Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story

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Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story was a 2000 television mini-series was highly anticipated among fans of Anne of Green Gables. It borrowed characters from the Anne of Green Gables novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery but not actual plot lines. Instead it served as a sequel to two mini-series produced by CBC Television in the 1980s. It was the most controversial and heavily criticized of the three film adaptations written and produced by Kevin Sullivan.

The miniseries was criticized principally because unlike the 1985 Anne of Green Gables and its 1987 sequel Anne of Avonlea, the screenplay was not based upon Montgomery's works, but instead used Montgomery's much-loved characters in a wholly original World War I story by Sullivan and Laurie Pearson. Montgomery had written an Anne novel set in that same period, Rilla of Ingleside, in which Anne was a mother whose two oldest sons were fighting in Europe. The new storyline places a childless Anne in the role of a woman on a quest to find her husband, Gilbert Blythe, who becomes a doctor and disappears behind enemy lines. This departure from the novels most likely is due to lawsuits brought on by the Montgomery heirs against Sullivan Entertainment for profits derived from the previous miniseries.

The film was also criticised for introducing a continuity problem. Following Colleen Dewhurst's death in 1991, Marilla Cuthbert's death was written into the series Road to Avonlea. At Marilla's funeral, it was noted that Anne and Gilbert had already married. However, at the outset of The Continuing Story, Anne and Gilbert are not yet married even though Marilla has been dead for almost a decade.

Megan Follows returns to the role of Anne Shirley.