Romance readers have a word for this feeling, they call it “unputdownable” that compulsive forward pull of a story that hooks you somewhere around chapter three and doesn’t release you until two in the morning, when you’ve finished the whole thing and feel vaguely embarrassed and not at all sorry. Carley Fortune’s Every Summer After had it, over a million copies sold say so. The question Prime Video had to answer when they optioned it was whether they could transfer that pull to the screen without losing the thing that made it work in the first place, the interiority, the slow accumulation of feeling, the specific ache of watching two people who should have gotten it right a long time ago still circling each other fifteen years later. The answer, eight episodes in, is: mostly no, But they tried.
Here’s the honest version of what Every Year After is. It’s a show about Persephone Fraser Percy, to everyone who knows her, a bookish kid from the city who begins summering in the fictional lake community of Barry’s Bay, British Columbia, and promptly falls into the orbit of two brothers.
Charlie Florek is the older one, all charm and wandering hands. Sam is the other one. Sam becomes everything. The pair share horror movies and friendship bracelets and the particular intensity of two teenagers who have decided, wordlessly, that they belong to each other.
Then high school happens, then Sam bails because he “needs to focus,” which is the kind of excuse that sounds reasonable at seventeen and looks catastrophic at thirty-two in retrospect. Then there are years of other people and email breakups and the long slow damage that follows when you hurt someone before you know how badly it will matter.
The structure of all this is non-linear, which on paper is fine, we open with Percy at her friend Chantal’s engagement party, a decade after she left Barry’s Bay for good, and the show spends its run shuttling between then and now. A death in the family pulls Percy back. Sam is still there. The lake is still there. Eight episodes of reckoning begin.
The problem isn’t the story. It’s that the show seems afraid of the story it’s telling.
The timeline problem is real and persistent. The show makes a baffling choice not to give its characters any visual markers of aging, no different hairstyles, no shifts in wardrobe sensibility, nothing to help you track whether you’re watching Sam and Percy at seventeen or twenty-seven. In a show whose entire engine runs on the weight of accumulated time, this is a significant own goal.
You find yourself squinting at the background, trying to read contextual clues, doing detective work that should be effortless. Romance isn’t supposed to require forensic attention. It should wash over you. Instead, Every Year After keeps pulling you out of it.
The characters themselves are written thin in a way that becomes genuinely frustrating once you notice it. Percy, we’re told, loves horror movies and wanted to be the next Stephen King but ended up writing obituaries. That’s the sum total of her inner life as the show presents it. Sam wants to be a doctor. He’s decent. He has good hair. These are not characters. They’re placeholders shaped roughly like people, and Matt Cornett and Sadie Soverall, who are both doing more with the material than it deserves spend eight episodes trying to fill them out through performance alone. There are moments it works. There are longer stretches where it doesn’t.
The supporting cast is quietly more interesting than the leads, which is its own kind of indictment. Aurora Perrineau’s Chantal, Abigail Cowen’s Delilah, and Joseph Chiu’s Jordie have a warmth and looseness on screen that the show’s central couple keeps straining to find. Watch how Perrineau handles a throwaway line, there’s actual personality there, something particular, the sense of a real person who exists between scenes. I kept thinking the show might have been better if it had let itself be more ensemble. But no. Every Year After keeps circling back to its central love story, which is where it’s most underpowered.
What really stings, and it does sting, a little, is how clearly this show knows what it’s supposed to be, and how consistently it pulls back at the decisive moment. The seventh episode finally reveals the catastrophic thing Percy did, the act so irrevocable she decided their love was finished. I won’t say what it is, though you can probably get within a guess or two from the first episode’s tone.
What I’ll say is that the reveal lands with considerably less force than it should, partly because the non-linear structure has diluted the emotional stakes, and partly because the show has been so careful to keep its characters at arm’s length that by episode seven, we haven’t quite bled alongside them enough to feel the full weight of it. The mechanics are visible. The gears show.
And here’s the thing about beach-read romance that the best adaptations understand: the machinery has to be invisible. When it works, when you’re watching something like what this genre can achieve at its genuine best, you don’t think about structure or character motivation or narrative economy. You just feel it. You feel the years, the distance, the particular unbearable proximity of two people who keep almost getting it right. Every Year After has the shape of that experience. It just doesn’t have the heat.
Commercially, this will do fine. The book’s fanbase alone will put it on the charts, Prime Video clearly has muscle behind the release, and right now viewers are disposed to fall in love with on-screen love. The streamer knows its audience. All of that is probably true and probably irrelevant to the question of whether the show is good. It’s not quite good. It’s the television equivalent of a book you read because you’re tired and the weather is bad and something is better than nothing, pleasant enough in the moment, completely gone from memory within a week.
Romance audiences are patient and loyal and they deserve to be rewarded for it. They’ve shown, over and over, that they’ll show up for stories that take their genre seriously, that understand longing isn’t just a plot device but a form of knowledge, that the back-and-forth of two people trying to find each other is worth examining with the same care you’d bring to any other human drama. Every Year After knows this is possible. It just didn’t quite believe it enough to do the work.
A detailed content breakdown for parents and caregivers
Rated TV-MA for violence, alcohol use, strong language, and sexual content. Streaming exclusively on Prime Video.
Violence & Intensity: Low physical, high emotional; No significant physical violence. The show’s real intensity is emotional: grief, heartbreak, and drawn-out psychological distress are central to the plot. A family death drives the present-day storyline. Scenes of relationship breakdown and estrangement may be upsetting for younger or more sensitive viewers.
Language: Frequent strong language; Profanity appears regularly in both casual and emotionally charged scenes. No slurs identified. Language fits the TV-MA rating. Expect adult vocabulary throughout.
Sexual Content & Nudity: Mature romantic content; Passionate romantic scenes and implied sexual activity are present. The show’s official rating descriptors do not cite nudity specifically, suggesting it stops short of the explicit content seen in other Prime Video romance titles. Mature themes around desire, intimacy, and adult relationships run throughout.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Alcohol use depicted; Alcohol consumption is shown across multiple episodes in social settings, parties, and emotional scenes. Cited explicitly in the official content rating. No significant drug use identified.
Thematic Concerns: Grief, infidelity, heartbreak; Themes include the death of a parental figure, romantic betrayal, prolonged emotional fallout from relationship mistakes, and the complexity of revisiting past trauma. Some teens may find the emotional content heavy or relatably distressing depending on their own experience.
