Amazon's College Hockey Romance
The Hollywood Reporter • • entertainment
Key Points:
- Amazon's new romance series Off Campus, featuring a star hockey player with daddy issues, faces inevitable comparisons to the successful HBO drama Heated Rivalry, making it challenging to match its popularity.
- Adapted from Elle Kennedy's books, Off Campus relies on familiar romance tropes like "fake dating" and "opposites attract," aiming to provide comfort and familiarity to viewers despite lacking originality.
- The series centers on Hannah, a music major, and Garrett, an NHL-bound hockey captain, who enter a tutoring and fake dating arrangement that evolves into genuine feelings, though Garrett's character development is slower to engage.
- Off Campus openly explores the sexual chemistry between its leads while addressing their traumatic pasts, managing to depict their complexities without reducing them solely to their struggles.
- The show struggles with tonal shifts between light romance and heavier drama, resulting in uneven pacing and dialogue, with the latter half of the season focusing more on darker backstory elements that diminish the impact of the happy ending.