Abstract
On 29 April 2020, the SVOD (for Subscription Video On Demand) platform Netflix released a new series in the "romantic drama" genre, whose original English title Summertime evokes the hoped-for or assumed international scope of such a product. In some countries, including France, it is known as Trois mètres au-dessus du ciel, thus emphasising the accepted heritage of the franchise on which it is based, which, between novels, films, musicals and other derivative products bearing the 3MSC brand, an acronym often used by its fandom, dominated the landscape of Italian pop culture in the 2000s. According to the presentation page on Netflix, Summertime (2020-2022) was inspired by Federico Moccia's "series of books" (Tre metri sopra il Cielo/Three Steps over Heaven (Moccia 1992) , Ho voglia di te/I Want You (Moccia 2017a) and Tre volte te/ Three Times You (Moccia 2017b)), preserving its general plot but mostly transposing it to the Adriatic coast of the Italian peninsula, over the course of three successive summers. Viewers may have difficulty forgetting the original work and/or the ensemble effect when watching this series, which proclaims its links with Moccia's literary works and the films of the filone giovanilistico (or youth-addressed cycle of films), such as the Italian Three Steps over Heaven by Luca Lucini (2004) and the sequel I Want You by Luis Prieto (2007) , its Spanish remakes Tres metros sobre el cielo and Tengo ganas de ti by Fernando González Molina (2010 and 2012) , and the French adaptation Ma première fois by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar (2011) . The teen movie all'italiana underwent a meteoric rise at the beginning of the twenty-first century, becoming a genuine epochal and societal phenomenon, a new cinematic 'object', even spreading to other media fields (Landron 2013) . This literary, cinematographic and theatrical trend, mainly aimed at a teenage and/or female audience and itself the heir to the American teen movie, was behind the creation of the Summertime series in 2020, which ended two years, three seasons and twenty-four episodes later. In the context of the features that make up the serial narrative, it is important to examine the evolution of the filone adolescenziale (youth-addressed cycle of films) from one medium to another, from one screen to another, and from one narrative system to another, in order to understand its adaptation to the codes of an era and the means by which it interacts with an audience identified at a given moment in time. This can be done by analysing the content and generic markers of the series, but also by observing the production conditions and reception by a community of viewers from the perspective of transnational distribution, with the birth or affirmation of new media figures. The aim is to understand how this audiovisual pop product combines a plot worthy of the most classic romcoms with an original form, to see how the serialised teen drama adapts to the times while presenting to different audiences a picture-postcard Italy, far removed from the canons of other successful and provocative series designed for a teenage audience, produced in Europe and broadcast by Netflix, such as Baby (2018 ( -2020 ( ), Elite (2018 ( -2024) ) or Sex Education (2019 Education ( -2023)) . By favouring a comparative approach between the models and the product studied, but also by positioning Summertime within the 'European television fiction renaissance' (Barra and Scaglioni 2020) and within the phenomenon of the 'internationalisation' of the Made in Italy audiovisual product (Scaglioni 2020) , the series helps to place contemporary Italian serial production within a context of exporting a 'brand Italia' (Benvenuti et al. 2020 ) and a-perhaps F. LANDRON artificial?-Italian way of life. These considerations will undoubtedly help us to better understand the series Summertime as an excellent example of contemporary Italian youth television.
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