The new Prime Video romantic drama Every Year After has all the hallmarks of shows from this genre: A waterfront location in Maine or Canada, someone coming back home after being away for years, a rekindled romance. But is it good?
Opening Shot: A woman stares in the mirror and puts on makeup as we hear her talk about not loving public speaking.
The Gist: Percy Fraser (Sadie Soverall) is the one making the speech, at an engagement party for her best friend Chantal (Aurora Perrineau) and her fiancé Drew (Karl Walcott). In the speech, Percy talks about how hard it is to find and hold onto love, as we see flashbacks of her in Barry’s Bay, British Colombia as a teen. She’s with Sam Florek (Matt Cornett), whom she always considered her soulmate. But things there ended badly and she left town 10 years ago, decamping to Seattle, where she works as a newspaper obituary writer and having casual sex with random guys. She also has panic attacks, brought on by how things ended between them.
Ostensibly, she does this because she doesn’t think she believes in love anymore, but Chantal knows otherwise. That night, as she’s about to sleep with Drew’s jerky half-brother, she gets a call from Barry’s Bay. It’s from Sam’s older brother Charlie (Michael Bradway), who has bad news: Charlie and Sam’s mother Sue (Elisha Cuthbert), has died after battling cancer for the past year. He invites her to come up for a memorial, and despite not having been to Barry’s Bay in a decade, Percy feels she has to go to honor a woman she felt was a second mother to her. She convinces Chantal to go with her.
Flash back to Summer, 2011: Percy (Juliette Hawk) is spending her first summer with her parents at Barry’s Bay. She goes to the lake on her first day there and sees Sam (Blue Clarke) and Charlie (Carson MacCormac) on a jetty in the middle of the water. She’s delighted but nervous when the boys come over and Charlie introduces her to Sam. They quickly become best friends, sharing Percy’s love of horror films, with Percy bonding quickly with their mother Sue.
In the present, Percy tries to keep a low profile, but in a small town like Barry’s Bay, that’s impossible. First she runs into Delilah Mason (Abigail Cowen), who has come back to town with her husband to purchase the big house on the block where her family used to stay, then Charlie. At the motel, she sees Jordie Lin (Joseph Chiu), another friend from back in the day, who pretends to barely recognize her. He’s the one who informs Sam that Percy is back in town. Sam is angry with Charlie for inviting her without asking him first, but when they see each other for the first time, the old chemistry is there.
Photo: Cate Cameron/Prime
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Amy B. Harris and Leila Gerstein, and based on Carley Fortune’s novel Every Summer After, Every Year After is like Virgin Riverand Sullivan’s Crossing mixed with The Summer I Turned Pretty.
Our Take: The best thing we can say about Every Year After is that it’s… fine. In many ways, it feels like a pretty standard romantic drama, with good-looking, mostly charming leads, a quaint small town near a body of water that’s either in Maine or one of the coasts of Canada, and enough secrets between everyone in that town to sustain multiple seasons.
The only real difference between this show and some of the ones we cited above is that there is a flashback component to it. While Percy navigates all of the emotional potholes of being back in Barry’s Bay after leaving a decade prior, we’re going to flash back to see just how she and Sam got close and started their intense relationship, and eventually what caused Percy to leave town and not come back.
The coming-of-age part of the show isn’t even all that unique, either; plenty of shows flash back to give viewers clues to how a now-broken romance developed, evolved and was eventually destroyed.
What’s going to keep viewers watching Every Year After, then? We do like both Soverall and Hawk as the adult and adolescent Percy, mainly because both actors show Percy as someone who is perpetually unsure of themselves but is open to the prospect of love. Even the seemingly cynical adult version of Percy is open, which is what Chatal tries to point out to her after Percy gets the news about Sue.
Like with many shows in this genre, the supporting players are often more interesting than the main couple, and we get that here. Perrineau is funny as the extremely supportive Chantal, who is a busy attorney but can just do her job via Zoom in order to go north with her friend, and Cowen is fun to watch as the friendly but scheming Delilah (whose name is a bit on the nose).
Photo: Justine Yeung/Prime Video
Performance Worth Watching: We’re intrigued by Elisha Cuthbert playing the determined and wise Sue, who is bringing up her boys on her own since their dad died, and who seems to have become a mentor for Percy. It will definitely show a side of Cuthbert we haven’t seen before.
Sex And Skin: Non in the first episode, but there may be some of both as the series goes along.
Parting Shot: Right after Percy and Sam reconnect in the kitchen of Sue’s tavern, Sam’s girlfriend Taylor (Roan Curtis) comes in.
Sleeper Star: Joseph Chiu is appropriately broish as Jordie, but we wonder if he’s going to get more involved in all the drama as things get more serious between Percy and Sam in the present day.
Most Pilot-y Line: Percy is actually short for Persephone, because, as she tells Sam after they first met, “My parents are both philosophy professors.” The more accurate statement is that she’s named Persephone because “my parents are characters on a TV show,” because that name feels like one only TV characters would give a kid.
Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s nothing revolutionary or even unique about Every Year After. But the cast is charming enough and the setting is pictureseque enough to make the show a pleasant distraction for fans of romantic dramas.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
