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Every Wednesday for the rest of this summer, fans of The Summer I Turned Pretty will tune in to the hit Amazon Prime series to find out who main character Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) will choose to spend the rest of her life with. Her options? Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney), a broody teen turned self-assured, therapy-going med student, or Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno), a charming frat-boy with a slight cheating problem and a ring with her name on it. She’s loved them both since she was a kid, they both love her, and if the last names didn’t clue you in to the main problem, maybe this will: Conrad and Jeremiah are brothers.
The Summer I Turned Pretty’s reign over vacation screens may be coming to a close, but this new season heralds an entertainment trend that’s only getting stronger. We’re in what I’m calling peak Brother-Fucker Summer. These don’t just have to be shows about choosing between two brothers, but can also include any romance that involves dating someone who might be related either by blood or situationship. The Conrad vs. Jeremiah debate has existed since 2009, when author Jenny Han published the first book in the trilogy that became the show’s source material. But the television adaptation has been followed by a parade of similar premises. There’s Prime’s other beach-set series We Were Liars, Netflix’s My Life With the Walter Boys, the latest season of The White Lotus, and the upcoming adaptation of Every Summer After. Sibling- or family-based love triangles aren’t new. But pull back the curtains on this craze and what you find is an increasing reliance on the most basic form of human titillation: taboo. We get it, we’re drawn toward the transgressive. But hinging entire entertainment ecosystems on the same formula waters down both expectations and results for TV dramas. And honestly, it makes watching them way less fun.
This is not strictly a recent trend. Some of the biggest and most beloved dramas of all time dabble in or outright rely on brother-fucker storylines. The Vampire Diaries (2009) follows human Elena (Nina Dobrev) choosing between immortal vamp brothers Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Damon (Ian Somerhalder). In One Tree Hill, which started in 2003, cheerleader Peyton (Hilarie Burton) is an on-again, off-again lover to basketball-obsessed brothers Nathan (James Lafferty) and Lucas (Chad Michael Murray). Clueless (1995), like its loose source material Emma, has its main character Cher (Alicia Silverstone) fall for her former stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd). (In Emma, the love interest is her brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley.) Jumping even further back, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women sees next-door neighbor Laurie choose sister Amy over his longtime love Jo. Is it overkill to mention the Bible’s own drama between Leah, Rachel and Jacob?
All of these stories skirt the taboo of incest for a more emotional caress of the lines. Unlike a normal love triangle, brother-fucker situationships raise a key problem: No matter who gets picked, they can’t change being related. This means, for one character, choosing the love of their life also means picking a lifetime of extremely awkward holidays, birthdays, and get-togethers. (Think a Thanksgiving table of Republicans and Democrats is bad? Try one where the person you’re asking to pass the peas is your ex.)
It’s hard to pin this particular resurgence to one specific cause. Is Gen Z truly not having sex, prompting them to lean into absurdist fictional romance? Is media literacy so low that TV creators have to mine the YA romance section of Barnes & Noble for simple plots that people can understand while scrolling on TikTok? Are all the new brother-fucker shows psy-ops to calm the feral masses in between seasons of Love Island? While the reasons could vary, I’d like to push our attention away from a potential root of the problem and toward a temporary solution: a moratorium on brother-fucker series and films until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
While shows about siblings are an entertainment staple, what’s changed between Clueless and now is the absolute reliance on the brother-fucker trope to carry to brunt of the shows on their incest-leaning backs. While The Summer I Turned Pretty also tries to tackle the link between mental health and grief, the show’s main focus remains just how difficult it is to try and juggle two brothers. We Were Liars has a thriller-mystery plot but spends a lot of time in the muck and mire of amnesiac Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind) trying to figure out her relationship with Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), the boy who’s supposed to become her cousin by marriage. My Life With the Walter Boys doesn’t even try to interest viewers in anything but the relationship between Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez) and brothers Alex (Ashby Gentry) and Cole Walter (Noah LaLonde). It’s actually even messier, since Jackie lives with the Walter family and is technically their foster sister. White Lotus at least committed to a real incest plotline instead of just hinting at it, but the situationship ultimately had no bearing on the season-ending murder.
I’m calling it: The brother-fucker market is officially oversaturated. All of these shows relying on a romantic choice between siblings instead of other dramatic tension is dulling audiences’ acceptance of this kind of story. Love triangles that involve siblings, used sparingly, can add intrigue and spark to a plot. But when they’re slammed over people’s heads, viewers eventually can’t help but think that these main characters could save everyone, including themselves, a lot of trouble simply by dating outside their front doors. We’re headed toward a brother-fucker market crash, people. Let’s stop it before it’s too late.
