike Carrie Bradshaw, she actually tried, instead of just complaining in couture. She lived with terrible roommates. She worked two jobs. She made friends and bad stuffing. She forced herself to call her mom twice to say she wasn’t coming home for a holiday (and by the way, Laurel gets the Extraordinary Achievement in Momming award for keeping her cool over that).
Lola Tung as Belly Conklin in The Summer I Turned Pretty, 2025
Courtesy of Prime Video
We were only in Paris an hour with Belly, and yet: It felt enormously satisfying, after watching her flail through conversations at the episode’s start, to hear her coolly discuss a leak with her roommate in perfect French at the end. And to take Taylor’s bag from her hands with the confidence of a hostess just months after bumping her carry-on through a grand tour of arrondissements. She had stayed. She had grown. By allowing her the space to do so, Han gives the young women viewers coming of age right now a new Paris story to get used to: one that both reflects the realities of being somewhere new on your own and embraces them wholly. She makes the trying look like the best part. Any girl who’s done it, even if she can’t tell until later, knows that this is true.
I think we all still believe, deep down, that Belly’s resolution will ultimately focus on romance. (Especially now that Conrad is headed for Paris in what appears to be a chic blue bodysuit.) The Summer I Turned Pretty is a show about love—always has been, always will be. But it’s a thrill to see a show truly commit to a girl growing on her own first, to celebrate even the parts of independence that don’t glitter. It’s such vindication that I couldn’t help but think, during that last shot of Belly in the stylist’s chair—well-earned red lip in place—You’re on a roll, Conklin. Cut it all off. Avenge Felicity next.
Megan Angelo is the author of Followers and has written about television, film, women and pop culture, and motherhood for publications including The New York Times, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Slate, and Romper.