Prime Video’s ‘Off Campus’ Review: Charming, Flawed, Worth It

The hockey romance era of television is officially a genre now, and Prime Video wants in. Off Campus, which premieres May 13, arrives in the long shadow of Heated Rivalry — HBO’s surprise phenomenon that turned ice rinks into the hottest real estate on streaming. Amazon knows the comparison is coming. The show basically can’t avoid it. And honestly? It doesn’t entirely survive it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time.

Based on Elle Kennedy’s 2015 novel The Deal — which has over 140,000 reviews on Amazon, twice as many as the book that inspired Heated Rivalry — the series was actually ahead of the curve before the curve existed. Lead actress Ella Bright auditioned in March 2025, they shot last summer in Vancouver, and the hockey romance wave hadn’t even crested yet.

“I’m from London, so I had never watched a hockey game in my life,” Bright told WWD while on a press trip to Brazil. “I had no idea that it was this thing. And when we were filming, I’m thinking we’re the only people doing an ice hockey show. I was like, ‘I love this story, but it seems very new.’ Ice hockey’s very niche. It is such a serendipitous thing that we all kind of came out at the same time.”

The premise is exactly what you think it is — and that’s kind of the point. Hannah Wells (Bright) is a music major at fictional Briar University, quietly pining over Justin (Josh Heuston), a rock-band frontman who barely knows she exists. Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli) is the school’s NHL-bound hockey captain, failing philosophy and desperate to keep his GPA high enough to stay on the ice. He notices Hannah acing the class he’s tanking. A deal is struck: she tutors him, he fake-dates her to make Justin jealous.

“This is why this arrangement is perfect — you’re not interested in me, and I’m not interested in a relationship,” Garrett tells Hannah. “This is purely transactional.”

Famous last words.

Showrunners Louisa Levy (who adapted the scripts) and Gina Fattore have constructed something that wears its influences openly — there are visual nods to Legally Blonde, plot DNA from 10 Things I Hate About You, and a campus social hierarchy straight out of Gossip Girl. It’s a Frankenstein of beloved rom-com parts, assembled with affection. Whether that reads as comfort food or lazy writing probably depends on your mood when you press play.

The Leads: One Shines Immediately, One Takes Time

Bright, who is 19 and may genuinely be the only cast member not playing several years younger than her actual age, is a genuine find. She talked about how she initially played Hannah too small — too shy, too closed-off — before a casting director course-corrected her.

“Hannah, she has this confidence in herself. Yes, she might not be the most popular person in school, but she has her two friends, Dexter and Allie, who she trusts and that’s all that matters to her. She knows who she is in this life and she is completely comfortable in that,” Bright recalled being told. That note unlocked something. The Hannah on screen is quick-witted, warm, a little quirky, and never a pushover — which makes her a more interesting rom-com heroine than the genre usually bothers to provide.

Cameli has a harder time of it early on. Garrett’s stoic-cool-guy energy can read as blankness in the first few episodes, which is a problem when you need the audience to understand why Hannah might eventually fall for him. But he’s genuinely good when the softer side comes out — the shy glance across a crowded room, the slow warmth of someone who’s been performing confidence his whole life and finally doesn’t have to. He gets there. It just takes a minute.

The season opens with Hannah accidentally walking in on Garrett in a locker room shower, and the camera makes absolutely no apologies about where it looks. His muscular back, the water, the abs — the show is not subtle about the attraction it’s selling. Once real feelings develop between them, the series handles intimacy as a form of emotional trust-building, which is more thoughtful than the premise suggests.

That’s because Off Campus gives both leads genuine trauma to carry. Hannah’s backstory involves a past assault, and the show handles it with more care than you might expect — revealing the details gradually, letting you know who these people are before unloading the weight of what they’ve been through. There’s a scene between Garrett and his playboy teammate Dean (Stephen Kalyn) about making the women they sleep with feel safe — locker room talk as actual emotional literacy. It’s the kind of thing that only exists in fiction written by women, which is exactly why Kennedy’s books have the fanbases they do.

“The show’s stand-out quality is its insistence that characters with trauma don’t need to be in depressing stories,” as one early review put it. “They can get trope-filled rom-coms, too.” That’s not nothing.

Where It Stumbles

The eight-episode season is uneven in ways that are hard to ignore. The tonal shifts are sometimes jarring — one early conversation starts as banter about Dirty Dancing and suddenly pivots to Hannah ranting about hockey’s glorification of violence, which is necessary context delivered with all the grace of a bodycheck. Another scene delivers locker room consent talk so earnest it might as well have been cut from a later season of Ted Lasso.

The show frontloads its best material. The first half is fizzy and fun and genuinely sweet; the back half gets bogged down in backstory revelations and heavier emotional terrain, and by the time Hannah and Garrett reach their happy ending, it feels slightly rushed — like the writers ran out of steam at the exact moment the payoff was supposed to land.

Steve Howey plays Garrett’s hockey-legend father, and the character is frustratingly one-note for someone that charismatic. The on-ice action is, somehow, less exciting than you’d hope. And some of the supporting performances are rough enough to pull you out of scenes that otherwise have real momentum.

The AV Club review wasn’t wrong to note that much of Off Campus “plays like those ‘spicy’ vertical dramas currently interrupting Instagram Reels” — there’s a slickness to it that can feel algorithmic. The graphic sex scenes sometimes feel dropped in rather than earned, which undercuts the emotional work the show does elsewhere.

The Supporting Cast and What Season 2 Might Look Like

Mika Abdalla as Allie, Hannah’s theater-kid best friend, is a consistent delight — every scene she’s in has more energy. And Abdalla and Kalyn, as Allie and playboy hockey teammate Dean, have more natural chemistry than the show’s actual leads for much of the season. By the final episodes, Off Campus has already started laying groundwork for their story to take center stage in Season 2, in the same way the Bridgerton universe rotates its central couple each installment.

Prime Video has already greenlit that second season, and Bright confirmed the cast heads back to Vancouver almost immediately after the premiere. “I think I get a day off to go back to London, repack my suitcase, and we start again,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

Whether Off Campus becomes a genuine phenomenon or a pleasant footnote probably depends on what that second season delivers. The trailer has already racked up nearly 9 million views, and the BookTok community that made Kennedy’s novels a cultural touchstone is primed and ready. The audience is there. The goodwill is there. The question is whether the show can sharpen itself into something with real teeth — or at least real heat.

For now, Off Campus is exactly what it looks like: a warm, occasionally clumsy, genuinely charming college romance with a breakout lead and a second season that might actually be the real thing. Sometimes that’s enough to get you to the next chapter.