What's Forever Summer: Hamptons About?

The territorial locals and city-dwelling invaders of the Hamptons collide in this docu-soap about a bunch of 20-year-olds hashing out their quasi-romances and post-high-school friendships in one of America's wealthiest vacation destinations.

Who's involved?

• Avery, the narrator of the series, is a Hamptons local who's home from her first year of college at Tulane.
• Ilan is the outsider, a cute city boy who's about 75% as charming as he thinks he is, staying at a family friend's vacation home for the summer. His attentions turn to a lot of girls, which ends up running him afoul of more than a few of his fellow hot young things.
• Emelye is Avery's best friend since childhood, but instead of going away to college, she moved in with her boyfriend, Hunter. The more Avery feels like she's moved on from her hometown roots, the more strained their friendship gets.
• Reid is Avery and Emelye's close friend, who's tall and gay and a pathological shit-stirrer who will tell your business to the exact person you least want to hear about it.
• Frankie radiates wingman energy and is the first person we see buddy up to Ilan. When he's not putting his foot in his mouth, he's got romantic aspirations of his own.
• Shannon, Lottie, and Milo are from Sag Harbor (the bay side of the Hamptons!) and traipsing on the East Hampton turf. Shannon has caught Frankie's eye, while Milo hooked up with Reid in the city earlier this year.
• Hunter is Emelye's live-in boyfriend, an absolute nightmare in the guise of a surfer boy, with Wahlberg energy.

Why (and to whom) do we recommend it?

There's a school of thought that says there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure; that any TV show, movie, or song that brings joy should be savored and celebrated without shame. This writer largely subscribes to that notion, but then along comes Forever Summer: Hamptons. Watching it creates genuine guilt. Guilt for getting so caught up in the vapid lives and petty dramas of these conventionally pretty, media-groomed college kids. They should be repulsively basic, yet it's that basic-ness that makes them strangely relatable, even if they all live in the Hamptons.

Part of its hellish appeal is that Forever Summer: Hamptons fills the void that was left when Laguna Beach gave way to The Hills, a more broadly popular, zeitgeist-y show that nevertheless lost some of the magic of that liminal time between adolescence and adulthood. Forever Summer is blatantly going for the same vibe, down to the hazy voiceover, problematic boyfriends, and outsized drama that comes when your friend looks like she's getting poached by other cliques.

The 20-year-olds of Forever Summer aren't as compelling as the Lauren Conrads and Kristin Cavillaris of Laguna Beach, although honestly, a good 60% of what made LC and Kristin's drama so addictive was what we all invested in it from our own perspectives and experiences. Those rich Orange County brats with their beach parties and giant houses were somehow knowable because on some level petty drama translates across borders. The same can be said for these youngsters.

Forever Summer falters a bit when it tries to establish class parameters among its characters. The Hamptons locals all have summer jobs (a lot of them work out of a food truck at a local crab shack), with the implication that they're the lowly townies being preyed upon by the invading summer vacationers from the city. But one of the food truck employees is Ilan, who is staying in the five-bedroom home that his parents' friends have seemingly vacated for the summer, so it's not like he's cutting grass to make ends meet. With a few exceptions, the show keeps having to remind us which characters are the townies and which are the "cidiots," which feels like an extension of the fact these kids are less creatures of their circumstances than products of a media age where they've all been performing as the main characters of their own reality shows their whole lives.

Ultimately, audiences may get swept up in the parts of these peoples' lives that feel recognizable: Ilan as the transparent charmer who shouldn't get away with half of the things he does, Avery and Emelye as the best friends who don't realize they're not best friends anymore, Reid as the messy gay who lives for drama, Hunter as the psycho who locks in on one phrase he thinks sounds badass like "I'll kick your teeth in" and keeps repeating it. We may not feel great about it, but these are the things that make this show a fun way to spend a vicarious summer in the Hamptons.

Pairs well with

• Laguna Beach, which was a better show than The Hills, and we should all admit it. Streams on Paramount+.
• Summer House, which is about slightly older dummies living it up in the Hamptons, though much drunker and more belligerent. Streams on Peacock.
• NYC Prep, Bravo's 2009 one-season wonder about privileged teens playing out a simulacrum of a wealthy social hierarchy while having no idea that the audience at home can see right through them. Streams on Bravo.com.