Yearning has become the emotional currency of modern romance storytelling, and Prime Video's Every Year After understands the assignment. The series, adapted from Carley Fortune's bestselling novel, follows best friends Sam and Percy across more than a decade of their lives, from age 13 into their mid-twenties, capturing the bittersweet pull of a love story shaped as much by missed timing as by genuine connection.
At the heart of the show are actors Matt Cornett and Sadie Soverall, whose chemistry grounds what could have been a melodramatic premise in something more intimate and real. Cornett, known for his work on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, stretches into a more emotionally complex role here, while Soverall brings vulnerability and nuance to a character whose journey spans multiple life stages and includes some genuinely messy decisions.
The scope is what separates Every Year After from the crowded landscape of young adult romance shows now streaming. "We're following these characters from 13 to their mid 20s," Soverall explains. "It feels really nostalgic, looking into the past and then into the present." That expansive timeline allows the show to sit with its characters through their most formative years, capturing not just the romance but the actual texture of growing up alongside someone.
For Cornett, Sam's defining quality is what he calls his yearning. "Boy, is he a yearner," he laughs. But that yearning isn't just performative longing or wistful glances. The writing, both in Fortune's original novel and in the adaptation by showrunner Amy, embeds that emotional hunger into Sam's DNA. "The writing made the yearning very easy," Cornett says. "They wrote it with a lot of yearning eyes, so there were probably some moments I threw a couple extra yearning looks in there."
Bringing beloved literary characters to screen carries its own pressure, especially in the age of BookTok. Fans arrive with fixed images of how Sam and Percy should sound, move, and feel. Cornett acknowledges the weight of that expectation. "There is inherently pressure that comes along with bringing this character to life when there's already such a big beautiful fan base around it," he says. "But I think the writing helped so much. I hope that people feel like we captured the Sam and Percy that they saw in their heads."
One of the show's more controversial narrative beats involves Percy sleeping with Sam's brother, a decision that has sparked considerable debate among fans. Soverall pushes back on the impulse to paint her character as a villain. "There's so many characters who make mistakes, and I don't feel like there are villains in the story," she argues. "I feel like it's people who have made mistakes are also good people. Both things can be true at once."
She points out that Percy's choice emerges from a recognizable human impulse: the desire to be loved. "She makes this choice when she's young, and I think a lot of people can relate to making a choice when you're young that you don't quite think through," Soverall notes. "It's important to see a young girl not being perfect and making mistakes, and that's okay, especially a sexual mistake."
The adaptation also presented practical challenges, particularly around accents. Soverall, British by birth, had to nail an American accent as Percy, while Cornett, American, needed to ground his Canadian character authentically. "I absolutely did my research," Soverall says of her American accent work. "I've grown up watching American shows and American media, so it kind of just came quite instantaneously, but I did have to do my warm-ups every morning."
For Cornett, the approach was more understated. Showrunner Amy discouraged him from leaning into exaggerated Canadianisms like the stereotypical "aboot" pronunciation. "I think any moment that I would do that, our director would come up to me and be like, 'Hey, maybe, maybe don't do that,'," Cornett recalls with a laugh. Instead, the Canadian setting and crew organically shaped the dialogue and tone. "The book takes place in Canada, and we wanted to make sure the show took place in Canada and we wanted to pay homage to the Canadian roots of this story," he explains.
Every Year After streams now on Prime Video.
Author Jessica Williams: "This show gets why audiences are hungry for yearning right now, and it has two leads who understand that restraint and timing matter more than grand declarations."
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