If The Summer I Turned Pretty gave you a sunburn of melodrama and a kitchen full of peaches, My Life With The Walter Boys hands you a thermos of cocoa, an apron and the chore list for the entire ranch - comforting, mildly sticky and somehow hard to put down.
The second season returns Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez) to the wide skies of Silver Falls after the cliffhanger that sent her back to New York, and what follows is a show that knows exactly what it is: a soap-tinged, family-first, love-triangle machine that prefers slow-burn familiarity over moral complexity. That certainty is both the series's strength and its Achilles' heel.
Season 2 opens with Jackie reluctantly heeding Katherine Walter's (Sarah Rafferty) invitation to come home. Katherine - warm, quietly authoritative and the show's best steadying force - has become the emotional lodestar, and Rafferty's performance is the rare piece of scenery the series never lets look flat.
Jackie returns into a household and a set of tensions that were frozen in awkward motion: Alex (Ashby Gentry), who drunkenly declared his love at Will's wedding, has changed after a summer working on a ranch and now radiates a new confidence; Cole (Noah LaLonde), who shared a goodbye kiss with Jackie before she fled, wants answers; and Jackie herself, carrying the residual weight of her parents' deaths, is trying to reassemble a life that will always contain grief.
The show treats that grief with respect more often than not; it's threaded through quiet moments, refracted in Jackie's reconnection with her mother's art and heritage, but it rarely allows that sorrow to rupture into anything messier than a consoling speech or a tender scene with Katherine. It's honest, but cautious.
Much of the season lives inside the central triangle, and here the series trips over a familiar problem: overfamiliarity. The push-pull between Jackie, Alex and Cole cycles through hurt, avoidance, and awkward proximity so many times that the emotional stakes sometimes feel worn thin.
Alex's coldness after his "glow-up," Cole's attempt to evolve beyond his bad-boy skin (complete with an improbable student-assistant-coach storyline), and Jackie's attempts (sincere if indecisive) to find herself are all logical continuations of season one.
Yet because the show keeps revisiting the same beats, the choices the characters make can feel more repetitive than revelatory. Credit where it's due: the three leads have grown into their roles, and their performances read as more layered now than in season one; chemistry fluctuates, notably stronger between Jackie and Cole, while Jackie and Alex's pairing often lands cooler by comparison.
The ensemble, as large as a small town, is both a blessing and a burden. When the writers give side players room - Cole's gradual acceptance of responsibility, Nathan (Corey Fogelmanis) exploring the school paper while navigating his own romantic complications with Skylar (Jaylan Evans), Danny (Connor Stanhope) and Erin (Alisha Newton) finding a tentative courtship - the series benefits from texture and warmth.
Other characters, however, are reduced to background motion. Parker (Alix West Lefler) and guidance counsellor Tara (Ashley Holliday Tavares) drift into near-irrelevance, and some arcs are shoehorned into episodes without the breathing room they need.
The show's appetite for romantic tension stretches beyond the core triangle into several lesser triangles (Alex/Kiley/Dylan, Nathan/Skylar/Zach, Cole/Danny/Erin), and the repeated use of secret kisses and overheard reveals grows tiresome, a soap shorthand that invites sighs more than genuine surprise.
On craft, the series sits squarely in the "cosy" lane. Production values are serviceable; there's a lived-in visual warmth to the ranch and small-town scenes, but at times the show feels economical next to Netflix's more polished cosy hits.
Some moments have the texture of earnest, low-budget drama - which is fine if you're buying into the show's handcrafted charm, but it occasionally undermines scenes that demand cinematic heft.
The writing swings between affectionate and corny: romantic lines often tip into cliche, and the show prefers neat emotional resolutions to messy, earned catharses.
That conservatism extends to cultural and thematic threads: Jackie's heritage and the series' Dia de los Muertos storyline are introduced with promise but handled with a light touch that stops short of meaningful interrogation.
When stacked against The Summer I Turned Pretty, My Life With The Walter Boys is a quieter cousin. TSIP leans into heightened teenage interiority and meme-ready moments; it's louder, more prone to raw, destabilising emotion, and built for the social-media age.
Walter Boys, by contrast, is tamer and more reassuring: where TSIP may leave you talking for days, Walter Boys is designed to be a comfortable companion, the sort of show that lives on nostalgia for large families, community rituals, and the safe turbulence of adolescent crushes.
That makes it ideal for younger teen viewers or anyone looking for earnest escapism. But if you came to it expecting TSIP's emotional risk-taking or narrative surprises, you may find it placid and predictable.
There are genuine pleasures here. Sarah Rafferty's Katherine grounds the series in a kind of grown-up empathy that many teen dramas lack. Cole's arc - from a flinty ex-athlete to someone making deliberate, adult choices about his future - is one of the season's most satisfying threads; a late-season decision he makes genuinely signals growth rather than performative contrition.
The community scenes, school shenanigans and familial rituals provide easy, comforting rhythms that make bingeing the show feel pleasantly undemanding.
But the season isn't without significant flaws: the repetitious handling of the central romance, the proliferation of half-baked side triangles, the tendency to tidy Jackie's grief too neatly, and an occasional visual thinness keep the show from transcending its formula.
It's earnest rather than ambitious, soothing rather than searing. The finale's cliffhanger lands with a jolt, predictable in a narratological sense, shocking in its execution, and it ensures the series will return for season 3 with plenty to untangle.
Ultimately, My Life With The Walter Boys Season 2 is exactly what its title promises: an intimate portrait of a sprawling family, romantic entanglements that will provoke sighs and shipping wars in equal measure, and the slow work of a teenager trying to reassemble herself.
If you want your teen romance wrapped in warmth, familial comfort, and a small-town aesthetic that rarely rocks the boat, you'll be satisfied.
If you want the peachy upheaval and emotional risk that made TSIP a cultural moment, you'll find Walter Boys agreeable company but not the thunderbolt.
Either way, it's a well-intentioned, occasionally moving ride that leaves you eager, if a little wary, for whatever the next season decides to do with its love triangles and its quieter, more promising human moments.
