The expectations were pretty high going into Off Campus, as Amazon had already picked up the show for a second season, feeling ultra-confident that it had a new hit on its hands. It comes from Elle Kennedy’s popular book series, which allows the show to have almost a Bridgerton-like structure, meaning the focus can shift to a new couple each season. But I grew up on these types of shows, coming-of-age teen dramas. I was blessed to be there for the arrival of The WB, starting off with shows like Dawson’s Creek, moving into things like One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl, along with plenty of shorter-lived shows that explored various aspects of the coming-of-age struggle. Off Campus feels a little more like a modern version of that, or you could tie it into just about any college-set series, even going back to Judd Apatow’s Undeclared, his follow-up to Freaks and Geeks. But this one certainly has more of a romantic angle to it, which works well for Amazon’s brand. They found out with The Summer I Turned Pretty that there is a massive audience for this, and they now seem to be attempting to replicate that success as much as humanly possible. So Off Campus is definitely on brand for Amazon.

For me, I did enjoy, at least conceptually, what Off Campus offered because I liked the fact that Hannah Wells (Ella Bright), our female lead for the season, was a music major and aspiring singer-songwriter who was at school hoping to better herself in the field. But she’s faced with a curveball when financial situations change and she finds out she will be losing her scholarship, not because she did anything wrong, but because the college’s finances are being restructured. Typically when this happens, the arts are always the ones to suffer. It’s never the sports, which is probably why when she starts having a connection with Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli), a star hockey player, they seem like an odd pairing. He doesn’t have any problems staying at the college. He’s also a legacy, as his obnoxious, abusive father Phil (Steve Howey) was a star hockey player in his day, and now everybody treats him like a god even though Garrett knows he is anything but.

Hannah and Garrett’s relationship starts off as an arrangement, with Hannah tutoring Garrett and helping him get his grades up while Garrett helps Hannah get the attention of Justin (Josh Heuston), the singer-songwriter she has a huge crush on. Garrett becomes increasingly enamored with Hannah, including her talent as a musician, while she is trying to win a competition that could give her the financial stability to stay at school. I kind of thought the series was going to do more of a romantic love triangle between Hannah, Garrett and Justin, but it really just seems to be treading water until Hannah and Garrett realize that they are the romantic protagonists of the season and need to stop fighting what inevitably will happen, which is them getting together. There’s a robust supporting cast around them, including Garrett’s hockey teammates Dean (Stephen Kalyn), Logan (Antonio Cipriano) and Tucker (Jalen Thomas Brooks), while Hannah’s roommate Allie (Mika Abdalla) is going through her own struggles and is positioned to become part of the romantic focus moving forward. The ensemble is well cast. They all seem effortlessly charming and charismatic, and I can understand why the show has taken off because everyone here feels capable of pulling in their own fans who will come back for future seasons to see different couples hooking up. Bridgerton will eventually run out of Bridgertons. Off Campus can just keep recycling through the student population. This is the kind of show that could theoretically run for 10 seasons if they can find 10 unique couples and stories worth telling.

I wasn’t necessarily compelled to propel myself through the series, but it certainly had its moments. The Drunk Shakespeare episode, where the students become part of a drunken production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was one of the more intriguing. I don’t know if things like that actually happen at colleges, but having these students trying to act out Shakespeare while also having a party felt like a unique concept and helped give the show some identity. Otherwise, the themes within Hannah and Garrett’s stories are definitely themes we’ve seen before, they just work and are recycled here to solid dramatic effect. Garrett, while considered a phenomenal athlete with his future seemingly laid out for him, isn’t really sure that’s the future he wants. It’s something his father has pushed him toward his entire life, but Garrett is 100% sure he doesn’t want to become his dad. Every time Phil pops up throughout the season, Garrett gets angrier and more annoyed at his presence. I could go through the history of kids not wanting to follow their parents’ failed sports dreams, but I always go back to that Varsity Blues moment where James Van Der Beek’s character tells his father that playing football may have been the opportunity of his lifetime, but he doesn’t want his life. That kind of feels like where Garrett is headed. Hockey may have been his father’s dream, but Garrett may be far more interested in something else. He’s just never really been asked what that something else might be.

Hannah, meanwhile, definitely wants music, but she’s struggling to find the pop singer-songwriter style she thinks she needs in order to win the competition. It isn’t really until her big secret hits her over the head again that she’s able to find the right emotion, the right lyrics and eventually a song that brings the house down. Hannah had been sexually assaulted in the past. She was drugged at a party, she knows who did it, and he got away with it. He continues to spread lies about her even though she has remained relatively silent about what happened and doesn’t wear this experience out in the open for everyone to see. It has affected the way she approaches relationships and trusts people, and it comes to a head when the guy who assaulted her suddenly turns up playing on the opposing hockey team during one of Garrett’s biggest games of the season. When he realizes Hannah is Garrett’s girlfriend, he makes a comment that makes what happened incredibly evident, especially once Garrett sees Hannah’s reaction. Garrett flies into a rage, throws down on the ice and gets himself thrown out of the game. Hannah doesn’t really know how to feel about Garrett doing that, and she’s simultaneously dealing with a panic attack simply from knowing this guy is around. She’s trying to be supportive of Garrett while her walking nightmare is within a stone’s throw.

Where all of this eventually goes is one of the things I respected most about Off Campus. Hannah is given an opportunity toward the end, once everything has been laid out for the audience, to seek some kind of recompense for what happened to her, but instead she chooses to move forward. It’s an interesting choice. I think most writers would have Hannah make a big deal out of it or pull out some shocking piece of evidence that proves unequivocally that he assaulted her so she can finally get her just desserts and see him punished. But it’s a very personal thing for Hannah, and her conversation with Allie is handled so delicately that I accepted this as her personal choice, refusing to allow herself to be defined as a victim and continuing to move forward. That’s what her final song is really about, this terrible thing that happened to her and her refusal to let it define the rest of her life. She’s even able to move past Garrett’s surprising mixture of chivalry and violence so they can end the season together instead of apart. All of those choices helped me find a deeper respect for Off Campus because they were atypical choices to make in this kind of drama. Oftentimes, when someone is in that situation, the storyline becomes about making sure the other party is punished for their actions. Here, really the only thing that happens to this guy is that he gets his ass beaten on the ice. He still gets to walk around, and I’m sure some will debate whether Hannah could have stopped him from doing it again. But he’s presented as such an icky, disgusting human being that I don’t know which girls would be getting too close to him to begin with. I think he got lucky at a party with Hannah. I don’t think she ever saw anything in him. He feels like the kind of disgusting human being who one day will turn into an incel, so as long as women let their natural instincts kick in, he’ll be a loner for life. Hannah can take the worst thing that’s ever happened to her and keep it as a personal experience instead of allowing herself to be defined by it.

Off Campus also had some lovely audio description this season from Media Access Group, and I appreciated their work, including specifically the sex scenes. I know that sounds kind of creepy, so give me a minute to clarify. As a blind film critic who went from sighted to blind, I can tell you that one of the words I started hearing more than almost anything else in the entire world was “thrusting.” It was like every audio description writer in the world had no idea how to write one of these scenes without describing everything as thrusting, all the time, all day, every day. Apparently, it’s the only move any human being ever makes during sex. So every time I find a writer who finds a way of creatively describing a sex scene in even a slightly different manner, I appreciate it. Of course, there’s some truly amazing work on something like Bridgerton, which has some of the best audio description writing specifically in this style. It even turned into a little bit of a social media phenomenon when sighted people turned on the audio description and realized that somehow it made Bridgerton a little bit hornier, which is a good thing. It should make us feel something. That’s kind of the point.

With the audio description for Off Campus, they do more than just thrust, and it’s appreciated. That’s all I’m trying to say. It’s not that I sit around thinking to myself, man, I hope there are some really killer sex scenes in this college show. But since they’re there, I’m glad there was an attempt to make them feel like the writers weren’t just going through the motions every single time. As far as the rest of the description, it’s pretty basic because this is a modern-day college show, and aside from the sex scenes, the most challenging things to describe are probably the hockey sequences and that Midsummer Night’s Dream episode. But everything held up nicely, and it was really just more excellent work from Media Access Group.

I’ll watch the second season. I enjoyed Off Campus. It didn’t immediately become a new favorite of mine, and I never felt compelled to rapidly consume every single episode, but I enjoyed it enough that I want to see where it goes next. It’s also good that we’re already invested in this larger group of characters, even if the romantic focus changes. That should be interesting, and it’s kind of what Bridgerton does, except Off Campus has the opportunity to keep Hannah and Garrett around in the background, contributing to somebody else’s story instead of jettisoning the previous season’s couple. That would be nice. I always think it’s weird when people just vanish from Bridgerton.

If you’re here reading a review about Off Campus, you’re probably looking for validation because if you’ve looked at Off Campus at all and considered it for yourself, you probably already know whether this show is for you. It is exactly as advertised. It’s not surprising. It doesn’t suddenly switch genres halfway through. It’s a young adult romance set at a college with an ensemble cast, and it does exactly what it sets out to do, with enough creativity and some surprisingly thoughtful choices along the way to carve out its own space in Amazon’s lineup.

Fresh: 7.4/10