On a sunny Tuesday in June, local townspeople milled about, admiring booths full of handicrafts. A beloved restaurateur flipped burgers over an open grill. The wind whipped through a canopy of fir trees.
It was Founders Day in Virgin River, a remote but bustling small town in Northern California that was established in the late 1800s. Yes, the community has its problems — the threat of wildfires; an illegal cannabis farm; the odd bit of kidnapping, chemical poisoning and emergency brain surgery. But it is mostly full of good people trying their best.
The town is also, as viewers of the Netflix romance series “Virgin River” know, wholly fictional. That hasn’t stopped millions of them from escaping quietly to this cozy quasi-utopia for seven seasons and counting.
The festivities were part of a location shoot on an estate in Abbotsford, British Columbia, one of several towns where the show is filmed around Vancouver and the nearby Fraser Valley. (The river seen in the show’s opening credits is actually the Squamish.) I was there to observe the making of what has since 2019 been one of the streamer’s most reliable hits, despite a near total absence of major stars, awards season chatter or “Stranger Things”-size budgets.
“Virgin River” isn’t the kind of show that lands on critics’ year-end lists. Based on the best-selling romance novels by Robyn Carr, it centers on Mel (Alexandra Breckenridge), a Los Angeles transplant, midwife and nurse practitioner, and her relationship with Jack (Martin Henderson), a local bar owner and former Marine.
Their friends, family and neighbors are mostly wholesome, but there is no shortage of melodrama. The local doctor (Tim Matheson) and the local detective (Marco Grazzini) stay busy. The detective is also caught in a love triangle — with Jack’s sister (Zibby Allen) and the local bad boy (Benjamin Hollingsworth). Stakes are sometimes life-or-death, but they aren’t usually complicated.
As Henderson put it at one point during my visit: “In a world where there’s so much pushing the envelope, this is very much the antithesis of that.”
The lead actors initially didn’t expect the show to do well. They viewed it as “very cheesy,” Breckenridge said during a production break. The lingering glances felt too long. The dialogue seemed overwrought.
“I just thought it would end up in the graveyard of Netflix’s unwatched things,” she said. “I kept saying to Martin, ‘Don’t worry, nobody’s going to watch it. Nobody’s watching. It’s fine.’”
Maybe they should have worried. Each new season of “Virgin River” has reached No. 1 or No. 2 on Nielsen’s streaming charts since 2020, when the lists were introduced.
Season 7 debuted on Thursday. Season 8, which begins production in April, will give “Virgin River” the most seasons of any live-action English-language drama in Netflix history. Alongside other streaming successes like “Bridgerton” and “Heated Rivalry,” the series offers more evidence of a substantial (and growing) audience for the comforting, sometimes predictable escape that romance adaptations provide.
Cheesy or otherwise, the cast and crew have settled in for the long haul.
ON THE SURFACE, “Virgin River” has a lot in common with the formulaic romances that have proliferated on Hallmark and Lifetime: a jaded city slicker moves to a small town and finds true love and contentment. There have been two Christmas episodes.
“I describe the show as a warm bath,” said Colin Lawrence, who plays Preacher, Virgin River’s star chef and Jack’s best friend. He has also appeared in a handful of Hallmark films, which shoot regularly in the same area.
But certain aspects of the series feel more appropriate to prestige drama than frothy romance. On a tour of the soundstages in Burnaby, where most of the interior scenes are shot, the production designer, Tony Devenyi, guided me through Jack’s Bar, Doc’s clinic and Mel and Jack’s farmhouse. The dark color palettes were rich, the décor finely detailed.
Devenyi said he had been watching the gritty crime series “Ozark” around the time he designed the look of “Virgin River,” and he tried to impart a similar visual gravitas.
“Even though the material might have been on the lighter side,” he said, “at least the sets would be really concrete and feel like they’re the real deal.”
When the showrunner Patrick Sean Smith (“Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings,” “Everwood”) took over in Season 5, he sought to ground “Virgin River” a little more while also expanding its lore. Recent seasons have also introduced minor L.G.B.T.Q. story lines and more actors of color.
“It’s a bit of a swinging pendulum between romance and reality,” he said.
And the show has gotten sexier. Smith said that the writers periodically receive “very graphic, specific requests” from the show’s female fans, describing trysts they would like to see onscreen. Breckenridge pushed for more sex scenes between Mel and Jack.
“I don’t particularly like filming those,” she said with a shrug. “But the audience enjoys them.”
Women don’t seem to be the only fans. A certain strain of conventional wisdom holds that romance adaptations are less broadly appealing than traditionally more masculine genres, like thrillers and procedurals. Smith doesn’t totally buy it.
“I’ve certainly met men who were like, ‘Oh, my girlfriend loves your show,’” he said. “Then they start to talk about it and I’m like, ‘Well, you sure know a lot of details about a show that your girlfriend watches.’”
Part of the show’s appeal likely lies in its focus on grown-up relationships. Breckenridge is 43 and Henderson is 51. Many of the supporting actors are in their 60s and 70s, including Matheson, 78, and Annette O’Toole, 73, who plays his feisty partner. (She is also the mayor.) Smith called it a celebration of “second love,” with multiple story lines about divorced and widowed people. Matheson noted that older characters on “Virgin River” are more than just someone’s parents or grandparents.
“They have fun, they have sex, they have careers,” he said. “We’re not pigeonholed into playing certain things a certain way.”
Being on “Virgin River” can have its drawbacks. Time passes slowly — one character was pregnant with twins for five seasons — so the cast doesn’t have many opportunities to portray character growth.
“I’m playing a lot of the same beats over and over again,” Breckenridge said. “As an actress, it can be quite frustrating.”
But familiarity can also generate confidence. In a studio at nearby Fort Langley Airport, the production was filming an ambulance scene starring a one-month-old actor slathered in goop made of gelatin and strawberry jam. After a few takes, one of lines still didn’t sit right with Breckenridge. The team quickly scrambled to tweak the line and its delivery before they ran out of time with the baby (just 20 minutes a day per union rules).
After seven seasons, Breckenridge — who along with Henderson is now a producer — has become more comfortable speaking up when something doesn’t feel right. She has also learned a thing or two about obstetrics.
“The other day, I was trying to count how many babies I’ve delivered,” she mused during a break, still wearing Mel’s scrubs and chewing gum. “I wonder if I could actually deliver a baby at this point.”
Constantly inhabiting that space, however, even in a series as uplifting as “Virgin River,” can take a toll. Breckenridge’s own son had a health scare as an infant. Playing Mel, who has experienced pregnancy-related trauma and performs multiple risky deliveries, can be challenging.
Filming the ambulance scene “was awful for me,” she said. “It was like going into my worst nightmare, but I had to, and that was extraordinarily difficult.”
A FEW HUNDRED FEET down a dirt road from Founders Day, producers had converted a muddy paddock into a Malaysian jungle, complete with potted tropical plants. Inside a canvas tent, Breckenridge and the guest star Austin Nichols were shooting a flashback scene from Mel’s time in Nurses Beyond Borders.
A makeup artist dabbed fake perspiration onto the actors. Breckenridge agreed to some extra clavicle sweat, but she drew the line at her armpits. Realism on “Virgin River” has its limits.
Production for the season was winding down, and there was a last-week-of-school vibe as a farewell card was passed around for a departing cast member and the crew chatted about their summer plans. As the sun began to set over the surrounding green hills, a barn cat strolled by. Grips and assistants paused to indulge it with a few chin scratches and take photos.
All of the “Virgin River” crew members I spoke to seemed genuinely delighted by their time on the series and the opportunities its lengthy run had presented. They sometimes appear onscreen: In the Season 7 finale, a special effects assistant played a blacksmith in a Founders Day scene; the show’s medical technician played a surgeon.
“If they do stray” to work on another nearby project, Devenyi, the production designer, said, “they realize, ‘Oh, my God, everything else is pain in the ass compared to this show.’”
Luckily for them, “Virgin River” shows no signs of stopping. Interest in romance as a genre seems only to be growing. (Readers bought nearly 44 million romance books last year, according to Publishers Weekly, up almost 4 percent from 2024.) Smith believes there is “more fertile ground” to explore in future seasons. And Jinny Howe, the head of Netflix’s scripted series in North America, said in a later phone interview that Netflix hadn’t seen any “diminishing of enthusiasm” from fans.
“It doesn’t show any signs of slowing down,” Howe said of the series. “As long as the fans want more, we will continue to give it to them.”
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