Virgin River Review

Netflix ordered Virgin River from Robyn Carr's romance novels in 2018, and it has been reported as the service's longest-running English-language drama, now seven seasons in with an eighth ordered. Alexandra Breckenridge plays Mel Monroe, a widowed nurse practitioner who moves to a remote Northern California town, and Martin Henderson plays Jack Sheridan, the former Marine who runs the bar and becomes her reason to stay. Shot in British Columbia, with Bowen Island standing in for the town, it lets the forest, river and mist do much of the work.

The best of it belongs to the older generation. Tim Matheson's Doc Mullins and Annette O'Toole's Hope McCrea, the town doctor and its mayor, bring a wit and friction the younger stories lack. Around them the plotting leans on daytime staples: an illegal cannabis farm outside town, a shooting in the bar held over as a season finale cliffhanger, pregnancies whose paternity stays in doubt for seasons.

Breckenridge and Henderson are warm, capable leads, but the dialogue spells out what the actors have already played, and Patrick Sean Smith, Tenney's successor as showrunner, has kept the formula rather than tightened it. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus called the second season as gentle as a babbling brook and just as exciting, which is the fair measure.