The Jenny Han Effect: How the YA rock star took charge of her own media empire

Even a quiet day on set sees Han in constant motion, texting and FaceTiming with her Season 2 co-showrunner Kucserka: watching takes, tweaking scripts, making calls on everything from tie-in merch to dialogue — or finding the exact moment in a song when lyrics match the emotional beats of important scenes from the books.

The new season packs in these “tentpole moments” Han knows her readers are excited for as it picks up a year later, as Belly (Tung) revisits the shattering events that followed her first-season spark with longtime crush Conrad (Briney). As a multigenerational drama, Han and the show’s writers also expand the world of “Summer” with new characters and scenarios, reserving the potential for surprise. “People think they want exactly what’s in the book, but I think that there’s real fun in the not knowing too,” she teased.

Today Han and the production team mull whether they should get ahead of a potential weather snafu and swap an on-location moment pulled from Book 2 with an interior soundstage scene planned for the following day. She watches Griffiths direct a scene in which Briney and Kaufman branch off from the group for a heart-to-heart. Then she heads down to the dock to oversee photos of the “Summer” kids in character and later, finalizes weekend plans to host a murder mystery dinner for her cast.

Susannah Fisher’s home in fictional Cousins Beach, filmed in Wilmington, N.C., serves as a primary setting of Jenny Han’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”

(Prime Video)

“We’re both Virgos, so we are both incredibly organized people,” Kucserka says. “She has this natural instinct for how to run a ship. And it’s amazing to see because I’ve seen plenty of folks who come in from a different world and they are like, ‘What is this? How does this work?’ And she really has that natural instinct for it.”

In some ways, producing feels like an extension of the tools Han employed as an author, taking a stake in her own marketing strategies and building a direct bridge to her readership. When she made the tough decision to skip the “XO, Kitty” premiere in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America strike, she filmed a video explaining why to her fans. She frequently fields questions from her 1.3 million Instagram followers, offering peeks into TV production, her creative choices and her close rapport with the actors. No one knows the Jenny Han universe and her constituents like Jenny Han does.

Case in point: the Herculean feat of landing five surprise Swift tunes for “Summer’s” first season, which shot Swift’s 2019 album “Lover” back to the Billboard Top 40 charts three years after its original release.

“The Taylor moment was one of the most special things,” said Han, who pitched to Amazon Studios execs the exact way Swift’s “The Way I Loved You (Taylor’s Version)” kicks in during the Season 1 finale. “I was like, ‘And then he stands up and we hear, duh duh duh duh … .’ I was listening to ‘Fearless’ the album when I was writing the second and third books, and the fans have always said, ‘Can you please put a Taylor song in?’ So I was really excited to give them that gift.”

The show’s inclusion of three songs from “Lover” — “Cruel Summer,” “False God” and “Lover” — helped boost the album by nearly 4 million streams in its first two weeks, while other featured artists’ music saw as much as a 6,000% spike in song sales, per Variety. Swift’s wistfully on-theme “August” and “Back to December (Taylor’s Version),” heard in the second-season trailers, already have fans speculating what Swift tracks might make their way into the new season.

It was that instinct for what her fans love and the comprehensiveness of her vision that led Han to push for greater control after the first “To All the Boys” film. “For an author, it’s not the most comfortable of positions to be in, to have to stand your ground in that way,” she said.

Now on “Summer,” Han is both boss and living, breathing show bible. Tung, who made her acting debut in the role and this season takes Belly further in determining what her heart wants and deserves, says that trust goes both ways. “You can tell how much she cares about every single choice,” Tung said. “But what’s lovely too is she is so open to talking with us about those creative decisions and hearing our input.”

“She knows exactly what it looks like and how it feels — it’s her world and she knows it so well,” said Briney, who plays Conrad. “If Jenny’s happy, it gives me permission to be happy and move on [from a scene]. Because Jenny would not move on if she wasn’t happy.”

Christopher Briney as Conrad and Lola Tung as Belly in “The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 2.

(Erika Doss / Prime Video)

Team Conrad, Team Jeremiah or Team Belly? “Summer” fans buckle up for Season 2, based on the sequel novel “It’s Not Summer Without You.”

(Erika Doss / Prime Video)