Because with Netflix dropping season three of My Life With the Walter Boys, fans will once again watch Nikki Rodriguez's Jackie attempt to determine if rebellious jock Cole (Noah LaLonde) or his more cerebral brother Alex (Ashby Gentry) is the love of her teenage life.
Loosely based on Ali Novak's book series of the same name, the teen drama follows Jackie as she attempts to heal from the sudden loss of her parents and sister.
With her mom's college bestie Katherine Walter (Suits' Sarah Rafferty) named her legal guardian, the high schooler uproots her life in New York City to move in with Katherine, her husband George (Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum Marc Blucas), their daughter, seven sons and two nephews on a sprawling ranch in a small, fictional Colorado town.
"The first thing that really attracted me to it was the part of Jackie and the love triangle between Jackie, Alex and Cole," showrunner Melanie Halsall explained to TheWrap ahead of the series' 2023 premiere, "but also the idea that she’d come from New York and gone to Colorado."
As such, "It was a really rich world for me, and it felt authentic, but at the same time very warm," she continued. "I could see immediately that that would be resonant for an audience."
And though it's unlikely our will-they-or-won't-they queries will be slaked until the series comes to a close, fans are already quite besotted.
With each of the first two seasons reaching No. 1 in the streamer's Global Top 10, its garnered 130 million views between its 2023 premiere and the end of last year. And season four—set for a 2027 release—is already in the works.
So, while you wait to see just who Jackie may ride off into the sunset with, we've lassoed a number of behind-the-scenes secrets straight from the cast.
1. Author Ali Novak was just 15 years old when she penned My Life With the Walter Boys, the first in her YA series, in 2010. And when showrunner Melanie Halsall—head of development for iGeneration Studios, which produced the Kissing Booth trilogy—went hunting for more teen material, she discovered the story on reading website Wattpad.
"I could see straight away that it could be a TV series," Halsall told The Hollywood Reporter. While reading it, she added, "it reminded me of the Gilmore Girls world of Stars Hollow. Those kinds of books are a little bit like unicorns; they’re quite hard to find."
2. That being said, she wasn't afraid to veer off script a bit. For starters, with the strong chemistry amid the cast, "it didn’t make sense for them to be ragging on her quite so much as they continue to do in the book," Halsall told THR. "They prank her quite relentlessly [and] ruthlessly, and I felt that made the characters seem unsympathetic."
Overall, she added, "We amalgamated characters. We changed characters. We added people to give us a broader range of things we could explore."
3. It helped that they "hit the jackpot" when it came to their stars, she noted to THR. Casting took place in 2020, largely over Zoom.
Picked to play Jackie—the NYC teen who loses her parents and sister in a car crash and relocates to small town Colorado to live with her mom’s bestie Katherine Walter (Sarah Rafferty)—Nikki Rodriguez had appeared in Netflix's 2018 series On My Block. Noah LaLonde, tapped to play one of Jackie's love interests, Cole, similarly had just a few entries on IMDB while his onscreen romantic rival Ashby Gentry's biggest credit before landing the role of Alex was an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?
"They weren’t super experienced, and they all just kind of fell into this brilliant ensemble of their own where they became great friends," Halsall noted to THR. "All of our cast have great chemistry. They love being here. They love being together. They support each other so well. They all kind of glow on screen."
4. While the town of Silver Falls, Colo. is fictional, they do film at an actual ranch. "It is a huge ranch," Gentry raved in a 2025 video for Tudum of the expansive 28,000-acre CL Ranch. "It's all the real deal. No green screen on this set."
5. And off-camera, they make the most of the set. "We'll walk around," Gentry told Tudum. "We'll climb on stuff. Apple baseball. We will make TikToks. We will tell jokes. You know, like, what don’t we do?"
6. FWIW, Rodriguez totally gets why Jackie is torn between the two brothers. "What Alex gives to Jackie is that he makes her feel like she does belong," the actress explained to Tudum ahead of season two's August 2025 premiere. "He makes Jackie feel welcome, and she should be here." Cole, meanwhile, "is a little bit more like, 'Well, what do you want? Maybe you should explore that.'"
7. While rumors that Rodriguez is dating LaLonde IRL—after the two walked several red carpets together—could be chalked up to overeager Jackie-and-Cole shipping by fans, a 2025 TikTok Rodriguez posted of LaLonde scooping her up with one arm may be seen as a hard launch.
However, LaLonde seemed to shoot down the speculation, telling Teen Vogue that August, "It's funny that people are so presumptuous!" They had simply spied a clip of Lili Reinhart doing the trend with The Love Hypothesis co-star Tom Bateman, he explained, "So the first thing that came in our mind was like, 'Oh, let's do it with our costar.' We like to have fun on TikTok."
8. They were also happy to lean in when Gentry suggested they dress up as the trio from Challengers for castmate Jaylan Evans' 2024 Halloween party. "When he said it, I was like, 'How did I not think of this?'" Rodriguez told Tudum. "Because Halloween is my favorite holiday, I'd been talking about dressing up all month."
After an hour of browsing a Goodwill store in Calgary, they pulled it together. "It was definitely a team effort," said Gentry of the end result, which Rodriguez shared on TikTok. "The churros were Noah's idea, and we got them from Subway right before. Nikki drew the 'I Told Ya' onto my shirt."
9. Jackie may have struggled to earn her driver's license in season two, but Rodriguez actually cruised through the process. "I was surprisingly a pretty good driver," she told Tudum. "I've somehow gotten worse."
Though she'd attribute at least part of that to having to drive stick: "It felt like a sheer panic attack every time I did it—no acting involved."
10. Similarly, Gentry really took the reins when Alex trained to ride broncs. "I know all the steps. I know how to measure reins. I know about saddle and boot types," he told Tudum. "Both the riders and the horses are athletes, and I have a lot of respect for them."
11. LaLonde didn’t have to work all that hard to get his head in the game when it came to Cole's football career-ending injury. Though he made the choice to stop playing hockey on his own, going on to coach his cousin, "it was always tough," he explained to Tudum. "I didn't feel like I got everything I wanted out of my career. But at the same time, should all that time, energy, and love that I spent cultivating my own career go to waste? Or should I allow that to live on in the form of guidance for somebody else?"
12. Yes, they love a good cliffhanger, acknowledged Halsall. After the first two seasons ended with major confessions of love, plus a medical emergency for Katherine's husband George (Marc Blucas), season three climaxes with yet another major kiss and a car accident.
"Obviously, what you want to do at the end of a season is give the audience something to hope for," shared Halsall. "You want to leave the audience wanting more. You want to leave the audience desperate to see the next episode, the next season."
13. While Halsall doesn’t know when the series will end—season four is already slated for 2027—she knows how it will all wrap up. Mostly.
"I definitely have a story in mind," she told THR. "Obviously things adapt and change while you’re writing. But the overall sense of where we’ll end up remains more or less the same."
14. As for who Jackie might ride off into the sunset with, they "wanted to make sure that both boys were absolutely viable candidates for romance and for Jackie," Halsall told The Wrap in 2023, "so we wanted both of them to be just as sexy, just as cool. They're very different. They both have absolute qualities that would make perfect, brilliant boyfriends."