It’s a truth universally acknowledged that summer is a season of romance. Full of long days, lingering sunsets, warm beaches, and often powered by a sense of nostalgia for the freedom and adventure of our younger days, it’s a season when anything seems possible, and the time is always right to fall in love. Or, at least, that’s clearly what Prime Video wants you to think. Hot on the heels of its hit college romance, “Off Campus,” comes “Every Year After,” another eight-part book adaptation that leans hard into many of the most familiar relationship tropes of the genre, all limned in the light of a magical summer sun.
Unfortunately, however, if you’re a romance fan looking for the playful charm of “Off Campus” or even the steamy yearning of “Heated Rivalry,” you won’t find either here. “Every Year After” skews decidedly more romantic drama than lighthearted rom-com, following its characters across two separate timelines as they make objectively ridiculous decisions, refuse to communicate clearly, and obsess about each other for reasons the show never fully bothers to flesh out.
Its dual timeline format means that the show often finds itself stuck in a strange storytelling limbo, with one half of its plot feeling fairly YA in tone, complete with high school-aged characters and typical coming-of-age problems, while the other is distinctly more New Adult, featuring more obviously grown-up concerns all wrapped up in the lingering emotional damage of youth. The two don’t mesh well—particularly because the show bounces back and forth between them so often—and the result is a series that feels weirdly directionless, paying lip service to ideas like character development without actually earning most of its various twists.
Based on the book Every Summer After by popular romance author Carley Fortune, the show certainly has the prerequisite seasonal vibes down. Set in the picturesque Canadian town of Barry’s Bay, it positively oozes summer atmosphere, from its glittering lake and lush forests to quaint shops and residences. It’s also the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else, a warm and close-knit community where its residents support each other, but where they’re also fully up to speed on the minutiae of everyone else’s business.
The story follows Persephone “Percy” Fraser (Sadie Soverall), who spends every summer of her teenage years at her family’s cottage in Barry’s Bay, where she befriends her next-door neighbors, brothers Sam (Matt Cornett) and Charlie Florek (Michael Bradway). An awkward, somewhat lonely teen who loves horror movies, the Floreks help bring her out of her shell, particularly her younger brother Sam, who becomes her best friend.
As the summers pass, their relationship deepens and evolves, ultimately blossoming into a (surprisingly cute) romance. Concurrently, the series’s second timeline follows Percy as an adult, as she returns to Barry’s Bay for a memorial service and comes face to face with Sam, now an ex from whom she’s been estranged for the past ten years. How did their relationship fall apart? Who are they to one another now? And is there any hope for a second chance at first love?
These are all questions that “Every Year After” attempts to answer by way of an overly convoluted narrative format that winds the two separate timelines through and around each other. Sam and Percy’s youthful romance is intercut with scenes from their later adult lives, as her return to Barry’s Bay stirs up a lot of painful memories, largely surrounding a vague yet constantly referenced terrible mistake Percy once made that seemingly drove her and Sam apart.
Unfortunately, the relationship between Percy and Sam is actually the series’s weakest element. Soverall and Cornett’s damp chemistry never truly catches fire, and the convoluted web of break-ups and betrayals that unfold between them often seems like nothing so much as a fairly cogent argument about why they shouldn’t be together. (Sam seems to be a truly terrible boyfriend a lot of the time.) It also doesn’t help that, beyond a few helpful title cards and the occasional timely needle drop, there is precious little to help delineate where in the pair’s relationship timeline various scenes take place, or how the characters have changed in the gaps between them.
Fortune’s book is a story of regrets, second chances, and coming to terms with your past. Yet this adaptation often skews younger than its source material in ways that don’t really serve the larger story it’s trying to tell. The flashbacks to Percy and Sam’s summers together take place from the pair’s first meeting when they’re just thirteen, all the way to their final summer together at eighteen.
The Sam and Percy of the present-day timeline are grown adults in their thirties, ostensibly meant to have gained some of the perspective that comes with maturity. Yet, while “Every Year After” has plenty of drama and emotional angst, it doesn’t always feel as though the adult Sam and Percy are actually all that different from their high school selves, no matter how much time has passed. (Sam and Percy certainly haven’t learned any lessons about communication; that much is clear.)
The show is at its most compelling in its early episodes, which detail the origin story of Percy and Sam’s friendship, a warm and accepting bond that grows stronger in the sunshine alongside the lake. Young actors Juliette Hawk and Carson MacCormac, who play the young teenage versions of Percy and Sam, respectively, are adorably awkward in a way that makes it almost impossible not to root for their romance. Friends-to-lovers is an exceptionally popular trope for a reason, and, at least in its earliest episodes, “Every Year After” works to make their youthful connection feel realistic.
Unfortunately, that same care doesn’t often carry over to the pair’s adult storyline, where character development is in fairly short supply, and we’re forced to rely on exposition to fill in fairly important gaps of feeling and motivation. It’s also entirely too long, with episodes that simply repeat many of the same narrative beats without offering any new information or perspective.
To their credit, the cast tries their best. Soverall, in particular, makes for a compelling lead, and does some excellent work opposite Aurora Perrineau and Abigail Cowen, as Percy’s past and present best friends, who both have problems of their own to work through. And, of course, there’s Barry’s Bay itself, the sparkling locale that seems to reshape and reinvent everyone who steps within its borders, and is practically a character in its own right.
Still, “Every Year After” is a deeply frustrating watch for many reasons, but mostly because it so clearly didn’t have to be this way. There are moments sprinkled throughout the show’s eight episodes that hint at something deeper, richer, and more emotionally complex underneath all the unnecessary narrative flourishes, plot padding, and pacing problems. Should Prime Video choose to adapt the next novel in Fortune’s series, let’s hope the streamer finds a way to let that better version shine.
All eight episodes screened for review. Premieres June 10 on Prime Video.
