OH, CANADA. HERE you come with yet another romance for us?! Yes, hot on the heels of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus (both written by Canadian authors) comes Every Year After, set in the town of Barry’s Bay, Madawaska Valley.
But while Every Year After has a few things in common with Heated Rivalry and Off Campus – lots of yearning, leads who can’t quite get it together – it’s its own thing at the same time. Here’s what to expect from the show.
Book origins
Every Year After is based on Ontarian writer Carley Fortune’s book Every Summer After, which was a BookTok hit. There’s plenty of young love and drama in Every Year After, which focuses on Percy (Persephone – yes, Persephone) Fraser (Sadie Soverall), and her relationship with her pal Sam Florek (Matt Cornett).
Percy and her family start spending summers in the picturesque Barry’s Bay when she’s on the cusp of her teenage years. Awkward and bookish, she soon makes friends with Sam and his brother Charlie (Michael Bradway).
Sam and Percy bond over horror films and figuring their way through their youthful years. But something happens that causes them to be estranged, and years later Percy is still dealing with the emotional impact of that.
Love and cynicism
When the series opens, Percy is giving a speech about love at an engagement party for her friend Chantal (Aurora Perrineau – daughter of Harold Perrineau, aka Mercutio in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet) and her beau. But we sense a certain cynicism in Percy’s words. She’s clearly damaged when it comes to love.
It’s a strong start. But unfortunately, the script tends to tell us exactly what Percy is thinking. For the first couple of episodes, rather than let the viewer be gently led along, we get some nakedly expository lines that spell things out.
There’s a moment when Percy says she’s unable to face “the place I used to call home… the people I hurt.”
And then there’s:
“I don’t deserve any better.”
“My whole world is filled with regret over the choices I made.”
“I’m back here and 18 again.”
Sam also has lines like:
“Percy wasn’t just my girlfriend… she was my best friend. She was family.”
“When I’m with her I don’t think… at all.”
It’s hard to take a show seriously when it spells everything out so clearly. Thankfully, Every Year After’s weak points sit alongside the intrigue around what exactly happened to make Percy and Sam’s friendship fall apart.
The series is set between present day, when Percy has to travel back to Barry’s Bay, and flashbacks across six summers when she was younger and before she lost contact with Sam.
She returns to the town because Sam’s mother Sue (Elisha Cuthbert) has died of lymphoma, and before she died asked his brother Charlie to try and help Sam and Percy reunite.
Estrangement
As the series moves along, we get to see how Percy and Sam’s friendship developed into a fleeting relationship, and what happened to make them estranged. We also watch them reunite as adults (Percy is an obituary writer and Sam is a doctor) and figure out what they mean to each other.
Alongside their story are other romances, one between two characters who really shouldn’t be together, and another involving Jordie (Joseph Chiu), Sam’s best friend. The focus on a range of relationships does add a frisson of excitement around the main story, although the fact that a character named Delilah, who’s friends with Percy, looks quite similar to Percy does get confusing at times.
There’s great chemistry between the leads, and Sadie Soverall manages to lift the character of Percy above the too simplistic dialogue that she’s sometimes given. Matt Cornett does a lovely job of playing Sam as a nice guy who doesn’t want to think too hard about his past, and when both are together you believe in the fact they’re pals who have strong feelings for each other.
There’s nothing radically different about Every Year After – it’s a romance that employs a lot of the usual tropes (yes, at one point Sam and Percy are forced to share a bed). There’s a bit of a Dawson’s Creek vibe about it all, particularly the flashbacks to Sam and Percy’s youth.
If you’re not a romance fan, you’re unlikely to find much here to entice you to stick around for eight hours of TV-watching. But if you are a diehard romance lover, this coasts along nicely, with emotional moments, lots of yearning, and two leads who you root for. Just don’t expect anything too wild or unusual here.
Every Year After is streaming on Prime now.