“Anne with an E” arrived on CBC on March 19, 2017, and it looked, at first glance, like another trip to Green Gables. It was not. Moira Walley-Beckett took Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel and rebuilt it around the parts other adaptations softened: the orphanage, the servitude, the fear. The show ran three seasons and 27 episodes, ending on November 24, 2019, when CBC and Netflix cancelled it shortly after the third season dropped. It should have run longer. What it left behind is one of the better period dramas Canadian television has made.
Trailer, via Netflix.
A Girl Sent to the Wrong House
The premise is a mistake. In 1896, elderly unmarried siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to adopt an orphan boy to help around their ancestral farm, Green Gables, on the outskirts of the fictional town of Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. Matthew goes to the railway station and finds 13-year-old Anne Shirley instead, an imaginative, bright, high-spirited and talkative girl.
Anne was orphaned when her parents died when she was a few months old. She had lived as a servant in various households before being placed in an orphanage. Matthew wants her to stay. Marilla does not trust her, given her status as an unknown orphan and the perceived uselessness of a young girl on a farm.
That distrust produces the season’s sharpest turn. Marilla cannot locate a brooch and concludes Anne is a thief. The Cuthberts send her back to the orphanage. Anne arrives, is terrified to enter, haunted by the bullying she endured there, and returns to the train station. Marilla then discovers the brooch was misplaced, not stolen. Matthew finds Anne and convinces her to return to Green Gables, where she is made part of the family.
Amybeth McNulty Out of 1,800
The casting was a genuine search. Roughly 1,800 girls across three continents auditioned for the role through an open casting call. Amybeth McNulty won it. Miranda de Pencier said McNulty could deliver dialogue that is “incredibly thick and dynamic and beautiful.” Walley-Beckett called her at once “luminous,” transparent, smart, soulful and emotional.
McNulty is Irish Canadian. Her stage career had included roles in Annie, The Sound of Music and Oliver!, and her screen work Agatha Raisin and Clean Break. Her audition, she said in an interview, “consisted of talking to trees, chatting with flowers and building thrones out of twigs.”
That is either a charming anecdote or a warning sign, depending on your tolerance. The show’s Anne talks constantly, and the performance has to make the talking a form of survival rather than a quirk. It does. McNulty plays intelligence as a mechanism Anne uses to gain acceptance, alongside problem-solving and imagination.
The Town That Keeps Testing Her
Green Gables is not the hard part. Avonlea is. Anne faces bullying from students at the Avonlea school and class-based discrimination from Diana Barry’s parents and others in the community. She keeps returning, keeps trying to win the town over.
Walley-Beckett’s series tackles helping orphans, child abandonment, psychological trauma, conformity, gender inequality, racism, religion, homosexuality, bullying and freedom of speech. That list is long, and the show does not always earn every item on it. But the ambition is the point. This is a children’s classic rewritten for an audience that has stopped pretending childhood is gentle.
Cast and Characters
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Amybeth McNulty | Anne Shirley |
| Geraldine James | Marilla Cuthbert |
| R.H. Thomson | Matthew Cuthbert |
| Lucas Jade Zumann | Gilbert Blythe |
| Joanna Douglas | Miss Stacy |
| Dalila Bela | Diana Barry |
Geraldine James gives Marilla the show’s second-best performance, all withheld warmth and suspicion that has to be unlearned rather than overcome. R.H. Thomson’s Matthew is quieter and gets less to do, but the pairing works because the two siblings disagree about Anne in ways that feel like a real household rather than a plot device.
Three Seasons, Then a Cancellation
| Season | Renewed | Ended |
|---|---|---|
| First | Premiered March 19, 2017 on CBC; May 12 internationally on Netflix | — |
| Second | August 2017 | — |
| Third | August 2018 | Released 2019; cancelled shortly after |
The series premiered on CBC on March 19, 2017, and on May 12 internationally on Netflix. CBC and Netflix renewed it for a second season in August 2017 and a third in August 2018. Then, shortly after the third season was released in 2019, both announced it was cancelled. The show was initially titled Anne for its first season within Canada.
What the Awards Confirm
Anne with an E received positive reviews and won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Dramatic Series in both 2017 and 2018. That is a back-to-back win for a series that a broadcaster ultimately decided not to continue. The awards are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the show kept its tone while widening its scope, and the recognition followed the work rather than the marketing.
Our Verdict
The first season is the strongest, because the brooch storyline gives Anne something concrete to survive and Marilla something concrete to be wrong about. Later seasons spread the show thinner across its issue list, and the ensemble grows faster than the writing can carry it. The cancellation after season three reads less like a verdict on quality than a scheduling decision, which is usually how these things go.
What makes Anne with an E worth the time is the refusal to sand down its lead. Anne is not grateful in the way stories like this usually demand. She is talkative, stubborn and strange, and the show treats those as assets. McNulty’s casting, out of 1,800 candidates, is the single decision that holds the whole thing together.
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