The Every Year After Team Weighs In on Sam and Percy's 'Question Mark' Season 1 Ending

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 1 of Every Year After. Read at your own risk!

Transitioning from friendship to a romantic relationship is tricky work, especially when both parties are dealing with unresolved trauma and there's a hot older brother in the mix. That's the recipe for disaster that befalls Percy (Sadie Soverall) and Sam (Matt Cornett) in Every Year After. The new Prime Video series is based on Carley Fortune's first Barry's Bay novel, Every Summer After, and bounces between Sam and Percy's first meeting as pre-teens at the idyllic Canadian lake and 15 years later when they are reunited for the funeral for Sam's mother, Sue (Elisha Cuthbert). It's obvious from the first episode that a lot has happened since these two young lovers first met, and it can only be described as a mess.

"I love that Percy is messy and not perfect," says executive producer Amy B. Harris. "She makes mistakes and has to learn very painful lessons. She takes a long time to learn those lessons. That is deeply relatable. I love a complex woman." 

That's not to say Sam is perfect. "So much of their relationship is about figuring themselves out. As young people, it's Percy's insecurities and Sam being wishy washy [that keep them apart]," Fortune explains to TV Guide. "He's this very safe best friend for her, but he's not safe as a boyfriend. He doesn't really give her what she needs emotionally." 

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Over the course of the series, we see Sam and Percy take their time in their teenage years to fall in love — or at least act on those emotions. It culminates in an emotionally overwhelming relationship when they are 17, which seems to be what first-romance dreams are made of, until Sam announces that he's leaving for college early to attend a Stanford summer intensive. The distance, Sam's inability to communicate, and Percy's tendency towards petty revenge lead to Percy and Sam's older brother, Charlie (Michael Bradway), hooking up. 

The transgression sends Percy and Charlie running away from Barry's Bay. The former only returns when she learns of Sue's passing and decides she needs to finally wrestle with the demons of her past. However, seeing Sam again brings back old feelings, and the two have to navigate being ex-best friends and now strangers during one of the most stressful weeks of their lives. 

"I keep wanting to talk about the first love of it all," Cornett says of Sam and Percy's journey in the first season. "That is a very special thing to a lot of people. It is OK if that's a really hard thing to move on from. It will always be a special place in your heart. I've had so many conversations with so many people about trying to move on from that first love. I think that's something Sam and Percy are trying to deal with. However, their first love might be their person forever." 

Might is the operative word there. Season 1 doesn't give a definitive answer on that. Sam and Percy go back and forth about whether their relationship is what's missing from their respective lives or a time bomb threatening everything they've built in their separate adulthoods. Percy decides, at least, that Barry's Bay is an essential part of her continued growth and moves back to the small town to take over the Florek family restaurant that Sue left her in her will. Sam also returns after learning of Percy and Charlie's betrayal, implying he's not giving up on their relationship yet, but that is right where the show leaves us before the credits roll on the Season 1 finale. 

"We intentionally leave them standing [that] far apart because they're coming together, but I don't think they're back together fully," Harris says, before teasing what that means for a potential second season. "The first season is 'Will they? Won't they?' And I think 'how will they?' is a big part of the second season, with all of the past behind them and the things they don't know about each other after a decade apart. That's something I'm very interested in exploring." 

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"It kind of feels like a question mark and undecided, but I think there is hope on the horizon," Soverall suggests. "I think, if we're so lucky, I want to explore the relationship between Sam and Percy and where that would stand. They have to figure out who they are to each other now because it's been some time."

Her co-star agrees and acknowledges that there's still a lot that needs to be worked out between Sam and Percy before they can commit to a happy life together. "I think question mark is a great analogy. What's interesting is that it sets up, hopefully, a time for them to be able to talk about and reckon with what happened. They can have a real, honest conversation about it, because they haven't had one," Cornett details. "Clearly, they still have so much love for each other. They care for each other so deeply, and if we're able to explore more in a future season, I hope we're able to watch them become friends again."

Fans should be prepared that if Sam and Percy officially decide to be together in a potential Season 2, that won't be the end of their romantic strife. "I always thought being in a relationship would mean things got static, like 'Oh, I'm happy now. I found my person.' And what I actually found when I did that is that it was a very complex, challenging relationship. That, in some ways, is more frightening because you have so much invested in it," Harris explains. "There's a lot of very emotional conflicts and coming together that I think would be great and really fun to explore in a second season." 

Every Year After has not officially been renewed for a Season 2 yet, but all eight episodes of Season 1 are now available to stream on Prime Video.