Prime Video just dropped the first two episodes of the third and final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty and there’s one particular storyline that feels a bit too familiar.
At the end of episode one, titled “Last Season,” Belly (Lola Tung) learns that Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) had sex with another girl, Lacie Barone (Lily Donoghue), during a spring break trip to Cabo, as they had a fight before the trip and he thought they had broken up.
“It happened when we were on a break… when we were broken up,” Jeremiah explains to an angry Belly after she finds out at a frat party. Belly yells back, “You knew that we weren’t really broken up, that that wasn’t real.”
“How was I supposed to know that? It was real for me,” Jeremiah claims before Belly responds, “Well, if I knew it, then you should have known it.”
In the second episode of season three, titled “Last Christmas,” Jeremiah maintained that he “didn’t cheat. We were on a break,” after being confronted by Belly’s best friend, Taylor (Rain Spencer). However, she clapped back, “You’re not getting off on this, like, technicality. You were broken up for all of two seconds, Jeremiah.”
While the great “we were on a break” debate may be new to some in the younger generation, it’s important to know it didn’t start with Belly and Jeremiah. In fact, there’s one not-so-little-known show that originated the “we were on a break” storyline and planted the phrase in the cultural zeitgeist.
In season three of Friends, the iconic phrase is actually coined. In episode 15, titled “The One Where Ross And Rachel Take A Break,” Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Ross (David Schwimmer), who were in a relationship at the time, get into an argument because Ross suspects Rachel is having an affair with her co-worker Mark. However, Rachel always looked at their relationship with Mark as platonic (though she later learned Mark did have a crush on her).
The ongoing argument about the matter led Rachel to suggest to Ross, “Maybe we should just take a break… A break from us.” They go their separate ways after, and both individually confess that their relationship was effectively over after that conversation.
Following the breakup, Ross went to a bar to process everything and decided to call Rachel to reconcile with her. However, Rachel has already called Mark, who offered to come over and comfort her after the fight. That leads Ross to mistakenly suspect Mark and Rachel are hooking up when he hears his voice in the background. An emotional and drunk Ross then ends up having an affair with a promiscuous woman named Chloe; though he learns the next morning that he misread the situation with Mark and Rachel and that she actually wanted to continue their relationship.
However, the one-night stand with Chloe doesn’t remain a secret and turns into another argument between Ross and Rachel in episode 16, titled “The One With The Morning After,” causing them to break up again. Rachel accuses Ross of cheating, as “we were on a break,” she says, while Ross claims that no cheating occurred because they had broken up, thus differentiating between a “break” and a “breakup.”
The iconic phrase is then used throughout the rest of Friends, which ran for 10 seasons, and one of the most popular lines from the show that’s still used today. And now the phrase has found a new life thanks to The Summer I Turned Pretty. However, just like it was for Ross and Rachel, it will likely be an ongoing discussion among fans as to whether Jeremiah and Belly were just on a break or officially broken up.
After the new episodes of the Prime Video show premiered early Wednesday morning, there was also some online discourse surrounding the cheating storyline, as some claim Jeremiah was sexually assaulted by Lacie since he was intoxicated and emotionally unstable when they hooked up. Some even took to X to call out author/creator Jenny Han for writing “that scene VERY HORRIBLY,” as one user wrote and should be treated as a serious and sensitive topic.
Ahead of the premiere, the official social media account for the Prime Video series on Monday cautioned viewers against bullying and hate speech, “targeting our cast or crew” and “harassing or doxxing members of the community.”