Every Year After Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Every Year After is a pleasant and easy-to-watch romantic drama that captures the feeling of summer nostalgia with beautiful visuals and likable performances. The Prime Video series captures the charm of Carley Fortune’s novel but struggles to rise above familiar romance tropes. Prime Video transforms a beloved BookTok novel into an easygoing summer drama filled with longing and memories.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Platform: Prime Video
Release: June 10, 2026
Episodes: 8
Cast: Sadie Soverall, Matt Cornett, Michael Bradway, Abigail Cowen, Aurora Perrineau, Elisha Cuthbert
Language: English
There is a specific emotional space that certain stories occupy — not quite sad, not quite joyful, somewhere in the warm middle where nostalgia and longing sit together on a porch and watch the sun go down over a lake. Every Year After lives entirely in that space. For the right viewer in the right mood, that is more than enough. For anyone wanting something that pushes beyond that comfortable warmth, the series will feel like a beautiful postcard that says very little when you finally flip it over.
The premise is the kind that romance readers recognise immediately. Percy Frazier returns to Barry’s Bay — an idyllic lakeside town she has avoided for a decade — after the death of her ex-boyfriend Sam’s mother. The trip forces her to confront everything she walked away from: the summers they shared, the friendship that became something more, and the secrets that eventually broke them apart. The series moves between the present and flashbacks across six different summers, slowly building the full picture of what Percy and Sam were to each other, and what they might still be.
The series tries to bring forth the breeziness of the novel and often does a good job of capturing it. Barry’s Bay is rendered with genuine warmth — water-light filtering through trees, the particular laziness of long summer days, a small-town atmosphere that feels lived in rather than manufactured. The setting is one of the show’s most consistent pleasures, and the directors across the eight episodes maintain a visual consistency that keeps the world feeling cohesive even as the timeline shifts back and forth.
Sadie Soverall as Percy carries the emotional weight of the series with real vulnerability. She is best in the flashback sequences, where Percy is younger and less guarded, and the feelings are rawer and less processed. Matt Cornett as Sam is earnest and likeable throughout, though the adult version of the character suffers from what most second-chance romance heroes suffer from — he is largely defined by how much he has been hurt and how much he still cares, without a great deal of independent personality beyond those two qualities. Their chemistry is genuine, which matters more than almost anything else in a show built entirely around whether you believe these two people would find their way back to each other.
The supporting cast steals scenes throughout. Michael Bradway as Charlie — the third corner of the complicated dynamic — is quietly excellent and often more interesting to watch than the leads. Abigail Cowen brings sharpness and warmth to her role and makes every scene she is in feel a little more alive.
However, it’s riddled with familiar tropes and similar romantic-drama beats, which makes it unmemorable and repetitive. The love triangle mechanics are well-worn. The emotional misunderstandings that kept Percy and Sam apart for a decade, when finally revealed, feel smaller than the decade of absence implied. The pacing across eight episodes stretches a story that might have been tighter at six — there are two or three episodes in the middle where the flashback structure stops building tension and starts simply filling time.
The comparisons to The Summer I Turned Pretty are unavoidable and largely accurate. Similar setting, similar emotional register, similar structural approach of weaving past and present summers into a present-day reckoning. Every Year After does not do anything that show has not done, and it does most of it slightly less sharply. The audience that loved that series will find this entirely comfortable and watchable. The audience that found that series too slow or too familiar will not find much here to change their minds.
What Every Year After does well, it does genuinely well — the atmosphere, the central performances, the specific emotional texture of loving someone across years and distance. It is a summer show in the truest sense: easy, warm, pleasant to be inside, and not built to last once the season changes.
Worth watching if the premise speaks to you. Worth skipping if you need more than a comfortable cry and a pretty lake.
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Every Year After is now streaming on Prime Video. All 8 episodes available.