women can be losers too

Bonjour,

I went from hanging in the woods with 500 Base builders in Burlington, Vermont to talking global money movement at the Stellar Meridian Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and let me tell you, there are serious people doing serious things across this industry and it’s refreshing to see. That said, trust:

ily,

Writer: Natasha 
Editor: Miranda

Polygon making big moves.

I regret to inform you that this newsletter is about a teen romance series and Taylor Swift. In my defense, the phenomenon happening online around a show called The Summer I Turned Pretty and its relationship to Taylor Swift is worth some exploration.

A caveat: I did watch this show in it’s entirety and found myself talking to my iPad on a plane but I’m not a Swifty. I am interested in is the speed at which the internet moves culture along, no matter how stupid that culture may be.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is an Amazon Prime adaptation of a young adult novel series in which a teenage girl gets caught in a love triangle between two brothers (Team Jeremiah and Team Conrad) she’s known her whole life. The acting is bad, the writing is worse, and the way this show gripped millennial women should be studied.

And yes, the viewership of the actual show is insane. Here’s a quick and dirty chart to demonstrate:

But more than actual viewership, it’s remarkable to see the life this show is producing on social through short-form content, with comment sections demonstrating actual mental illness. It has reached escape velocity in a way that’s tough to articulate. To give you a sense, the hashtag #TeamConrad has racked up around 13.5 billion views across social.

A big part of the show’s life outside the show is the burning questions around its music budget, especially for a series that until this season was seen as a relatively low-budget production.

The TSITP subreddit (with over 500k subscribers) has been alight with questions for Jenny Han, the original author of the books and the creator of the show, about how she’s managed to afford not one, not two, but 23 Taylor Swift songs across the 26 episodes. The current running theory is that Han wrote a note to Swift and they worked out a deal. Sometimes a handwritten note really does go a long way.

The Venn diagram of being into this teen drama and being a die-hard Swifty is basically a circle. But when licensing a full TSwift songs runs somewhere between $400K–$600K, asking how this happened is ripe for internet discourse. Personally:

None of this was really newsletter-worthy until it all came to a head with the series finale this week, when the two main characters the internet has been rooting for finally got together. A Taylor Swift song from 8 years ago (which peaked at #31 on the Billboard charts, which is pretty mid for TSwift) played in the background while they did this:

What happened next? By the next morning the song was back on the charts and had climbed into the top 5 on US iTunes. The girlies are, cRaZY.

Personally, I think this show hit the zeitgeist so hard because millennial women realized they could use a little male yearning in their lives.