Every Year After review – this hunk-packed romance is sweet, irresistible trash

Persephone Fraser (Sadie Soverall) is sad. “My whole world is filled with regret because of the choices I made,” she says forlornly as she clutches an oversized coffee cup, while standing at best friend Chantal (Aurora Perrineau)’s marble kitchen island. Regret? How can this be? Even Persephone – or Percy, for short (“it’s easier”) – is perplexed. After all, she splutters, shrugging her cashmered shoulders at the gosh-darn inexplicability of it all, “I have one of the only remaining jobs in journalism, I have a cute apartment and I have hot men to hook up with!” Yet still; guffaws come there none. Percy needs closure. “I can’t move on and I know I have to,” she whimpers as the soundtrack reaches tearfully for its acoustic guitar. The answer? “I need to say goodbye [TWANG] … to Barry’s Bay.”

And with that we’re off. Specifically, we’re off to Barry’s Bay, the dinky Ontario lakeside town that is both the source of Percy’s turmoil and the picturesque setting for the barrel of escapist tosh that is Every Year After.

Based on a 2022 novel by Canadian author Carley Fortune and showrun by Amy B “Gossip Girl” Harris, the romantic drama is about, cough, “the big stuff”: love, death, growing up, heartbreak and scenes in which Percy, 28, says things such as “Sometimes the currents can feel like they’re against us!” Above all, however, it means hunks. To wit: there is Jordie (Joseph Chiu), a thoughtful hunk who works at the local motel. There is Charlie (Michael Bradway), a bulky hunk who wears board shorts in an occasionally successful attempt to distinguish himself from the mountains that overlook Barry’s Bay. And there is Charlie’s younger brother Sam (Matt Cornett), the alpha-hunk whose existence is the reason Percy will spend the next eight episodes wandering around with an expression suggestive of a recent and not insignificant head injury.

Michael Bradway as Charlie Florek with Matt Cornett in Every Year After. Photograph: Cate Cameron/Prime

The hunks celebrate their hunkery by engaging in bouts of horseplay at the lake that serves as a backdrop to their emotional entanglements and a metaphor for youth/freedom/the intransigence of time, etc. This includes wrestling by the lake in shorts, hurling each other into the lake in shorts, and emerging from the lake while running their fingers through their hair and saying “yeeaaahhh” (in shorts).

Not that any of this is gratuitous or superfluous to the plot, you understand. Indeed, Jordie, Charlie and Sam are horny-handed hunks of toil and their well-oiled musculature is put to regular practical use in the town’s kitchens and outhouses. We see this in scenes such as a) Charlie repairs a fridge in his late mom’s tavern while stripped to the waist, and b) Sam washes a plate while panting in a vest.

Around these near-naked bollards of masculinity slaloms Percy, whose return to Barry’s Bay after a decade-long absence brings with it much angst. Wistful flashbacks slowly unfurl the reason for much of the above. In 2011, we learn, Percy’s parents bought a holiday home in the lakeside town, whereupon the bookish adolescent bonded with puppyish neighbour Sam (“I’m Sam!”). Subsequent summer visits saw teenage friendship bloom into teenage love until, inevitably, Something Bad Happened. Now, after the death of Sam and Charlie’s beloved mom Sue (Elisha Cuthbert), our troubled protagonist feels compelled to return to the site of said Bad/Sadness to put her post-pubescent demons to rest.

Michael Bradway and Sadie Soverall in Every Year After. Photograph: Justine Yeung/Prime Video

Much handwringing doth ensue, and while the fondant-y soundtrack does its best to distract us from the realisation that this is essentially The Summer I Turned Pretty in big girl pants, questions bob like buoys – and, indeed, boys – around Percy’s shapely ankles. Will she exercise caution in her dealings with the suspiciously well-adjusted Sam? Will old rifts be healed and new engagements forged?

There are no huge surprises and several gifted actors seem to be locked in an interminable WWE cage match with a script that requires them to say things that no human should ever be required to utter (“Adulting is no joke!”). But oh, the lake! The endless cerulean lake, so tolerant of the witless peacocking of its emotionally fragile resident hunks! It’s as difficult to resist the verdant wonder of Barry’s Bay as it is to remain unaffected by the sweetness with which this twaddle goes about its labours.

Grab your shorts and [TWANG] jump in.