Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. A teenage girl vacations with her family and meets two brothers, forms a bond with their mother, and gets caught in a love triangle even though it’s pretty obvious from the start which brother the story actually wants you to root for. Then the brothers’ mother dies, her will complicates everyone’s lives, and the boys are left questioning why she made the decisions that she did. If that sounded familiar, you’ve probably watched The Summer I Turned Pretty. However, you might have also seen Every Year After, a show Amazon would really like you to get those same vibes from while simultaneously trying to skirt the obvious, even changing the title of the book it’s adapted from. The novel is called Every Summer After. The series is called Every Year After. Amazon claims they wanted a title that suggested these relationships extend beyond the summers. I think that’s nonsense. The story still revolves around summers at the lake, and changing the title doesn’t suddenly make it a different show.
The series jumps between two timelines. One follows Percy Fraser (Sadie Soverall) through her childhood, teenage years, and first love while spending summers at a lake in Ontario. The other picks up ten years later when Charlie Florek (Michael Bradway) calls to tell her that his mother Sue (Elisha Cuthbert) has died, forcing Percy to return for the funeral and confront everything she thought she’d left behind. Cuthbert is easily the most recognizable face in the cast, and thankfully the series uses enough flashbacks that her role feels meaningful instead of simply existing to kick off the plot. Percy meets brothers Sam (Matt Cornett) and Charlie, with Sam immediately becoming her closest friend before the inevitable romance begins to blossom. Percy is obsessed with horror movies, reading Stephen King’s Christine, hanging a Creature from the Black Lagoon poster in her room, and dragging the boys into scary movie nights. She’s basically the horror version of Dawson Leery, except instead of a creek, there’s a lake.
Outside of that central trio are Delilah (Abigail Cowen), Percy’s longtime friend who also spends summers at the lake, Chantal (Aurora Perrineau), Percy’s ambitious lawyer friend in the present-day storyline, and Jordie Lin (Joseph Chiu), the motel manager and longtime friend of the Florek brothers. Those six characters are the entire show. Everyone else exists somewhere below supporting character status. Taylor, Sam’s girlfriend, barely registers despite being in the middle of a love triangle. Chantal’s fiancé is in so little of the series that it’s difficult to invest in that relationship. Delilah’s husband is even less developed despite becoming important to her storyline. They’re all plot devices more than people. It honestly feels like Amazon wanted a world populated by extras with six leads standing in the middle of it.
That becomes even more noticeable as the series starts pairing everyone off. Percy and Sam have to work through years of unresolved feelings. Charlie and Delilah begin their own complicated relationship while Delilah struggles with her marriage. Chantal ends up spending an incredible amount of time with Jordie over the course of roughly a week, despite supposedly coming to support Percy and juggling nonstop work as an attorney. Shouldn’t she be with Percy? Wasn’t that the whole reason she came? Instead, she’s off building a romance while Percy gets all of the emotionally charged scenes with Sam. Meanwhile, the show constantly whispers about one gigantic secret Percy is hiding from Sam that supposedly threatens to destroy everything. If you’ve watched enough romantic dramas, you’ll probably figure it out long before the reveal, and you’ll probably also realize it isn’t nearly as earth-shattering as the series wants you to believe.
Where the show really lost me was with the characters themselves. Sam is honestly kind of toxic, and the series never really checks him on it. He breaks up with Percy over email after years of friendship and dating, reacts to difficult situations with anger, gets drunk, starts fights, smashes a bench with a baseball bat, and generally handles conflict terribly. Even while grieving his mother’s death, I never found myself rooting for him the way the series clearly expects. The scary part is that he’s a doctor. Apparently somebody decided this man should be responsible for other people’s health. Charlie, meanwhile, is constantly treated as the irresponsible screw-up even though he’s successful enough to pay off Sam’s medical school debt, which is no small accomplishment. The show keeps insisting he’s the family disappointment while simultaneously presenting evidence that suggests exactly the opposite.
Percy isn’t much better served. Persephone is a writer, at least on paper, but the series rarely makes that a meaningful part of who she is. Most of her character revolves around being emotionally frozen by decisions she made ten years ago. Chantal suffers from a similar problem. The show goes out of its way to establish that she’s this high-powered attorney. She proudly introduces herself as Percy’s lawyer during the will reading even though Percy doesn’t need one, yet when Delilah actually needs legal help during her divorce, Chantal backs away almost immediately after running into an obnoxious opposing attorney. She might as well have been a circus clown or a chimney sweep. At least Sam being a doctor pays off because he cares for his mother through her illness. Chantal being a lawyer benefits absolutely nobody by the end of the season.
The supporting cast never gets the opportunity to make these six leads feel like they’re living in a real world. Sam and Charlie pick up family members for Sue’s funeral, but those relatives barely speak. We never get meaningful conversations with an aunt, grandparent, or anyone else who might have known Sue differently than her sons did. Percy’s own parents are barely around despite being alive. She spends more time with Sue than she ever does with them. When Percy gets her first period, it’s Sue who helps her through it, not her mother. By the end, it almost feels like Sue raised her. That’s a much more interesting relationship than several of the romances the show spends far more time exploring.
One thing I absolutely did appreciate was the audio description. It’s excellent. The writer clearly understands that accessibility isn’t just about describing movement. It’s about preserving character. That’s why I know Percy is watching The Blair Witch Project, reading Christine, and has that Creature from the Black Lagoon poster on her bedroom wall. There’s a recurring family photograph of the brothers that the description pays careful attention to, including details like a faded black eye that quietly reinforces how often they’ve fought over the years. Those are the kinds of details that tell me someone cared about writing the track. It’s so much more meaningful than reducing everything to “Sam looks pensive,” “Percy frowns,” or “Charlie exits.” The little things are what bring these characters to life.
Then there’s that ending. It is one hell of a swing. It’s the kind of finale you write when you’re pretty confident Amazon is going to renew your show, because if they hadn’t, this would’ve been an absolutely wild place to leave the audience hanging. Luckily for the fans, Amazon did renew it for a second season, which isn’t exactly surprising considering how clearly this is positioned as the company’s successor to The Summer I Turned Pretty. I actually laughed when the finale ended because I couldn’t believe that’s where they chose to stop. Had the series not been renewed, I can’t imagine book fans would’ve been thrilled.
This isn’t one of the worst things I’ve watched all year. It’s not a disaster. It’s simply not good enough. We live in an era where television is overflowing with outstanding dramas across streaming, cable, and broadcast. If you want people to spend eight hours with your characters, you have to give them a reason. Copying a formula isn’t enough. You have to build on it and carve out your own identity. Every Summer After, which is still what I think this show should be called, ought to feel like a vacation. Instead, it feels like homework. And these are kids who definitely don’t do homework.
Rotten: 5.8/10
