You can catch of glimpse of a KY location in ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ season 3
There are plenty of questions to ask in season three of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” but here’s a new one to add to your list: “Was that Berea College?”
That’s right, Kentucky’s own Berea College is used as an exterior shot of the college the main characters are attending. You can spot it around 10 minutes into the third episode of season three, Berea College posted on social media.
The coming-of-age show follows Isabel (“Belly”) as she navigates high school and college, first love and heartbreak. Based on the trilogy of books with the same name by Jenny Han, the third season will be its last and follows Belly’s relationships with brothers Conrad and Jeremiah.
The show has been one of the top-viewed shows on Amazon Prime since it premiered in 2022.
While Berea was used for the outside of the school setting, most of the show was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, according to IMDb.
Berea College spokesperson Jodi Whitaker said it was a surprise to learn the school had appeared in the show.
No film crews came to campus campus, meaning the show purchased prerecorded video of Berea College, she said. That’s what appears in episode three.
New episodes are streaming weekly on Amazon Prime.
Other colleges in Kentucky have been used in movies and TV shows in recent years. In 2023, a made-for-tv movie was filmed at Eastern Kentucky University, and 2,400 students, faculty, staff and community members took part in filming as extras. Some students worked behind-the-scenes on the movie, “Killing All My Sisters.”
Several other TV shows have mentioned Kentucky schools, although weren’t filmed on location.
Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” is peppered with references to Lexington and Kentucky, including Henry Clay High School and Kentucky State University. The author of the book “The Queen’s Gambit,” which the show is based on, was Lexington native Walter Tevis. Most of the filming was done in Germany.
Additionally, “Call Me Kat,” which premiered in 2021, starred Mayim Bialik, a University of Louisville professor who quit her job to open a cat cafe in Louisville.