This story originally published online at The Assembly.
When Gabriella Neyman received the email in her university inbox, she screamed.
“‘We’re filming the third season of an Amazon Prime show typically filmed in Wilmington,’” it read. “And from that sentence alone, I knew what this show was,” she told The Assembly.
The 30-year-old media relations manager guessed correctly: The Summer I Turned Pretty wanted to film portions of its final season at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jenny Han, a UNC-CH alumna and the author of the original book trilogy, oversees the hit romance-drama series that chronicles a heated love triangle between two brothers and their childhood friend.
While the show is largely filmed in Wilmington, in the final season, UNC-CH is transformed into Finch College, a fictional New England school. Some episodes capture the main characters strolling around campus (with many lucky students cast as extras), while others show them shopping on Franklin Street.
“I think that Carolina is one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. We were only a couple of hours away, so why not try? I was thrilled when the University said yes,” Han said in a university feature promoting the show. “I’m proud to show it off.”
Neyman, who was the UNC-CH point of contact on the production, said she had the task of explaining the show to many of her colleagues before the school signed off—including Chancellor Lee Roberts. “It was kind of comical explaining it to Chancellor Roberts,” she said. “He just was not familiar with it.”
Roberts’ main question, she said, was whether students watched the show. “And I was like, ‘Yes, 100 percent, this is something that I think a lot of young people in general watch,’” she recalled. “Once he realized how much excitement there would be around this, he was really on board.”
The show’s crew descended on campus for three days of filming in summer 2024. During the long 16-hour days, Neyman stood on the sidelines and watched the show come together. Parts of the show mirror Hans’ own journey at UNC-CH. For example, the main character, Belly, stays in the Old East dorm, where Han lived as a student. At one point, Neyman said that Han snuck away from production to UNC Student Stores and signed book copies until she sold out.
“The process of Jenny being on campus was just very endearing, seeing her take her production team through all the locations and talking about how much campus has changed, yet how it has also stayed the same,” Neyman said. “There’s just such a strong connection between her experiences here and the books.”
While UNC-CH receives dozens of filming requests every year, Neyman said The Summer I Turned Pretty was the biggest production to come to the university since the 1990s, when Patch Adams, a Robin Williams movie, was set almost entirely on campus.
As a public university, UNC-CH does not receive any revenue from movie productions. But the campus has certainly reaped the benefits of association.
On social media, UNC-CH has made several posts with carefully curated shots that show where the characters appeared on campus. While most of the people in the comments are fighting about which brother should prevail, some wrote things like “literally my dream university” and “is this a valid reason to transfer out of UNC Charlotte?”
Beyond anecdotal social media comments, Neyman said visitors have bombarded campus tour guides with questions about where certain parts of the show were filmed.
“It is so great to see how many, especially young people, are commenting like, ‘My dream school,’ and asking us to admit them in five years,” she said. “I think a really young audience invested in our school, just based on the filming taking place here.”
While it’s hard to say how many young minds the show may sway, Neyman said the opportunity to show off the campus to viewers is an exciting prospect. For Neyman, who grew up just outside of Los Angeles and moved to Johnston County in middle school, her own first exposure to campus came from a reference to “Carolina blue” and the women’s soccer team in She’s The Man, a popular 2006 Amanda Bynes movie.
“Pop culture and media can really shape how people perceive a lot, especially institutions,” she said. “[The Summer I Turned Pretty] amplifies who we are—and our pretty campus scenes—to an audience that I think might not even be thinking about Carolina.”
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