Prime Video's 'The Summer I Turned Pretty Meets Agatha Christie' Series Arrives In Less Than A Month
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
While a mix of The Summer I Turned Pretty and Agatha Christie might sound hard to pull off, one upcoming Prime Video show offers exactly this blend. The Summer I Turned Pretty lasted 3 seasons and 26 episodes between 2022 and 2025. In that time, Prime Video’s adaptation of author Jenny Han’s novel trilogy turned Lola Tung, Christopher Briney, and Gavin Casalegno into major stars, and The Summer I Turned Pretty’s upcoming movie remains hotly anticipated by the show’s large fan base.
However, while The Summer I Turned Pretty is a massive hit, one thing that the coming-of-age romance could not be called is a mystery thriller. Like Han’s earlier hit trilogy To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Summer I Turned Pretty is a straightforward blend of romance, drama, tragedy, and character comedy, so a show that ostensibly blends this story with an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery might seem like a weird mix.
Fortunately, Prime Video’s Perfect Liars has the right plot to pull this off. Adapted from Venezuelan author Alex Mírez’s viral Wattpad novel Perfectos Mentirosos, Perfect Liars follows its heroine Jude as she arrives at the elite Tagus University and soon gets between a trio of rich, powerful brothers to find out the truth about her own brother’s death. While The Summer I Turned Pretty’s heroine Belly only had to worry about which of two rich brothers to pick, the stakes are a lot higher for Jude.
Perfect Liars Turns The Summer I Turned Pretty Into A Thriller Series
The show’s heroine, Jude, hopes to bring down Aegan, Adrik, and Aleixandre Cash, three handsome, wealthy, arrogant students who consider themselves to be untouchable thanks to their family’s wealth. However, when she sets up a secret high-stakes poker game to ensnare the brothers, Jude soon learns that the power dynamics between them are not as simple as she assumed, that the brothers have more secrets than she thought. Also, Jude herself is dealing with an inconvenient attraction to one of them.
Thus, the stage is set for a story that takes the murder and mayhem of an Agatha Christie whodunit and transplants these plot elements into a thrilling romance where the heroine is caught between the affections of two wealthy, powerful brothers. As strange as a psychological thriller version of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s story might sound, Perfect Liars makes the plot work, with plenty of clever misdirections and sexual tension to keep viewers guessing.
Of course, that’s just the successful source novel, which has over 180,000 ratings on GoodReads across the books in the series. The question of whether Prime Video’s show can replicate this delicate balance of self-aware camp, tense thrills, and romance remains to be seen. However, Perfect Liars does have the right director to take on the task, as proven by their previous hit, Netflix’s Money Heist franchise.
Prime Video's Perfect Liars Has The Ideal Director
Debuting in 2017, Money Heist was a Spanish-language crime thriller that unfolded across various POVs, using flashbacks, changing perspectives, and real-time storytelling to constantly misdirect viewers. The show proved such a massive success that what was originally intended to be a one-off miniseries ended up spawning four more seasons, a spinoff in the character-centric series Berlin, and a location-based reboot set in Korea.
Thus, the news that Money Heist director Jesus Colmenar will helm Prime Video’s adaptation of Perfect Liars could not be more fitting, since the filmmaker already has plenty of experience with high-stakes mysteries and thrilling, thoroughly unpredictable streaming shows. Perfect Liars won’t arrive on Prime Video until November 20 but, in the meantime, viewers can always re-watch The Summer I Turned Pretty and some Agatha Christie adaptations to get a feel for the movie's weird tonal blend.
- Release Date
- 2022 - 2025-00-00
- Network
- Prime Video
- Directors
- Erica Dunton, Jesse Peretz, Jeff Chan
-
Lola Tung
Isabel 'Belly' Conklin
-
Christopher Briney
Conrad Fisher
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.