Inside Amazon Prime’s Surprisingly Divisive Off-Campus Adaptation

Yesterday, May 13th, the new Amazon Prime Video adaptation of Elle Kennedy's Off-Campus series premiered with 8 episodes.

And this is a review from someone who has read every single book connected to the Off-Campus universe: the original series, the Briar U series, the spin-offs, all of it.

So:

• If you haven’t read the books and don’t want spoilers, stop reading now.

• If you’ve watched the show but haven’t read the books and want to know why book readers are losing their minds, keep reading (but beware of possible spoilers!).

• And if you’ve read the books and watched the series, please sit down with me because I need to vent.

First of all, let’s talk about Garrett and Hannah.

I actually didn’t hate their storyline. That’s the thing. It was entertaining, the chemistry worked, and they kept enough key moments intact so it still felt like Garrett and Hannah at times. But the problem is that they changed some of the most important emotional motivations behind those moments, and that completely changes the characters. Because if you know Garrett Graham, then you know Garrett Graham was the book boyfriend for years. So many consecutive years of girls on BookTok, Tumblr, Instagram, everybody collectively agreeing this man was perfect. When people think of Garrett Graham, they think of the campus-wide hands-off law.

And the way they executed that storyline in the show was just weird.

In the books, Hannah breaks up with Garrett because she’s being blackmailed by Phil Graham, Garrett’s father, who threatens that he’ll financially cut Garrett off if Hannah doesn’t leave him. That’s why the breakup happens in the first place. Hannah doesn’t actually want to leave Garrett, and Garrett knows her well enough to immediately realize something is wrong because the breakup feels forced from the very beginning. So when she starts trying to date other people to convince both him and herself that it’s over, Garrett steps in. The entire point of that storyline is the emotional panic behind it. Garrett knows Hannah loves him. He knows something happened, and instead of backing away, he refuses to let her push him out of her life when he can clearly see she’s hurting. That’s what made people obsessed with that scene in the books.

But in the show, all of the blackmail storyline with Phil Graham is gone, even though that is basically the emotional backbone of the final part of the book. Phil is still awful, but he’s not nearly as manipulative or terrifying as he’s supposed to be. And because of that, the hands-off law loses its meaning. In the series, Garrett is the one who breaks up with Hannah because he feels like he’s not good enough for her, which completely changes the meaning of everything that follows. Because if he is the one ending the relationship out of insecurity, then the hands-off law suddenly makes way less sense emotionally. They still included it, but then had Garrett say he would never actually do something like that because he just wants Hannah to be happy.

Which is sweet, sure.
But that’s not Garrett Graham.

Do you want to know what Garrett Graham actually says when Hannah confronts him about the hands-off law in the book?

Hannah asks, “You invoked a campus-wide hands-off law?”

And Garrett goes: “Of course I did.”

Of course he did.

The law itself was never the important part. The important part was why he did it, the desperation behind it, the certainty that Hannah still loved him, the protectiveness, the emotional chaos of it all. That’s what people fell in love with. And that’s kind of my overall issue with the adaptation. Because I read these books back in 2019, maybe 2020, when they still had the old covers, so these characters have lived in my head for years. I understand people saying book readers are impossible to please when adaptations happen, but at the same time, a book adaptation is still supposed to feel like the book.

And this barely does sometimes.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad. If I had watched this series without ever reading the books, I honestly probably would’ve loved it. I actually did enjoy it a lot. But as an adaptation, it constantly makes you feel weird because it changes things that didn’t need changing.

And nobody suffered more from that than Dean and Allie.

Because Dean Di Laurentis was my first-ever book boyfriend. He was already my favorite throughout the first two books, but his own book completely sealed it for me. So watching what they did to his storyline genuinely pissed me off. Allie, his love interest, loves love in the books. She’s romantic, emotional, soft in a very specific way, and while I am absolutely all for women doing whatever they want and hooking up with whoever they want, that version of Allie just isn’t her. It doesn’t feel like the same person anymore. Introducing Hunter Davenport this early was already risky enough, but turning him into the guy Allie sleeps with while Dean literally can’t even touch another girl felt insane to me, because Hunter and Dean are not supposed to be enemies.

Quite the contrary, Hunter is basically Dean’s protégé in the books. Dean sees himself in him. He protects him, guides him, takes him under his wing. Their relationship matters so much later on, especially in Briar U, so changing that dynamic into this weird rivalry over Allie just feels completely unnecessary. And the worst part is that the actual love triangle storyline already exists in the universe later on, with Hunter, Fitzy, and Summer (Dean's sister). That’s where the messiness belongs. Not here. I could’ve tolerated Allie kissing Hunter. Fine. But having her fully hook up with him while Dean physically can’t bring himself to touch anyone else was brutal to watch because it completely changes the emotional balance between them.

Book Allie would never have done that. So at some point, you genuinely have to separate the books and the show in your head because they almost feel like entirely different characters wearing the same names.

The other thing that kept throwing me off throughout the season was the dynamic among the boys, because one of the reasons the books work so well is not just the romances but the friendships. The house feels lived in in the books. It feels like a family. Everyone has their person in there, and those relationships matter just as much as the actual couples do. Logan’s storyline especially has been changed a lot already. Obviously, his mother is now the one in rehab instead of his father, and he has a non-binary sibling instead of a brother. I did really like them, but I honestly still can’t fully decipher the meaning of their character as of now, because in the books, his brother wasn't all that mentioned.

What bothered me more, though, was Garrett and Logan’s relationship because they are way closer in the books than they are in the show. Here, they felt like friends. In the books, they feel like brothers. That’s the whole structure of the house dynamic. Tucker and Dean are extremely close, Garrett and Logan are extremely close, Dean and Beau are extremely close, but at the same time, they all orbit around each other constantly. Logan and Dean especially have that very loud, annoying brother energy throughout the books, and Garrett’s relationship with Logan has so much more emotional weight to it than what we saw on screen. In the series, Logan seemed disappointed in Garrett for not taking hockey seriously enough and for acting carelessly, but it never fully felt like that disappointment came from a place of deep attachment. In the books, it hurts Logan because he genuinely cares about Garrett’s future, probably more than Garrett cares himself at that point. He’s also disappointed in Garrett on another deeper level, because Garrett knows that Logan comes from a much less privileged background and still takes risks that don’t just affect him, but the entire team, which in turn puts Logan at risk too, even though hockey is the one thing securing his future through his scholarship and everything that comes with it. Even though this comes across in the series, it’s framed in a way that reduces it to something almost selfish, as if Logan is only worried about his scholarship, when in reality his disappointment runs much deeper than that, because Garrett isn’t just a teammate to him, he’s his brother, his bestfriend, and watching him throw away his future and put the team at risk isn’t just frustrating, it’s personal. Their friendship is rooted in years of understanding each other, protecting each other, pushing each other forward, and I just don’t think the show captured that intensity yet. I did love Tucker being the dad of the house, though. Him cooking for everyone and constantly holding the chaos together felt completely right. That was one of the moments where I watched something and immediately thought, okay, yes, that’s Tucker.

And then there’s the whole Logan and Hannah situation.

Obviously, Logan has a little crush on Hannah in the books, too, but everyone always interpreted that storyline less as him genuinely being in love with her and more as him being deeply aware of what Garrett and Hannah have together and realizing he wants that kind of connection for himself. There’s envy there, but not in a malicious way. He sees Garrett being loved properly for maybe the first time in his life, and he wants that feeling too. Hannah just happens to become the symbol of it for a while. That’s why I didn’t like the scene where Hannah kisses Logan after Garrett and Hannah kiss for the first time, because that changes the tone of the whole thing.

In the books, she kisses Dean, which honestly makes perfect sense because Dean is just Dean. He’s everybody’s favorite little chaos agent. He’s the one who’s down for everything, the one who turns every situation into a joke, and the scene works because it feels unserious and fun and harmless. Having her kiss Logan instead suddenly gives the whole crush storyline more weight than it ever needed to have, and even though the show didn’t fully lean into it afterward, it still felt unnecessary.

And somehow, despite all of this, the casting is perfect.

Especially Beau and Dean. Beau Maxwell is perfect. Dean is perfect. Their friendship is perfect. And that’s exactly what scares me because if you’ve read the books, you know what’s coming (Huge Spoiler Ahead).

Beau is going to die.

And the show somehow made that worse because Dean and Beau feel even closer here than they did in the books. Every scene of them joking around, understanding each other, just existing together makes me physically fight myself not to get attached because I already know how this ends.

And no, I genuinely don’t think they’ll change that storyline among all the changes they've made.

Because Beau’s death doesn’t just affect Dean. It changes everything. It impacts Tucker’s storyline, Sabrina’s storyline, the emotional direction of the entire universe. It has to happen and I'm not ready for it.

By the time the finale ended with the Hunter and Allie reveal, I was genuinely frustrated. I went to bed annoyed and woke up still annoyed because the show keeps getting so much right while simultaneously changing the exact things that made these characters special in the first place. This series clearly understands the appeal of the books. It understands why people became obsessed with Garrett Graham, why Dean Di Laurentis became people’s first book boyfriend, why readers got attached to this house and these friendships and this entire universe for years. The show knows these moments matter because it keeps trying to recreate them. It just changes the emotional reasoning behind them so often that they stop feeling the way they’re supposed to.

If the adaptation had been completely terrible, it would’ve been easy to dismiss it and move on. But it isn’t terrible at all. In fact, parts of it are genuinely great. The chemistry between the characters feels natural, and there are scenes that feel like they walked straight out of the versions of these people that have lived in my head since I first picked up the books years ago. But then the show changes something fundamental about them, something emotional, something small that completely changes the meaning of a relationship or a character dynamic, and suddenly you’re reminded that this is not actually the same story anymore.

So now I’m left in this strange middle ground where I can’t fully separate the books from the show, but I also can’t fully connect them either.

Because the adaptation understands Off-Campus's aesthetic perfectly. It understands the humor, the friendships, the charm of the hockey house, the appeal of the characters, the banter, the chaos, and the nostalgia people have attached to this universe. What it sometimes fails to understand is why those moments mattered emotionally in the first place. And unfortunately, with stories like this, the emotional reasoning behind things is everything.

Still, despite all of that, I already know I’ll be seated for season two the second it drops, especially with the recent confirmation that the next season will focus on Dean and Allie. I still don’t know if that makes me excited or slightly dreadful, because if we’re already moving into their story, then there really isn’t that much time left for Beau...

Regardless, I’m still excited for what’s coming next.

GET A GLIMPSE INTO THE SERIES HERE: