Sunny summer? Cruel summer? They’re both here

Summer can be cruel, if you’re a TV viewer. Scripted shows fade; reruns and reality shows bloom.
And it can be either kind or cruel if you’re a teen-ager. That depends on which life you’re living – the one that floats through commercials and beach movies or the one that often lurks in real life.
Now both extremes exist in “Cruel Summer.” The show starts its second season at 9 and 10 p.m. Monday (June 5) on Freeform, with new characters and the same sort of scripted depth.
The setting is right out of a teen’s summer ideal. This is a fictional town along the water.
“The Pacific Northwest was that perfect location that has these beautiful small towns around bodies of water,” said actress-turned-producer Jessica Biel. Alongside that, she said, the weather patterns are “ominous – when the fog rolls in and the rain comes down.”
That reflects the story, which leaps between three different times, as a teen girl changes profoundly.
This time it’s Megan (played by Sadie Stanley, 21, who was Adam’s girlfriend Brea on “The Goldbergs”). In the summer of 1999, she’s a waitress and a brainy computer programmer, heading to a good college; she has a low-key life with her single mom and her platonic friends, including Luke (Griffin Gluck, 22), the easygoing son of a wealthy developer.
Suddenly wedged into this situation is Isabella, (Lexi Underwood, 19 who was Kerry Washington’s daughter in “Little Fire Everywhere” and Malia Obama in “The First Lady”). A rich exchange student with a wobbly past, she soon puts on a showy bikini and injects herself into Luke’s pool party.
Then the show starts leaping to the other two timelines – December (as nears “Y2K” changeover to the year 2000 ) and the following summer. Life darkens; people change.
Those times include a darker style to the filming, plus changes to the actresses’ clothes and hair. “I don’t know if I could have kept it straight if I didn’t have the three different looks,” Stanley said.
Megan slides quickly from sunny to goth. Isabella loses her big-hair flair. Luke stays sort of the same. “I wish I had a goth look,” Gluck said.
For him and for Underwood, the first part – sweet, small-town summers – required imagination. He grew up in Los Angeles, she grew up near Washington, D.C.; both were professional actors at 10.
Stanley, however, had some Megan-style teen years. She became an actress at 16; until then, she said, her life in Columbia, S.C., was uncluttered.
“I remember hanging out with my next-door neighbor Courtney every single day. We would make little movies videos and make little movies with our phones and ride our bikes in the neighborhood. It was all very normal, very cute, good times.”
Unlike the TV world, no one was murdered. “That we know of,” Gluck quickly interjected.
“Cruel Summer” is a reunion of his childhood role in “Private Practice.” In that one, Paul Adelstein and KaDee Strickland were his father and stepmother; this time, they’re his father and Megan’s mother.
That was sheer coincidence, producer Michelle Purple said, but it required some attitude adjustment. “Paul was tripping out that he (Gluck) was having a beer.”
Other adjustments involved timing. Many of the New Year’s Eve scenes, Gluck said, were filmed “when it got unbelievably hot and we were wearing four layers.”
By comparison, summer scenes were filmed in late winter/early spring in Vancouver, Canada. Those bikini scenes look joyous, but Underwood said they were shot “in a freezing cold pool.”
When the cameras turned off, Gluck said, “there were seven of us huddled around a single heater.” It was a reminder that summer – real or pretend – can be cruel.