It’s no easy feat to adapt a best-selling, beloved book into a TV show.
That was the task that Amy B. Harris faced as showrunner on Every Year After, the new eight-episode Prime Video series that adapted Carley Fortune‘s debut novel, 2022’s Every Summer After.
Harris tells PEOPLE she “devoured the book in 24 hours,” and she “felt a huge amount of responsibility to honor this beautiful book and author and her fans” as she took the helm of the TV show.
“I’ve done adaptations before, and I think there are times where you’re like, I have to change this, or this doesn’t work for storytelling purposes for TV, or it’s told in the wrong time period for what we can make… But what I really felt was so important with this book was to honor Barry’s Bay. It had to be a main character in its own right,” she reveals of her approach.
Equally important was to “honor the love story” between childhood best friends-turned-first loves, Sam (Matt Cornett) and Percy (Sadie Soverall), and to “make sure we [included] lots of fun little Easter eggs” for book fans. There were some “non-negotiables,” like the anatomy textbook scene, and Sam telling Percy, “You came home,” but not everything in Every Year After unfolds like it does in Every Summer After.
From Fortune’s point of view, the series “does exactly what an adaptation of a book that has a fan base should do, which is that it honors the story. It has the heart and soul of the book. It feels like the book,” she tells PEOPLE. “But it also expands the world.”
Below, Harris explains her thought process behind some of the biggest changes made for the TV show from Fortune’s book.
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