A hometown return. A handsome handyman. A look at the formula that made ‘Sullivan’s Crossing’ a Netflix hit.

A city girl relocates to a sleepy town to restart her life, reconnect with her family and turn over a new page.

It’s not Cousins Beach, Massachusetts, Ransom Canyon, Texas or Serenity, South Carolina. And it’s not Virgin River, California, either. But it’s close. Welcome to Timberlake, the picturesque Canadian town at the center of Sullivan’s Crossing — a leafy, idyllic setting that can feel like a welcomed respite from the crazed real world. Here, time slows down, people really talk to each other and you can tune in a little more to the finer details of life to figure out what matters most.

Adapted from the bestselling books by Virgin River author Robyn Carr, Sullivan’s Crossing follows Boston neurosurgeon Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan), whose perfectly planned life is upended after a professional crisis. She moves back to her hometown in rural Nova Scotia for a fresh start and to rebuild her relationship with her estranged father, Sully (Gilmore Girls’ Scott Patterson), all the while unexpectedly falling in love with a ruggedly handsome handyman named Cal (One Tree Hill’s Chad Michael Murray) and trying to save the family campground, The Crossing, from financial ruin and real estate vultures.

But Maggie’s transition from the big city to small-town living is anything but smooth amid romantic turmoil, unexpected reunions and life-altering decisions. There are love triangles. Makeups and breakups. Family secrets unearthed and relationships mended. Pregnancies and miscarriages.Medical mysteries and life-and-death crises. Births and deaths. Sullivan’s Crossing has it all.

Canadian catnip

The series first originated in Canada, premiering March 19, 2023, on CTV, where it was the network’s most-watched Canadian drama during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 broadcast seasons. It later aired stateside on the CW, where it is one of the network’s most-watched shows for three seasons and counting.

It found a whole new audience when its first two seasons premiered on Netflix on July 8. The show was streaming catnip for American viewers — Season 1 was one of the top 10 most-watched shows in the U.S. for six consecutive weeks this summer. Season 2 followed, holding its own with three weeks in the top 10 in the U.S.

When Season 3 arrived on Netflix Aug. 11, Sullivan’s Crossing reappeared alongside the streamer’s most popular titles globally and in the U.S., proving its effect on audiences was not a fluke.

The steady growth in streaming interest and viewership has turned Sullivan’s Crossing into a unique case study of what can go right when an older show grabs a new audience.

“It has been really nice in that it has been this slow build-out, whereas other shows will come in, Season 1 will be huge and then [it] dies off in Seasons 2 and 3,” series star Kohan tells Yahoo. “This seems the opposite of that, which has been very affirming in how much people resonate with these stories.”

A relatable escape from reality

Sullivan’s Crossing fans have cited the show’s relatively low stakes, predictability of the storylines and relatable characters as main reasons why it’s prime for binge-watching. It’s also dependable, a signature of the cozy, comfort TV the show is often described as.

“Things can happen to [the characters], but you’re pretty sure you’re not going to get Game of Thrones or Ned Stark-ed,” Megan Vick, freelance writer and Television Critics Association board member, tells Yahoo, referencing one of the biggest plot twists in recent TV history when the presumed Game of Thrones protagonist was dramatically killed off in Season 1, heightening the sense that no one was safe. Instead, you go into it with the mindset of, “‘I’m going to spend 45 minutes with these people who are likable and are trying to do their best.’ There is no politics. It’s just, ‘OK, how are we going to save this campground? How are we going to handle this next medical emergency?’”

Alexa LaMalfa became a fan of Sullivan’s Crossing earlier this year. She was scrolling through Netflix, bored with what she had been watching, saw that the show was new, and quickly binge-watched the first two seasons in a few days. Desperate to know what happened in Season 3, LaMalfa — who admits she’s an “absolute sucker for shows like this,” listing Hart of Dixie and Virgin River as some of her favorites — downloaded the CW app and watched the rest of the episodes there.

“It represented family [and] community. It was comforting to watch the characters interact in the way that they did,” LaMalfa tells Yahoo. “I think that’s what really drew me to keep watching because it didn’t seem fake to me, like I was sitting [on a couch] watching TV. It was like I was going to Sullivan’s Crossing.”

The fact that the characters didn’t lead extraordinary lives also made it easier to digest, she says. “They have normal jobs and that’s relatable to an audience. You can just jump in and feel like you’re part of it.”

Kaitlin Kemp, a 33-year-old filmmaker based in New York City, who was looking for something to watch “to help me get off my phone and decompress,” was sold by the “serene-looking landscape.”

What she didn’t account for was how invested she would become. “My stress levels jumped the second the show started,” Kemp tells Yahoo.

The Virgin River boost

Sullivan’s Crossing holds much of the same DNA as Netflix’s longest-running scripted series, Virgin River. Both are romantic dramas inspired by novels written by Carr, who has a large, engaged fan base. And both are now streaming hits for Netflix.

Vick credits Virgin River’s sustained success as a key factor fueling Sullivan Crossing’s current uptick in streams.

“There’s a very large audience for Virgin River. So when you’re looking for shows like Virgin River [on Netflix], Sullivan’s Crossing is an automatic win,” Vick says.

“The pipeline from Virgin River to Sullivan’s Crossing is very easy,” she continues. “Netflix [has] the algorithm, so they know if you’ve watched Virgin River to put this in your ‘We think you should watch this’ queue, and that’s how it takes off. It’s such an organic match for Virgin River that it makes perfect sense that Netflix would feed it to those fans.”

Sullivan’s Crossing creator Roma Roth, who was an executive producer on Virgin River, set her “sights high” with the goal of matching the Netflix series’ popularity with that formula in mind. “We had all the building blocks between all of those ingredients to create a hit show,” Roth tells Yahoo.

“Giving people realistic characters on identifiable journeys that they connect with” is the basis for Sullivan’s Crossing, Roth says, “because we live in this world where we’re talking through screens and we’re not connecting emotionally with each other.”

The show represents “this world that we would all maybe like one day to live in,” Roth says. “If we walk out of our backyards and we walk into Sullivan’s Crossing, you give them that community that they’re missing, the support they’re missing in their real lives and allow them to express their emotions through a third party, which is the character that they’re going on this journey with.”

‘A modern-day soap opera’

Sullivan’s Crossing may follow a formula, but it also isn’t afraid to throw the occasional curveball and craft memorable cliffhangers to keep people on their toes. After all, it is television.

“What I love most about Sullivan’s Crossing is how unpredictable it is,” Kemp says, who describes it as “a modern-day soap opera” that she can’t quite quit. “You truly never know where the writers are going to take the story or how long you have to meet a character before they die or come close to death… And the cliffhangers are truly unmatched.”

A brain tumor makes a beloved character face her mortality, Sully’s guilt over an accident he caused leads him to take on the financial burden of raising a child and Maggie’s surprise pregnancy at the end of Season 2 are just a few examples of the familiar conflicts that have plagued the characters.

LaMalfa agrees, referencing the dramatic diner fire in the Season 2 finale — in which Sully’s fate was left unanswered after he raced into the fire to rescue those trapped — as an emotional game-changer. “The stakes were low and then something like that happened; it just brought everything from point A to point B,” she says. “Things got more intense and then [I] got 10 times more invested.”

“Any good show is going to draw your audience in. And if it’s too easy of a watch, you might get bored with the show or you might be making yourself a sandwich, which you don’t want. You want to keep the audience’s attention,” Roth says. The showrunner scours social media to track fan responses to storyline beats and character developments. “In a drama, you have to pack things in them in a more dramatic way and take some creative license. We want to take people on a fun journey… in a way that is bingeable.”

That strategy has worked in spades. Now, with Season 4 back in production in Halifax, Nova Scotia, there will be even more drama in store with the arrival of Maggie’s secret husband complicating her romance with Cal.

“Season 4 is all about metamorphosis and transition,” Roth says.