'Forever Summer: Hamptons' focuses on locals' point of view

It's hot in the Hamptons, both on the beach and on TV, where no fewer than four current reality shows are set in that East End enclave: This year's "Selling the Hamptons" and "Serving the Hamptons" on Discovery+, "Summer House," which Bravo has renewed for a seventh season, and now "Forever Summer: Hamptons," premiering early Friday on Prime Video.

"The Hamptons is kind of a special and unusual place and it's so exclusive and it has such a status in and of itself that I think that people are just fascinated with the cartoonish wealth of it," suggests Aaron Rothman, 44, an executive producer and showrunner of the new reality-TV series — noting that there is a wide income disparity between the locals and the visitors, reflected somewhat on the show. 

Which, he maintains, is not piggybacking on the other reality series, saying this show grew out of Prime Video's young-adult fiction series "The Summer I Turned Pretty." Amazon Studios, which produces both, "was, like, 'Is there some way we could maybe pair it with something tonally like it in the nonfiction space?' It's been pretty fertile to have something in that space," he says.

The cast of "Forever Summer: Hamptons" is slightly older than the 16-year-old heroine of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" — late teens or early 20s, most of them native Hamptonites. The show finds these young locals interacting with the summer crowd of tourists, rich weekenders and what the show calls "cidiots" — the "city idiots" who help Hamptons businesses make the bulk of their annual revenue but who also exasperate the year-round crowd.

"It's a longtime term," assures Westhampton's Avery Solomon, now 20, one of the primary cast members. "I feel like it was first used just to describe their driving, because you can spot them, whether it's the flashy car or whatever," says the Westhampton High School graduate and now Tulane University student, the daughter of clinical psychologist Diane Brooks and teacher-sculptor Steven Solomon. "But they're also just the most reckless drivers. They'll be the ones to cut you off and then you're, like, 'Oh, a cidiot.' "

Among the many other cast members are Sag Harbor's Habtamu "Habs" Coulter and Shannon Sloane, East Hampton's Frankie Hammer, Westhampton's Emelye Ender, Westhampton Beach's Hunter Hulse and Reid Rubio — and Ilan Luttway from New York City, a "cidiot" and, judging from early in the series, the show's designated villain.

"Yes, he was definitely set up in that way," agrees Rothman. "In a lot of ways he can't get out of his own way." But, the producer argues, "He's not quite the designated villain. I think he handles a couple of pretty significant problems in a way that makes me really glad he was part of the show."

Coulter, 19 — who at age 4½ was adopted from Ethiopia with his younger brother Lire by tutor Erin O'Connor and her ex-husband, real estate professional Alex Coulter — recalls of the shoot last summer that, "I had history with some of [the cast] because they went to my high school" — Pierson High, in Sag Harbor — "and they weren't very nice to me when I was a freshman. But I didn't have any issues with them now. They had issues with each other, and I was the one trying to resolve them."

All eight episodes drop Friday.