I wrote about Peter Friedlander’s first Upfront as Amazon’s TV head, the recent growth in broadcast, the death of vanity production deals, interviewed Bravo and Peacock reality chief Frances Berwick, and reported on how A24 is reshaping TV. I’m lesley.goldberg@theankler.com
Add Off Campus to the list of romance novels that have successfully expanded their rabid literary fan base to television audiences.
The steamy college-set romance skyrocketed to the top of Amazon’s U.S. top 10 offerings, reaching No. 1 worldwide on the platform following its May 13 binge drop — and boasting an impressive 96 percent rating among critics and a 90 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. While it’s too soon to have viewership data from the likes of Nielsen (or Amazon), longtime data analyst and former NBCUniversal senior vp strategy Ted Linhart reported Off Campus is averaging 800,000 per day over its first three days. A slow start, to be sure, but Heated Rivalry also was a word-of-mouth hit that grew over time.
Drawing immediate comparisons to the Crave/HBO Max queer hockey romance, Off Campus is based on the massively popular Off Campus book series by Canadian author Elle Kennedy. The first book in the franchise, 2015’s The Deal, revolves around the unlikely pairing of music major Hannah Wells (Ella Bright) at the fictional Briar University who (spoiler alert!) falls in love with Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli), the school’s star hockey player, after the duo make a deal to help her earn the affection of another guy (Josh Heuston). It’s a will-they-or-won’t-they on steroids that was renewed for a second season before the Amazon-Temple Hill production even premiered.
Kennedy’s Off Campus franchise has grown to include two multiple-book spinoffs and a total of 12 novels that each revolve around members of Briar University’s hunky hockey team. Across Kennedy’s more than 50 novels in all, the New York Times best-selling author has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, with her works translated into 25-plus languages.
Overseeing Prime Video’s latest buzzy YA franchise — after hits like The Summer I Turned Pretty, We Were Liars and the recently ordered Fourth Wing — is creator Louisa Levy, a writer who came up under former Grey’s Anatomy showrunners Tony Phelan and Joan Rater before honing her skills on The CW’s Life Sentence and In the Dark. Levy hopes Off Campus offers what Netflix’s Bridgerton and Heated Rivalry have — a happily ever after — while also setting the stage for new couples to lead with their own complications.
“We are setting up a love story that gets left hanging so there’s always something that gets a happily ever after and then something that is a little bit messy with more story to tune in for,” the first-time showrunner tells me from the show’s production offices in Vancouver, where she returned this week for work on season two.
The 36-year-old Levy — whose credits include Hulu’s Death and Other Details, ABC’s Stumptown and HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant — grew up in L.A. reading her mom’s romance novels and visiting TV sets where her dad worked as a gaffer. She was first approached with Off Campus as part of an open writing assignment, with Prime Video greenlighting the series in October 2024, about a year after Heated Rivalry was quietly being developed. Levy, who was paired with veteran showrunner Gina Fattore (Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, UnReal, Dare Me), says she’s glad to have been able to write and film half of the first season of Off Campus before Heated Rivalry made every executive in town run for the romance section.
“The hardest thing when you’re writing is to try to write the next version of something else,” she says. “And the best thing you can do is write the first version of what you want to write.”
In today’s interview with Levy, you’ll learn:
- How Off Campus is following the Bridgerton model as it plans its future — and what that means exactly
- How Levy explains the “third method” for romance on TV she is using
- Why Prime Video is betting on romance franchises and what kind in particular
- What rights Amazon has to Kennedy’s 12 Off Campus-related books
- How Levy broke into Hollywood and climbed the ladder — and why she fought for young writers to be on set
- The romance tropes Levy loves, and her unique approach to adapting them for TV storytelling
- How Off Campus balances serious subjects (rape, domestic violence) with romance in a counterintuitive way
- Some teases of what to expect from season two
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