I quite enjoyed the first season of Amazon's "Cruel Summer" and was looking forward to this second run, so I'm disappointed that it doesn't work quite as well as the first one did.
In a coastal town, Isabelle (Lexi Underwood) arrives to live with the Landry family on an exchange year. Though initially resistant, she becomes best friends with Megan Landry (Sadie Stanley) and her circle of friends, particularly her childhood best friend Luke (Griffin Gluck). Six Months later, Luke and Isabelle are dating, which Megan has come to regret. At a social event, a video of Luke and Isabelle having sex is inadvertently shown to the group. Six months later, Luke is dead and the police want to talk to both Isabelle and Megan about a night at a cabin near where the body was found.
I said in my review of the first season that I thought the idea to anthologise but keep the central conceit of the series was a good one. I still think that, even though I don't think this story was a strong as the first one. I don't think its as prescriptive as saying that the six month jump as opposed to a year was the problem, but I did occasionally struggle to get exactly which timeframe we were in. I think it's more to do with the central crime, I think, rather than the jump length. I ended up watching it out of sense of obligation, rather than anticipation, which I didn't feel with the first run.
Performances are still good. Griffin Gluck is pretty much the only one of the kids that I knew from anything else, though there's a few of the adult cast that I recognised. I really liked the music choices. It's set around the Millennium and the tunes come from then.
If it comes back for the third season then I would probably watch it, but I'd hope for better than this.