The Summer I Turned Pretty Turned Ugly

The Summer I Turned Pretty is an unquestionable hit, an almost old-fashioned television success story of a series that grew more popular with each successive season. Jenny Han’s adaptation of her own book series debuted on Prime Video in 2022 and was well received, but it was in 2023 when TSITP really exploded, becoming one of the most viewed original series ever on Prime Video. The third and final season, which streamed in 2025, was even more popular, logging a reported 25 million viewers in its first week—those are Game of Thrones numbers. The show made stars of its young cast, led by Lola Tung, Christohper Briney, and Gavin Casalegno.

Once upon a time, a hit TV show was a guaranteed payday, with syndication deals turning television series into seemingly endless waterfalls of cash. The Friends and Seinfeld casts made famously lucrative deals in the Nineties, earning millions per episode, those salaries were also bolstered by the ancillary revenue of syndication and international distribution. Then digital and streaming came along and basically killed syndication, and now with the current contraction of the entertainment industry, even up-front deals are shrinking.

According to Deadline, TSITP is a key example of the shifting economics of television, as its young stars signed contracts following season two that have not kept up with the show’s enormous popularity. I can hear the tiny violins, and I get it, it’s hard to have sympathy for people who are still making way above the average worker’s salary. But remember, if the deals for the topline talent are unfavorable, it’s always worse for those working further down the line. So let’s get into the salary situation on TSITP.

As per Deadline, the success of season two prompted contract renegotiations with Wiip, the production company that makes the show in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios. During these negotiations, which saw the main cast getting raises, the actors were asked, allegedly suddenly and in late stages of bargaining, to also commit to a movie as part of their new contract. Knowing lawyers, they would vastly prefer to negotiate a film contract separately, or at least include separate clauses from the TV deal, but, again allegedly, the actors were told to either take the offer or lose out on their raise. Some of the actors felt “forced” into the deal and signed “under duress”.

Their new season three salary is rumored in the $100K per episode range, which also came with an increased episode count, moving up to 11 episodes. That’s a solid $1M+ for the final season but now tucked into that deal is their feature film salary, an estimated $300K (or the value of three additional episodes) for the leads. Again! Tiny violins! But not even a decade ago, a hit TV show that spun off a movie would result in WAY bigger paydays, and it’s also hard not to see this as bringing pressure to bear on young stars, still building their reputations and fearful of earning a “difficult” label, never mind how much worse such labeling could be for Lola Tung, as a biracial woman.

But it’s not even really about the money, it’s about HOW this happened. These actors were in the middle of renegotiating deals to reflect the success of the television show, success due in no small part to the effort and talent of the cast. TSITP is a hit not just because it’s a good show people enjoy, but because people fell in love with what Lola Tung, Christopher Briney, and Gavin Casalegno, specifically, brought to their roles. And yet, when it came time for them to reap the benefit of their work, they were (allegedly) forced into an unfavorable deal. They were essentially told to shut up and sign or lose everything. If that happened in any other context, we’d be steaming mad, it’s not okay just because it happened to actors and we, as a society, don’t value performance as a job. That’s on us, not them.

It’s also hard to hear about actors being threatened into unfavorable contracts when the parent company of the streamer is f-cking AMAZON. The company’s net profit in 2025 was over $77 billion, and Jeff Bezos’s net worth is in the $240 billion range. He’s literally one of the three or four richest people in the WORLD. He’s not some guy who worked hard and became the top earner at his company, he’s hoarding wealth like a f-cking dragon, and it IS a zero-sum game. He is that rich because other people are not making wages that reflect their worth (and a helluva lot of Amazon workers aren’t even making livable wages).

Prime Video’s success over the last several years has been materially, positively impacted by TSITP, driving new subscribers to the platform. The show has been nothing but a benefit for the company. And yet, the stars who make the show so popular are not being compensated in a way that reflects that reality. We can argue over actors being paid too much some other time, there is actual, measurable evidence that TSITP has been a net economic gain for Prime Video, and yet the young stars of the show were bullied into bad contracts.

We should be mad about this because it is a labor issue. We should be mad because the out of whack economics we’ve all been feeling for years—decades—have gotten so bad, even famous actors are getting screwed. When the people who have the best lawyers can’t get good deals, what chance have the rest of us? Not much.

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