Prime Video's Off Campus Has the Heat, But Can It Match Heated Rivalry

Amazon’s new romance adaptation Off Campus arrives with a clear mandate: be the next Heated Rivalry. The show, based on Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus novel series, launches on Prime Video with all the ingredients romance fans crave—college hockey players, fake dating, and plenty of steam. But as critics Nadira Goffe and Rebecca Onion explore in their Sex Reviews breakdown, the question isn’t whether this show is sexy. It’s whether intimacy and heat are enough to eclipse the cultural phenomenon that Heated Rivalry has become.

The adaptation centers on Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli), a charming hockey star with commitment issues, and Hannah Wells (Ella Bright), a music major hiding a painful secret. Their arrangement starts transactional—tutoring in exchange for dating help—but quickly evolves into something far messier when Hannah reveals she’s struggling with her sexuality following past trauma. Rather than shying away from this complexity, Off Campus leans hard into the emotional scaffolding beneath the sex scenes. That vulnerability becomes the real draw.

The show’s sex scenes themselves are graphically confident in ways network television simply cannot be. There’s cunnilingus, bare bodies, and genuine eroticism woven throughout—particularly in the centerpiece scene where Garrett and Hannah achieve intimacy through mutual vulnerability and eye contact while masturbating across from each other. It’s a moment that prioritizes consent and communication over performance, which feels deliberately chosen in an era when audiences are increasingly attuned to how sex is framed on screen.

But here’s where Off Campus diverges from Heated Rivalry’s yearning, hotel-room intensity. The show is soaked in college party energy and red Solo cups rather than the secretive, desperate longing that defined the Game Changers adaptation. The characters are straight, the setting is domestic chaos rather than clandestine meetings, and the stakes feel smaller even as the emotional beats land harder. Goffe rates it a 7 out of 10 for arousal, citing the intimacy as her primary draw. Onion gives it a 6, admitting she’s too old to avoid feeling weird about college-aged romance, no matter how well-executed.

What Off Campus nails is something Heated Rivalry couldn’t quite achieve: depicting a woman working through sexual trauma with a partner who actually listens, adjusts, and prioritizes her comfort without making it about fixing her. That’s radical for television, even prestige television. Whether that emotional sophistication outweighs the absence of Heated Rivalry’s raw, forbidden-love electricity is the real question hanging over the series.]