Try getting into this inner-city pub on a Wednesday night. You’ll have to fight hundreds of women first

1 week ago 3

Sitting down at a pub for some mid-week grub is a time-honoured tradition that’s united many a university student, tourist, footy fan, office worker, tradie and more across the country.

But those looking for a table – or even a sliver of bar on which to rest their beer – at Sydney’s inner-city The Chippo Hotel on Wednesday nights may find themselves politely moved on. There is, thanks to the ingenuity of publican Bhavani Baumann’s 18-year-old daughter, simply no room for walk-ins.

Publican Bhavani Baumann shuts down the ground floor of The Chippo Hotel every Wednesday evening for hundreds of women of all ages – and some reluctant boyfriends – to watch new episodes of teen drama The Summer I Turned Pretty.

As soon as the clock strikes 3pm, Baumann’s staff starts what’s become a “bit of a mission”, and the highlight of her week: they clear out the venue’s street storey, line up a seemingly endless number of chairs, set up a projector and put custom-made desserts in the bar fridge.

By the end of the night, they would have hosted around 400 people of all ages (overwhelmingly women, though inevitably some reluctant boyfriends as well) across three booked-out showings of Amazon Prime Video’s teen drama series The Summer I Turned Pretty.

“My whole thing at The Chippo is community, and it’s especially nice for girls to come together and scream,” says Baumann. “You feel quite exhilarated by the end of it. It’s so emotional.”

It was Baumann’s daughter, Coco, who gave her mother the idea to host the free sessions, which start at 6.30pm but see fans pack the pub almost two hours before to try and nab a front-row seat underneath the four big screens.

What follows is four hours of tears, screams, gasps, wolf whistles, and a sea of waving red (usually for Jeremiah Fisher, played by Gavin Casalegno) or green flags (mainly for Conrad Fisher, played by Christopher Briney).

The flags and The Chippo Hotel’s episode-inspired menu – one week, Coco based a sweet on the two-tier dark chocolate wedding cake with raspberry coulis and a mirror glaze that caused tension between Jeremiah and his then-fiancee Belly Conklin (Lola Tung) – may be unique to the pub, but The Summer I Turned Pretty watch parties are packing out venues from Newtown to Naarm to New York.

Screams, sobs, cheers and chuckles reverberate across the ground floor of The Chippo Hotel for hours on Wednesday nights. Here, fans wave red flags and wince at Jeremiah Fisher’s (Gavin Casalegno) actions in episode nine of season three.

“You can watch this at home on your computer, but being amongst people who are feeling the same … crying and laughing and screaming together … it just creates a cultural moment,” says Brittany Ferdinands, co-founder of the Glitter Gel Pen Book Club and fan of the show. “But also this feeling of community, which sometimes in adulthood is hard to access.”

Ferdinands, her sister Ellese Ferdinands, and their mutual best friend, Katrina Chan, formed the Sydney-based social club for women in their 20s and 30s in June, and quickly found their meet-ups sidetracked by passionate discussions about the show.

“We all were talking about these characters like we know them personally,” says Ferdinands. “It’s so nostalgic … the [young adult] genre, it really sticks with you because you remember those feelings and you can transfer them to your later experiences as well. Without the [young adult] genre, everything is just so serious.”

They decided to host a watch party for the series finale at Buddy’s Bar in Newtown. It sold out in two days, and the second session they released to satisfy their “humungous” waitlist followed less than 24 hours later.

“I feel so bad because I just want everyone to enjoy this cultural moment together,” says Ferdinands. “But we can’t do another session. It’ll be too late in the night.”

Belly (Lola Tung), Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and Conrad (Christopher Briney) in season three of The Summer I Turned Pretty.

It could be argued that, in terms of difficulty and excitement, securing spots at The Summer I Turned Pretty season three finale watch parties are on par with scoring tickets to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which crashed merchant websites and saw fans camp outside Ticketek offices overnight. Almost as soon as a new watch party at a new venue makes tickets available, they’re snapped up.

The Chippo Hotel’s September 17 event has been fully booked since early August (Baumann gets caps-locked messages every day from people begging to be let in). One Melbourne watch party, hosted at Hickens Hotel this week by Luisa Sanchez, requires constant vigilance over a Facebook group for the small chance a spot becomes available. The waitlist for Sanchez’s September 17 finale watch party, which has yet to confirm its location, is already full – but fans can join the waitlist’s waitlist.

“Girls, we’re yearning for this type of community,” says Ferdinands. “I feel like Millennials and the older Gen Zs, there was such a rush to grow up, and it was so lame to love what you love.”

“Young women are such a powerful consumer group and it’s always been dismissed. I’m so happy that there’s this massive movement leaning into it.”

Brittany Ferdinands

Ferdinands remembers loving “girly things” such as Swift while growing up, and having no space to be “loud and proud” about them because “society was telling us that … our feminine interests were lowbrow.”

Australian playwright Yve Blake touched on this in 2019, to critical acclaim, with her sardonic Fangirls, a musical inspired by the mocking labels (“crazy”, “hysterical”) used by mainstream media to describe One Direction fans’ responses to Zayn Malik’s departure from the band.

Four years later, Margot Robbie’s Barbie demonstrated the power of women and girls as a consumer group, turning the world’s box office hot pink with a cool $US1.4 billion ($2.2 billion) after a globe-trotting, method-dressing press tour that doubled as city-by-city fan events.

The commercial power of the fangirl

Its commercial success prompted the Golden Globes to create a new category – the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award – in 2024, which it won. Though director Greta Gerwig and Robbie were notably snubbed at that year’s Oscars two months later, streamers clearly took note of Warner Bros’ marketing strategy.

“We’re living in an era at the moment where fandom is something you can’t ignore, and it’s becoming increasingly more and more valuable,” says Kate Pattison, who is a fan studies PhD candidate at RMIT University.

In the past, Pattison says, there was a divide between fans and traditional media companies producing the content, who were concerned about copyright violations and had no need to rely on fan endorsements to succeed. Now, in an ecosystem fuelled by fickle eyes that shut when subscription prices rise, loyal customers in the form of fans hosting events and advertising the product on social media are priceless.

Brittany Ferdinands, Ellese Ferdinands and Katrina Chan formed the Glitter Gel Pen Book Club in June. Their fourth event will be a The Summer I Turned Pretty season three series finale watch party, which sold out in days.

“We have so much choice when it comes to things that we’re listening to, watching, whatever it might be,” says Pattison. “Now [they’re] competing for attention, having fans creating content off their own back, free of charge because they love the show, obviously is a huge benefit to these production companies.”

In the same way costume-making and practising fan-created chants became almost a prerequisite to attending Swift’s $US2.1 billion ($3.1 billion) Eras Tour, The Summer I Turned Pretty’s watch parties are a subculture of their own.

Footage of fan reactions to big moments – such as when Belly thinks about her past romance with Conrad while dancing at her bachelorette before her wedding to his brother – rack up hundreds of thousands of views on social media.

Videos where fans edit scenes from the show to popular songs, which may have formerly sparked copyright concerns, are also being embraced by Prime Video.

“That type of content is what [social media] platforms highlight in the algorithms,” says Pattison. “So it does make sense if you’re Amazon, if you’re Disney, to really lean into that. And rather than telling people to stop using copyrighted content to make their own things, they’re encouraging it. They’re commenting on it.”

Streamers are not just commenting on fan-created social media content – they are taking a page out of their communities’ books, and facilitating opportunities to celebrate their shows in-person as well as online.

In April 2024, Netflix notably brought Bridgerton season three leads Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton, alongside showrunner Jess Brownell, to Bowral in NSW’s Southern Highlands, for a week-long press tour and ticketed fan celebration. By July 2024, it had reached the streamer’s top 10 most popular English-language series in the world.

Less than a month ago, the cast of Wednesday – season one is the most-watched Netflix series of all time – flew to Sydney for an immersive fan festival that saw Cockatoo Island completely taken over for the better part of a week. Season two has been in the top three most-watched Netflix shows in Australia for the past four weeks.

Two weeks before Wednesday Island, The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Tung, Rain Spencer (who plays Taylor Jewel), and creator Jenny Han came to the Emerald City for a live media and fan book club event, which Prime Video also used to advertise the upcoming Our Fault film.

Season three of The Summer I Turned Pretty has 40 per cent more viewers, according to Prime Video, than season two, and the audience is triple that of season one’s. Among women aged 18 to 34, it’s the streamer’s most-watched television season of all time. Encouraging fan culture is clearly paying off (though Prime Video notably was forced to remind some fans that insults hurled towards actors for the characters’ on-screen actions were inappropriate).

Olivia Vickery debriefs with friends each week after watching The Summer I Turned Pretty.

Numbers and commercial strategy are nebulous concepts for fans such as 24-year-old Olivia Vickery from Melbourne – or even 28-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who shared a photo with a peach on Instagram, referencing a scene between Belly and Conrad, with a note that she’s “counting the minutes” until the next episode – who view it as an opportunity to bond with friends and forget life’s hardships.

“We watch it all and come back and debrief,” says Vickery, who has a group chat about the show with her closest friends.

“It just makes it more fun and enjoyable when you’re talking about it with your friends,” says Vickery, who is firmly on Team Conrad, which she attributes to the fact that he’s a man written by a woman who knows what women want in a partner.

“We’re like, ‘Oh my god, what was this? Why didn’t [Belly] do that?’ It’s so interesting to talk about the little hidden Easter eggs [Han] puts throughout the show, so we’re like ‘Oh my god, did you see the flowers are turning red? They’re no longer blue’. And we go through every little dot point.”

Ferdinands, meanwhile, sees beauty in embracing frivolity for one hour a week.

“As women, there is such a pressure to be so productive and to hustle and to do everything … and we are pushing back against that,” she says.

Her sentiment is clearly shared across oceans. The morning we spoke, Ambar Lee – influencer wife of YouTuber and investor Caspar Lee – launched The Fangirl Nation in London, her version of Ferdinands’ Glitter Gel Pen Book Club.

“The idea that every hour of our lives needs to be optimised for productivity … we’re reclaiming and celebrating femininity in ways that were once dismissed as frivolous.”

The Summer I Turned Pretty (season three) is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Nine, the owner of this masthead, also owns Stan.

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