Every Year After Review: Amazons Latest Attempt to Recapture the Summer I Turned Pretty Magic Drowns in Its Own Romantic Misery

Imagine talking to your most heartsick friend, the one who simply cannot get over her ex. A decade on, this breakup has become her entire personality — the only thing she ever seems to think about or want to talk about, the single event she blames for everything from her ill-advised hookups to her recurring panic attacks to even, somehow, her boring job.

Now imagine the person you are talking to is not your friend but a total stranger, and a fictional one at that — giving you no reason whatsoever to listen politely as she cries yet again about her misery, let alone tag along while she hurtles herself back into his orbit yet again.

This, at least initially, is the experience of watching Every Year After, Amazon’s latest addition to its YA-ish drama catalogue. So besotted with its own heartbreak it forgets to sell the romantic fantasy that would make it worthwhile in the first place, it mainly serves to confirm that recapturing that The Summer I Turned Pretty magic is easier said than done.

Though creators Amy Harris (The Carrie Diaries) and Leila Gerstein (Hart of Dixie) have based their series on Carley Fortune’s bestselling novel Every Summer After, its plot reads like a patchwork of well-worn elements from other recent romances.

Our mopey heroine is Percy Fraser (Sadie Soverall), a 28-year-old obituary writer who grew up spending summers lakeside in a small Canadian town but hasn’t been back since her world-rending split with Sam Florek (Matt Cornett), the boy next door. Then news arrives that Sue (Elisha Cuthbert), mother to Sam and big brother Charlie (Michael Bradway) and almost a second mom to Percy, has died. Despite suffering such intense anxiety at the mere thought of Barry’s Bay that her best friend, Chantal (Aurora Perrineau), is enlisted to take a week off work and accompany her, Percy makes her mind up to attend the memorial.

From there, the season’s eight hours cut between Percy’s week in town — during which she wavers between trying like hell to avoid Sam, now a doctor, and finding any excuse to get closer to him — and all the summers she’s spent there in the past. The connection between the two leads is most charming in the early tween years, when they’re bonding platonically over horror movies and friendship bracelets and lake swims — not least because Juliette Hawk, as the young Percy, possesses a sweetness and a lightness that’s missing from Soverall’s perpetually pouty performance.

But the march of time is inevitable, and so are the hormones of adolescence. As Hawk and Blue Clarke are replaced by Soverall and Cornett, somewhere around age 15 or episode three, they spend less time playing in the sun and more time toying with each other’s hearts — almost but not quite confessing their feelings, trying to make each other jealous and getting together and breaking up over and over again, before an endlessly patient audience of their friends and family.

In fairness to Every Year After, there’s something to the portrayal of teen love as so all-consuming it borders on narcissism — let she who has not blown off a friend to make out with a cute boy (something the show eventually calls Percy out for) cast the first stone. The self-involvement becomes less forgivable when the two of them carry on this behavior into adulthood, spending almost the entire week of Sue’s memorial weeping about how much they’d like to be together but can’t for Boring Spoiler Reasons, and almost making out but not, and complaining about all of it to anyone in earshot.

It would be one thing if Every Year After were self-aware enough to call out this toxicity for what it is — that was the secret sauce of Hulu’s Tell Me Lies, another romantic drama about two exes who can’t leave each other alone. But the melancholy pop soundtrack (Gracie Abrams, Lana del Rey, Noah Cyrus) and many, many longing gazes suggest we’re meant to find all of this terribly moving, rather than exhausting.

Meanwhile, saddled with half-baked clichés and some truly groanworthy attempts at profundity (“All I wanted was to be a cardiologist so I could fix people’s hearts, but after all the studying, I finally realized that you can’t really save someone from heartbreak,” says Sam, who is an adult man), neither Soverall nor Cornett are able to muster up any convincing semblance of a personality, much less any sparks compelling enough to make us yearn right alongside them.

It comes as both a relief and an indictment of Every Year After that the show is leaps and bounds more likable when it’s focused on anyone but its two stars. Perrineau eventually gets to break out of the thankless best friend role when workaholic Chantal starts hanging out with Jordy (Joseph Chiu), a laid-back but thoughtful motel owner who might be the only truly kind person in a town full of lovelorn jerks. Abigail Cowen gets off to a rough start as Percy’s almost cartoonishly catty ex-friend, but eventually matures into a real bright spot as Delilah’s marital troubles get a funny-sad subplot of their own.

Even Cuthbert gets some lovely moments in her sporadic flashbacks, helping a lonely young Percy navigate her first period or her first heartbreak. Why Sue seems to be the only parent in town (Percy’s barely appear at all) is one of many logical questions that go unanswered. But Every Year After is full of undercooked details that get brought up only as an excuse to bring its would-be lovers together or pull them back apart, and then get discarded when they’re no longer needed for that purpose. Sue’s just the only one unlucky enough to have had to die for it.