‘Every Year After’ Didn’t Film in Ontario, and the Reason Why Makes Total Sense

For fans of Carley Fortune’s beloved novel, the town of Barry’s Bay is as much a character as Percy Fraser or Sam Florek. The story lives and breathes through its lakeside setting, a small Canadian cottage town where summers smell like pine and first love feels permanent. When Prime Video announced it was adapting ‘Every Summer After’ into the series ‘Every Year After’, one of the biggest questions for devoted readers was a simple but loaded one: could the production actually capture the magic of that place on screen?

The answer required a very specific stretch of British Columbia coastline, a construction crew willing to hang a fake town sign, and a 20-minute ferry ride.

Principal photography for the series began on June 4, 2025, in Vancouver, and concluded on September 18, 2025. Rather than shooting in the real Barry’s Bay in Ontario, where Fortune herself grew up, the production relocated the fictional version of the town to British Columbia. While the novel is set in the real town of Barry’s Bay, Ontario, the adaptation is set in a fictional Barry’s Bay in British Columbia. The soundstage work was handled at North Shore Studios, with location filming spreading across Vancouver and its scenic surroundings.

Why Bowen Island Became Barry’s Bay

The most visually striking real-world location used for the series is Bowen Island, a small community accessible by ferry from West Vancouver. The production filmed on Bowen Island’s Snug Cove boardwalk, at the Union Steamship buildings, and along the Dorman Point Trail. It was a deliberate choice rooted in a deep understanding of what the story required.

Executive producer Grace Gilroy, a Bowen resident of 24 years, immediately thought of the island after reading the script and concluded that it held the right small-town feel and natural beauty to create Barry’s Bay. Locations such as Doc Morgan’s, Tippy’s Cookhouse, and the Causeway all appeared in the series, with some undergoing significant transformations. A sign placed on the Causeway welcoming people to Barry’s Bay confused some tourists during production, and clever editing was used to transform the ocean into a lake.

Gilroy said of the result, “I think we showed Bowen off to its best advantages. You know, we made it feel special, and it is, you know, it’s a special place.”

The choice to stay firmly in Canada was not incidental. Showrunner Amy B. Harris made it a creative priority from the beginning. Speaking to ELLE, Harris explained, “Her stories always are about her Canadian life and the worlds that she loves and knows. It was very important that it not be generic, like, ‘Oh, this could be anywhere.’ No, Barry’s Bay is a Canadian town. It’s not the Hamptons. It’s this very beautiful, down-to-earth, grounded place.”

What It Felt Like for Carley Fortune to Walk onto the Set

For the author herself, arriving in Vancouver to see a reconstructed version of the town she grew up in was a deeply personal experience. Fortune recalled, “I was walking onto this, like the town of Barry’s Bay that had been constructed out in Vancouver. I grew up in Barry’s Bay, so that was incredible. Before meeting anybody, I watched some of the scenes be filmed, and hearing the actors in the scene call each other by these names that I created felt very strange. There was a lot of people around me, or else I think I would have been in tears.”

That emotional weight carried over to the cast as well. Sadie Soverall and Matt Cornett treated the source material with something close to reverence on location, carrying copies of Fortune’s novel with them throughout filming. Soverall told ELLE, “I had it with me every day on set. I would read it moments before we were about to film, to get back into what was happening, at the time, for Percy, in her head.”

A Fitting Home for a Story Built on Place

The decision to film in and around Vancouver speaks to a broader sensibility that shapes the entire production. British Columbia has become a go-to destination for romance dramas looking for that combination of lush landscapes, accessible infrastructure, and genuine natural beauty, and ‘Every Year After’ joins titles like ‘Virgin River’ and ‘Off Campus’ in calling the region home. But where many productions simply use the province as a neutral backdrop, the team behind this series leaned specifically into its coastal and small-town qualities to honor the spirit of Fortune’s world.

As filming continued through the summer months, the serene landscapes of the region echoed the heartfelt tone of the story, with fans of the novel noting how closely the waterfront visuals tracked with the imagery Fortune built in the book. For a series so dependent on the feeling of a particular place at a particular time of year, getting the setting right was never optional. It was the whole point.

Drop your thoughts in the comments and let us know whether you think the British Columbia locations captured the heart of Barry’s Bay.