‘Off Campus’ Review: Amazon’s Hockey Romance Is No ‘Heated Rivalry,’ and That’s Mostly OK

Does the saying “A rising tide lifts all boats” apply to subgenres of small-screen romance? Amazon surely hope so. As a romance involving a star hockey player with daddy issues, its new series Off Campus will be unable to avoid reflexive comparisons to Heated Rivalry — and, given the HBO drama’s lightning-in-a-bottle success, unlikely to live up to them.

Off Campus can only pray that said comparisons will attract the attention of an audience newly primed for love stories involving sweaty men with sticks on ice skates, and that its own charms will be enough to get them to stay.

On that front, there’s good news and bad news. Less steamy, less emotional and, somehow, possibly even less interested in the sport of hockey than Heated Rivalry, Off Campus is unlikely to supplant the earlier series in most romance lovers’ hearts. But once you get over the show it isn’t, the show it actually is has modest pleasures of its own to offer.

Adapted by Louisa Levy from a series of books by Elle Kennedy, Off Campus plays like a collage of recycled romance tropes, from “opposites attract” to “fake dating” to “notorious playboy catches feelings for the last person he expected.” This is not a failing of the series so much as its central appeal: Entering this world should feel as comfortingly familiar as sliding into a warm bubble bath — perhaps even with a vibrator, if that’s your thing, as it is for some of these characters.

Somewhere on a generic New England college campus are two photogenic students with two seemingly unrelated problems. Hannah (Ella Bright) is a music major hopelessly mooning over Justin (Josh Heuston), a wannabe rock star. Garrett (Belmont Cameli) is the school’s NHL-bound hockey team captain, who’s struggling to keep his grades high enough to keep playing.

Garrett has never looked twice at Hannah, despite one of her three work-study jobs being waiting tables at the campus hangout he frequents, and despite his best friend (Antonio Cipriano’s Logan) nursing an obvious crush on her. But after he notices she’s acing the class he’s failing, Garrett suggests a deal: If she agrees to tutor him, he’ll help her get Justin, mostly by pretending to date her to make Justin jealous.

If this arrangement makes not much sense — one would think Garrett, who is rich, could simply pay Hannah, who desperately needs the money — Off Campus barely pretends otherwise. Really, it’s a pretext to throw together two characters who otherwise run in mutually exclusive social circles, then hope that the sparks between them will do the rest.

For the most part, they do, although it takes a minute to get there. While Bright (who, at 19, might be the only cast member who’s not playing several years younger) embodies Hannah’s sunshiny energy from the jump, Cameli has a harder time making Garrett’s stoic cool read as something more than blankness. But he is, thankfully, far better at playing Garrett’s softer side, which comes out almost immediately as he starts to warm toward Hannah.

The series is at its most endearing when the two are simply connecting, whether it’s the normally confident Garrett gazing shyly at Hannah from across a crowded room, or the normally reserved Hannah confidently taking charge of their relationship. It’s at its second most endearing when Hannah is confiding about all of it in her theater-kid bestie, Allie, played with appealing gusto by Mika Abdalla.

Off Campus makes no bones about the sexual charge between its two leads. The season opens with Hannah accidentally walking in on Garrett in a locker room shower, whereupon the camera lingers on his muscular back, his rippling abs, the drops of water pouring down both. Once Hannah and Garrett start to develop real feelings for each other — I’d say spoiler alert, but c’mon — orgasms are both how they express their trust in one another and how they reinforce it.

This turns out to be more serious business than one might expect, since Off Campus saddles each half of its central pairing with a traumatic backstory to explain her anxieties about sex and his about commitment. To its credit, it manages to do so without reducing either character to just their tragedies. By revealing the details only bit by bit, it allows us to get to know who these people are now before we’re made to fully unpack the baggage they’ve been carrying with them this whole time.

But if the intention is admirable, the execution is shaky. The eight-hour season struggles at times to blend its fluffier romance elements and heavier dramatic ones, yielding some jarring tonal shifts and some groaningly clunky dialogue. One of Garrett and Hannah’s first conversations begins as a bit of banter about Dirty Dancing before taking a sudden swerve into her ranting about hockey’s glorification of violence; it’s essential foreshadowing but also whiplash-inducing. Another attempt to balance both sides yields locker room talk about consent so cloyingly wholesome it might as well come from a later-season episode of Ted Lasso.

Eventually, Off Campus can hold off the darkness no more. Having frontloaded its sweetest, fizziest material into the first half of the season, the good times peak around the midpoint, leaving the back half to deal with all the sadder, uglier backstory-related developments. By the time Hannah and Garrett make it back into the light, their happy ending (again, I’d say spoiler alert, but c’mon) feels like an afterthought.

That sense is not helped by the fact that by that point, Off Campus has already started to shift its attention away from this lead couple to another pairing among their friends (no spoilers this time) who seem primed to take center stage next season, the way various Bridgertons take turns finding love at various balls. It’s an odd choice if you see this as the Graham and Hannah show, suggesting a mismatch between the amount of story the writers had to tell about them and the number of episodes they had to fill. But if you see it, like hockey, as a team effort, perhaps it’s just good strategy.