A fast-talking single mom has won me over again. A woman named Summer England, who has amassed more than 285,000 followers on TikTok, has the cottagecore aesthetic of a young librarian, the verbal acuity of a Gilmore Girl, and the wide-eyed, innocent face of a romantic comedy heroine. Her era is Folklore. And recently, she started dating her neighbor and telling us all the deets, which has left thousands of viewers like me rapt, craving her parceled-out updates.
What seems like a simple storytelling experiment on TikTok, an app known for its honest confessionals, might signal a trend of how best to keep an audience engaged in romance. Packaged for Gen Z with short bursts of plot and character development, England’s form of storytelling—which is composed of tiny morsels of a bigger story told in two-to-three minute sections—increases suspense and buy-in in a world where there’s so much content, it’s hard to stand out. Instead, the popularity of something is the best measure of success.
I didn’t find Summer England on the clock app, nor did I seek out this kind of serialized content. Summer England’s videos found me via the uber-powerful TikTok algorithm. TikTok knows me better than anyone: It helps me manage mental health conditions I’m not even diagnosed with (yet), shows me all the musical theater clips I crave (see: “Roxanne opt up”), and somehow knew that I’d like to watch the story of a single mom (like me) who talks really fast (like me) and is a theater person (like me) who takes us along on her journey toward self-love via romantic love (like—maybe someday—me).
The serialized video rom-com is not a new thing, having previously found popularity via the 2012 YouTube series, “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.” But England’s “The Neighbor Saga,” as she calls it, appears to be the first of its kind on the clock app. Her rom-com has all the pieces of a Meg Ryan-starring classic: England herself is in her twenties, blonde, and has a huge smile. She dresses, as she says in one video, like a Hobbit, and she loves all things cozy. Or, at least, that’s the character she’s presented us with. As viewers come to learn in the videos–and as I did in a recent interview with her—there’s far more to her than the presentation.
On March 27, England began the “saga” with a video of herself knitting while complaining about her neighbor bringing home a new girl every night. It’s a great set up for an enemies-to-lovers story, one she’s reupped for each installment: They get to know each other, realize they’re both actors, and begin to have a relationship. Following that first video, which she later said she initially filmed a year earlier, England stitched together highlights from previous videos (“that neighbor saw my boobs;” “So I did kiss my neighbor”) before sharing the next segment of the romance, which took place mostly in her small-town Virginia neighborhood.
The story had enough conflict to keep the stakes high, because England claimed that the neighbor (who remains nameless throughout the adventure) was slated to move back to New York at the end of the year after his current acting contract was up. Since she didn’t want to try long distance, they either would have to break up, or she’d have to ask him to stay in her small town. The whole story was purportedly true. Somewhere along this gripping adventure, I became obsessed. If England didn’t show up on my feed first thing, I sought her out, desperate to hear the next twist in the love story.
At first, followers thought England was telling us these stories as they were happening to her in real time. There was a hubbub when we, those who weren’t necessarily following along since the beginning, realized that the events of the saga actually took place in 2021-22, many months before England began the series in the spring of ’23. While some people wanted the mystery of both England and the audience not knowing what was going to happen, others felt comforted that England wasn’t telling us her story day-by-day. The time delay worked to her advantage, making England’s one-minute confessionals appear to follow the arc of a romantic novel, a genre which requires a happily ever after (or HEA). People hoped this would be the case, but this was a story based in reality, England claimed; thus, we tuned in to see what actually happened between these two star-crossed lovers. This exciting twist on the rom-com takes our love of reality television and narrative storytelling and combines them into a whole new form of media.
England, a trained actor, singer, dancer, and storyteller, is also a part of BookTok, where creators talk about and promote books on the app. BookTokkers’ taste in literature tends toward mainstream romance, like the Emily Henry novels or A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR, to those in the know). As such, England is well-versed in crafting a romantic narrative from a structural standpoint as well as a performance one. Not only does she know that a romance requires a HEA, but England also recognized that it often has specific beats along the way. These usually include an “A” plot, telling what actually happens and resolving the external conflict, and a “B” plot, which entails what happens to the main character to make them dynamic and heroic, thus solving the internal conflict. A character must start out flawed and self-sabotaging and come out able to love another person and themselves, too.
All of these elements are in “The Neighbor Saga.” However, the story of the neighbor didn’t start out as a fully formed feature.
“I just posted a draft one night,” England tells The Daily Beast in an interview about the series’ origins. She wondered “how storytelling fares on this platform.” From there, she says, “Around the third or fourth story, I realized, ‘Oh, this is working,’ because I am embodying the version of myself of the past. Instead of offering backstory, I’m just telling you the story,” as if it were happening now. England’s storytelling choice is the key to the success of the rom-com since it feels “in the moment.”
“Because I didn’t know where [the story] was going, it felt very organic,” England says. “I didn’t realize until the middle of it what was happening,” in terms of an internal character’s arc. The main internal conflict—a single mom learning how to overcome fear to find love—came out in the retelling. She says, “My realization that I didn’t know how to be on the other side of fear happened on camera,” she explained. “Even though [the story of what happened with my neighbor] was in the past, I was still processing emotions live through my camera.”
Still, some viewers may question the authenticity of England’s perfectly calibrated, rom-com-ready performance. “Every single aspect of that is all me,” she says. “If I were trying to be a romantic comedy trope, I would not write a character like myself, because I made awful, chaos-monster decisions. I could not write that into a book, because [readers] would think it’s not believable whatsoever,” she says. But the “reality” of her quirky personality and human mistakes made the story all the more engaging.
The kind of pathos her character growth inspired really resonated with viewers. It’s also kept them watching: “The Neighbor Saga” is now 66 parts long (and counting). England tells The Daily Beast that, during one three-week period in the midst of the story, she gained 200,000 followers. The huge influx was likely due to the magic of the algorithm, which promotes content once someone likes a video, perpetuating a user getting a similar type of content or videos from the same person once they’ve liked another of their videos—hence the app diagnosing me with a developmental disorder since I messaged my sister a video of the symptoms once and sending me England’s videos unprompted after I liked a couple.
As for what continues to draw folks in, England chalked it up to the series’ everyday, relatable setting. Her takeaway as a teacher and storyteller, she says, is to lean into stories about real lives.
“The daily things, the mundane things—that is beauty,” she says. “You living your life, and getting up in the morning, and brushing your teeth, that’s awesome. That’s being human. Love will find its way in through those cracks. You as a person is the best main character story of all time, because it’s yours.”
England’s storytelling and success couldn’t arrive at a more opportune moment. The romantic comedy of the ’90s is dead. Mainstream romance novels, however, have never been more popular and widely appealing. Gone are the cheesy covers featuring windswept maidens in long dresses, held aloft by Fabio on a white horse. Now, romance is the highest-earning genre of fiction, raking in $1.44 billion in revenue a year as of the end of 2022, with a 52-percent growth from previous years. Romance is featured in end caps in books stores right next to the Pulitzer Prize nominees, sporting bright, illustrated covers. Sex sells, obviously, and our shame around that seems to have dissipated.
Yet TikTok is notoriously prudish. You can’t say a number of words without getting flagged or “shadow banned.” Some of the terms the platform deems offensive and that cannot appear verbally or in captions include: “sex” and references to anatomy or acts; cuss words; and “killed,” which has led to the annoyingly pervasive use of “unalived,” as in “Harry Potter’s parents were unalived by Voldemort.” England’s story could have been told as “smut,” as she calls sexy romantic fiction, with euphemisms in place of anything too R-rated. Instead, she went the way of the “old” rom-coms and kept the bedroom off-stage—appropriately in line with the average TikTok user’s expectations.
This choice was deliberate. While “there were plenty of steamy scenes,” she says, “I wanted to make sure it was very exciting and appealing to people who are dating in their mid to late twenties. That’s such a rat race. We’re allowed to have fun flirty times.” Keeping the story PG-13 made it just tantalizing enough for those of us who may not want every detail of someone’s whirlwind will-they-won’t-they.
Without giving away the resolution to the “will-they-won’t they,” because you should go enjoy it for yourself, “The Neighbor Saga” follows a satisfying arc befitting a full-length book or movie, especially if she’s able to flesh out the events surrounding the main plot: her life as a single mom and actor, and some side characters like her sister and the “fun sock guy” foil. But, unlike with fiction, the message of England’s story hits harder because it really happened to her.
“Really good love does exist,” she says. “Your rom-com love absolutely is out there. No matter how sucky your life and your love has been up to that point, have hope, ’cause I didn’t. I had no hope, even when I had it right in front of me, but I got out of my own way.”
England’s plans for “The Neighbor Saga” are currently under wraps, but she assures us the story isn’t over. As for me as a single mom/theater person/person with a lot of “relationship trauma,” I suppose the lesson is that, in order to overcome my own fears, I need to live like a main character in a romantic comedy.
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