In a way, you can’t blame Prime Video for wanting to make “Every Year After.”
The book it’s based on — Carley Fortune’s “Every Summer After” — was a smash in the world of beach-read romances, selling more than a million copies to readers and BookTok fanatics who wished they could be whisked away for a breezy Canadian summer of love. The general vibe of the story is pretty familiar territory to Prime Video as well, with Fortune’s tale of a high schooler palling around with two floppy haired brothers in a resort community hewing almost uncomfortably close to another of the streamer’s swoony sensations, “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”
And yet, despite all its bonafides, everything about “Every Year After” just feels decidedly uninspired. The settings are lovely but the story is rote and predictable. Spread out over eight almost too flimsy episodes, the show tells the 15-year-long story of Persephone “Percy” Fraser (Sadie Soverall), a high school nerd who eventually turns into a hot adult, who starts summering in a cottage with her parents in the fictional lake community of Barry’s Bay, British Columbia. As she suns herself on a dock her first afternoon in town, she runs into a couple of brothers — Charlie and Sam Florek (Michael Bradway and Matt Cornett, respectively) — who become her consummate companions from then on out.
While Charlie’s older and a bit of a horny cad, Sam and Percy really hit it off, sharing friendship bracelets and horror movies. Summer after summer, the two pal around and as the years pass, their “will they or won’t they” energy increases until the pair kiss on the eve of becoming high school juniors. It falls apart, as high school relationships are wont to do — Dingus Sam bails on Percy, arguing that he “needs to focus” on high school to get into a good college — and thus begins the era of the couple’s true romantic back and forth. There are alternate significant others and even more make-ups and break-ups (including a particularly brutal one done via email), but ultimately Percy does something so catastrophic to whatever they have going that she decides their love is done forever. (No spoilers. The show reveals what it was in its seventh of eight episodes, but you can also probably guess.)
That’s not to say that any of this plays out in a linear fashion in “Every Year After,” because it doesn’t and that’s one of the show’s biggest problems. The show kicks off with Percy celebrating her friend Chantal’s engagement 10 years after departing Barry’s Bay and spends the rest of its run skipping around between past moments and present tense, with Percy having been summoned back to the beach town following a death in the family.
While the first two or so years of flashbacks have Percy and the boys played by younger teen actors, the show ages up the characters on-screen around 16 or 17. It’s not done really successfully, either: For whatever reason, the show declined to add distinguishing characteristics or hairstyles that could change, meaning that it’s all-too-easy to find yourself wondering whether you’re watching 17-year-old Percy and Sam going through some drama in his mom’s restaurant or 27-year-old Percy and Sam. The timelines are muddled and mushy, and in a show that has so much romantic back and forth already, it’s easy to become incredibly confused. Consequences of actions seem to carry little weight, either — something that’s especially annoying considering it’s pretty clear from Episode 1 where the show is ultimately taking its characters.
And those characters, it should be mentioned, are already written pretty thinly. Percy, we learn, is a horror movie fan who wants to be the next Stephen King and ends up writing obits, but we know precious little else about her. Sam Florek gets even shorter shrift, reduced to being just a decent enough guy who wants to become a doctor, and Charlie’s only real character beats are “hornball” and “finance guy.” The trio’s on-screen friend group — Chantal, Delilah and Jordie, played by Aurora Perrineau, Abigail Cowen and Joseph Chiu — are both more interesting and better cast, having more fun on-screen and with the script than the other actors further up the call sheet.
Metrics-wise, “Every Year After” will probably succeed despite all its flaws. Just look at the book’s existing audience, the push Prime Video is putting behind its release and viewers’ overall love of on-screen love at the moment. That doesn’t mean it should, though. Audiences deserve meatier stories. They deserve hotter sex, more interesting characters, and twists you’re not able to suss out from first allusion. Just because romance audiences will watch something doesn’t mean they should have to. They deserve more.
In a post Heated Rivalry world, when it’s clearer than ever what’s possible when someone takes true care to adapt a romance, Every Year After ultimately just feels like settling.
“Every Year After” premieres Wednesday on Prime Video.
