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On paper, Sophie Honeywell (Teresa Palmer) is the main character of The Last Anniversary. She has a whimsical habit of checking her watch every time she meets someone new, just in case they end up being The One. She blushes so hard at embarrassment or emotion that a blotchy, beetroot red climbs her face and neck like a trellis. She left her former boyfriend, Thomas (Charlie Garber), at the altar, as he’s so fond of claiming. (Technically, she left him at the airport, where he was just about to propose.) And now, years later, out of the clear Australian blue, Thomas’ grandmother, Connie, has left Sophie her house on (fictional) Scribbly Gum Island, despite Sophie barely having known her. 

But Sophie is not exactly the main character in this Australian series, which was produced by Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films and makes its stateside debut on AMC+.The Last Anniversary revolves around an intricate knot of women and the messy ties that bind them. These women include—deep breath—Sophie; Connie; Connie’s sister, Rose; Enigma, whom Connie and Rose discovered, took in, and raised; Enigma’s daughter, Grace; Thomas’ sister, Veronika; and Thomas and Veronika’s mother, Margie (Susan Prior). Those ties are loose at first—zig-zagging scribbles like those on the trunk of a scribbly gum tree—but over the course of six episodes, they grow tighter, drawn by secrets and intrigue, camaraderie and motherhood.

The Last Anniversary was adapted from the 2005 novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty, who also wrote the books Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, and Apples Never Fall. Her genre, previously discounted as chick lit—and more aptly described as domestic drama—runs the risk of going stale or losing the interest of those outside of a narrow demographic slice. But with a few choice tweaks from Samantha Strauss, who adapted this story for the screen, the show manages to sidestep that rut, grounding a very specific story in poignant universal themes. 

In this version, Sophie is a journalist, so it makes sense that Connie brought her to an island with a decades-old secret in the hopes that she can help unravel it. Scribbly Gum Island, a tranquil gem on the Hawkesbury River, is home to the Baby Munro Mystery: Years ago, Alice and Jack Munro disappeared, leaving behind the newborn Enigma. The Munroes vanished with only a few traces: a freshly baked marble cake waiting to be iced, a record spinning on the record player, and a few drops of dried blood on the kitchen floor.

Cut the the present, and Enigma (Helen Thomson) is a new grandmother who leads tours of the abandoned Munro cabin, which is preserved as a miniature museum. The Baby Munro Mystery has beco*e the lifeblood of the island, and everyone has a hand in the family business. They’re a close-knit bunch, and Connie warns Sophie in the letter she leaves her that “my family may behave like vultures when they realize I’ve left my all to a relative stranger. But I need someone joyful in my house, now more than ever.”

Sophie is joyful. She’s magnetic, dynamic—and she understands the need to find people to belong to. Her parents died in a car accident 17 years ago, and now she’s on her own. So there’s an understandable pull toward the familial bonds of Scribbly Gum Island, despite all of the dysfunction. Plus, she’s a hopeless romantic, always reading Regency romance novels, and she was almost engaged to Thomas. What would life look like now if she had ended up with him? This angle, while more prominent in the book, is (thankfully) almost non-existent in the show. The musings are more existential here. Sophie is 39, and she knows she wants a family. And a couple of well-wrought glimpses into her challenging egg retrieval process raise the stakes on the postscript in Connie’s letter: “There is one young man who I believe will capture your heart.”

That addendum threatens to tip this story toward fluffy, cloying romance territory, but the show rights the ship. In fact, it’s a bit of a bait and switch: Men, though pursued, are ultimately decentered. Rather, Sophie grows closer to the women around her as she uncovers more of their shared connections. Grace (Claude Scott-Mitchell), Enigma’s daughter, has a newborn, a sweet boy who Sophie is more than happy to babysit whenever she can. But Grace, an ethereal children’s book illustrator, has been silently drowning under waves of postpartum depression. And once again, the show portrays a co*plex women’s health issue both artfully and realistically. 

Motherhood, especially its rough edges, beco*es a through-line in The Last Anniversary. Grace’s often cold mother was never particularly maternal, and her mother disappeared. But nothing on the island is as it seems, and as Sophie and a perpetually disgruntled Veronika (Danielle Macdonald) dig deeper, they unearth more tangled family roots. There is perhaps one twist too many here, and the plot is a bit overstuffed. But what do you expect from a family that made its own mystery into a cottage industry? And that extra turn allows for a tender discovery about cantankerous Rose (Miranda Richardson), the remaining matriarch. There are love stories on Scribbly Gum Island—multiple, in fact—but none of them, pointedly, are about young men at all.  

The Last Anniversary premieres March 30 on AMC+