Cruel Summer season 2 review: Smells like teen murder

“So far, this just sounds like a fairytale,” one lawyer carps during an interrogation scene in Cruel Summer season two and, inundated with talk of teen sex tapes and secret pregnancies and, oh yeah, body bags, you can’t blame the guy. But it’s not fantasy that the second edition of Freeform’s teen drama thriller seemingly takes after. It’s fan fiction.

The pulpy, CW-lite second season of the Bert V. Royal-created, Jessica Biel-produced series—which premieres its first two episodes on June 5 (eps will stream the next-day on Hulu)—follows the same narrative framework as its predecessor: a period-piece mystery unraveling across three alternating timelines. But, like the recent spate of TV crime anthologies, round two boasts an entirely new plot and a fresh cast of characters.

Where the 2021 debut season followed the early 1990s disappearance of a pretty, popular Texas high schooler (Olivia Holt), and the classmate who may or may not have knowingly concealed her whereabouts (Chiara Aurelia), the follow-up flashes things forward to the final year before the millennium, where A-student computer genius Megan Landry (Sadie Stanley) is dealing with your usual cafeteria line of teen angst while living in a small beachfront town in the Pacific Northwest: quietly crushing on her best friend Luke Chambers (Griffin Gluck), being perpetually annoyed by her mom’s existence, and feeling instantly inferior to the mysterious yet magnetic new girl in town, Isabella LaRue (Lexi Underwood), a worldly exchange student invited to live with Megan’s family for a year.

While season one’s whodunit was told across three summers, the sophomore edition truncates the timeline to a mere 12 months, cutting constantly between July 1999, December ’99 and July of the following year. Those temporal switches are signified via exaggerated shifts in color grading (the angsty middle period is so desaturated and dull-looking, it might as well be a Marvel movie) and enough nostalgic needle drops—Sugar Ray here, Ricky Martin there—to fill a Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation.

Slashing the timespan of this season’s story by two-thirds makes already far-fetched plot details even more preposterous: In the summer of ‘99, Megan barely tolerates Isabella as a resident in the same household; five months later, the exchange student is her “ride or die” surrogate sister, a relationship close enough that they would jump off a cliff for each other, hell, would kill for each other—and maybe one of them did, because a corpse gets pulled out of the ocean by a forensic team, throwing their new and intense friendship for a loop. (Another humorous absurdity is how, in little more than a semester’s time, the formerly overall-wearing, ponytail-swinging Megan gets a hard Hackers-by-way-of-Hot Topic makeover, her heavy eyeliner and heavier chain necklaces less-than-subtly signaling the character’s darkest period. It’s drag broodiness that the sunny actress—who radiates like a young Julia Stiles—can’t quite pull off.)

Last season, that fractured narrative structure was used to solid dramatic effect, toggling every other episode between the perspectives of Olivia Holt’s kidnap victim Kate Wallis and Chiara Aurelia’s identity-stealing “villain” Jeanette Turner, subsequently gaining audience goodwill and empathy for each girl along the way. This edition, however, isn’t as probing into Isabella’s headspace as it is Megan’s, and thus the new kid on the block is treated more with suspicion than sympathy, with actress Lexi Underwood saddled with selling near-meta dialogue that’s more obvious than ominous. (“Your mom said you like mysteries,” Isabella pointedly tells Megan in the premiere, giving her a suspense thriller entitled Grave Questions.)

And despite the fact that there’s the whole “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of a dead teenager to fuel this season’s story, the love triangles and scholarship drama and revenge porn and cyber crime and all of the other campy, convoluted subplots decelerate any true sense of high-stakes momentum or danger. Where season one’s chilling creepiness kept chugging along, pulling full-strength into that standout penultimate episode, here the crazy train quickly loses steam well before then. (The first seven episodes of the season were made available for review.)

There are plenty of high-quality murder stories, both true and otherwise, to better satiate your crime fix—even Biel’s other homicide-focused Hulu series, Candy (the IRL story of the ax-wielding, adultery-having Texan housewife Candy Montgomery), does a more plausible job navigating the outrageousness of the genre. But you’re not watching Cruel Summer season two for any crime-scene credibility or weighty ideas about obsession, compulsion, and desire. Like a page-turning beach read or a high-kudos Archive of Our Own fan-work, it’s an easy, breezy—and often cheesy—volume to speedily thumb through and subsequently forget by season’s end. It’s cool for summer, at least.