10 series that make summer

BarcelonaThere are series that put our brains into vacation mode from the first frame. These are fictions set in summer that serve as a distraction, even if they sometimes lack quality. The Durrells (which would be an example of good fiction) is probably the first title that comes to mind when we think of this type of series, but there's more to life than this British production (which will be available on TV3 this summer). We review ten that will immediately make us want to put on our swimsuit and lie down on a sun lounger.

If we look for the perfect combination of summer, quality and distraction, it appears The White Lotus, one of the great TV series phenomena of recent years. Its creator, Mike White, has a very clear formula: a resort in an idyllic destination for each season and characters who range from pathos to extravagance. Every viewer has their favorite episode: some prefer to spend their vacation in Italy, while others enjoy watching American hypocrisy parading around Hawaii. Whichever option wins, there's always a healthy dose of dark humor.

The summers of the rich are not like ours, for better or worse. This is made very clear in The perfect couple, which falls into that category of series that initially make you cringe, but eventually hook you. Here we find Nicole Kidman in the role of a snobbish mother dedicated to organizing the perfect wedding for her beloved son on the island of Nantucket. Plans go awry when, before the wedding, a person appears dead on the beach. The family celebration then becomes the scene of a criminal investigation, and all members of the clan become suspects.

It's one of Amazon Prime's great youth-oriented series, and besides having an ideal theme for vacation days, summer plays an important role. Based on a trilogy by Jenny Han, the plot revolves around Belly, who spends her summer vacation with her mother's best friend and her two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah. Friends since childhood, the summer Belly turns sixteen, their relationship changes and becomes a love triangle. This July, the platform premieres the third and final season of the series, with Belly about to finish her third year of college and longing to spend the summer with Jeremiah again (and also grieving for Conrad's reappearance).

Outside of English-language fiction, summer is also conceived as one of the most idyllic and romantic seasons. In this Korean miniseries, a passionate architect experiences a romantic romance during a vacation on the coast, but when he tries to reconnect with his girlfriend in Seoul, she, who boasts of being a free spirit, falls apart. Beyond these two, the series explores the romantic relationships of two other couples, related to the main characters. Their ups and downs are interspersed with interviews with the characters in which they give their views on love.

It is likely that for the more adult audience Outer Banks may have gone unnoticed, but among younger viewers it's a genuine phenomenon. The series, one of Netflix's great jewels, exploits the eternal rivalry between rich and poor by following the adventures of a group of working-class teenagers living in a community on the North Carolina coast who call themselves the "Pogues." Pursued by the law and by their enemies, the wealthy Kooks, they are determined to find out what happened to the father of the group's leader, John B. Along the way, they discover the existence of a treasure linked to the missing man. Adventures and youthful love are the formula for the success of this series, which has been running for four seasons and is currently preparing for a fifth.

The latest addition to the summer series offering is We were liars, one thriller which follows the current trend of delving into the dysfunctional lives of the most privileged. The protagonist is Cadence Sinclair Eastman, who spends each summer on a private island in New England owned by her grandparents, Harris and Tipper Sinclair. The girl is not alone. On the island, three generations of the family reunite, including Cadence's cousins, with whom she forms a group popularly known as "the Liars." During the summer of 2016, the young woman suffers an accident from which she does not wake up until months later. Suffering from amnesia, in the summer of 2017 she sets out to discover what happened to her, especially after realizing that no member of her family wants to talk about it. The series, based on a young adult novel by E. Lockhart, has a mostly unknown cast but with some nepobabies notables such as Mamie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep, and Esther McGregor, daughter of Ewan McGregor.

The sticky, suffocating heat of summer looms over this harrowing miniseries fraught with trauma and buried violence. Amy Adams plays Camille, a journalist struggling with addiction who returns to her Midwestern hometown to investigate both the death of a teenager the previous summer and the disappearance of another girl. Her return forces her to confront her mother, a sociality accustomed to having a tight grip on her daughters' lives, and allows her to get to know her stepsister better, a teenager who is a ticking time bomb. The miniseries, based on the debut novel by Gillian Flynn, author of Loss, was the last project he directed Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée before his death in 2021.

More mysterious and harrowing summers from this two-season anthology series. One of the unique features of the first season is that it focuses on three specific days: June 21st—the moment that marks the beginning of summer—in 1993, 1994, and 1995. In the first year, Jeanette is a hesitant and insecure teenager, with braces and glasses, just as the cliché of nerdBy the second year, she's transformed into a sort of carbon copy of Kate Wallis, the most popular girl in school. By 1995, however, darkness descends upon her: she's become one of the most hated people in America, linked to Wallis's disappearance a year earlier. The second season, on the other hand, begins in the summer of 1999, when Megan Landry's family takes in an exchange student, Isabella LaRue. The two girls become close, but their friendship begins to crumble when they both become romantically involved with Luke. When Luke is murdered, they both become prime suspects.

Romantic comedies are a genre that fits quite well with summer, especially if they include a vacation trip that ends up leading to an unforgettable story. This is what happens in the miniseries. A perfect story, based on a best-selling book Elisabet BenaventThe story is full of clichés, but it works. Margot is the heiress of a hotel conglomerate who decides to leave her boyfriend at the altar. On the run, she meets David, a guy who is completely different from her: he works three different jobs to make ends meet and lives with his best friends, who let him sleep on the couch. Their budding friendship transforms into something else when they travel to Greece and are swept away by the sunsets on some beautiful islands. The romanticism that the miniseries exuded was transferred to real life and Anna Castillo and Álvaro Mel, both protagonists, fell in love and are now a couple.

If you still practice the noble art of zapping you have surely fallen at some point on the A3series channel and come across Crime in paradise, a series that seems to be broadcast on repeat. The British production is what in serial slang is known as a procedural: that is, a fiction in which a criminal case is solved in each episode. The distinctive feature of this long-running series is its setting, the sun-drenched island of Saint Marie, a spectacular Caribbean enclave where deaths seem to be rampant. If the constant reruns of A3series aren't enough, this July the Cosmo channel premieres the fourteenth season of the series, which incorporates a new protagonist, London detective detective Mervin Wilson.