Off-Campus TV Series: Hockey, Fake Relationships, and Jennifer Lopez

The Off-Campus TV series became one of the main hits of spring 2026: the romantic drama about the university hockey team was released on May 13 and in the first weeks became one of the most viewed releases of the platform, surpassing even the superhero hit "Boys" in terms of current popularity. On Rotten Tomatoes, the show holds a "fresh" rating of about 93% from critics and 88% from viewers. One of the scenes unexpectedly brought Jennifer Lopez's dance hit On the Floor back to the global charts 15 years after its release. What is the origin of the new series and what is generally happening with the genre of the hockey novel — in the material of Izvestia.

Hockey, a deal, and a "fake relationship"

"Off Campus" is an adaptation of the first book in the Canadian writer Elle Kennedy's series of the same name and follows the classic romcom trope "opposites attract." The captain of the Bryar University student hockey team, Garrett Graham, is the star of the campus and a promising player who is burdened by the shadow of his famous father and the pressure of a future career in the NHL. Hannah Wells is a music student and is secretly in love with musician Justin. In the book and in the TV series, she went through a traumatic experience at school, she has difficulties with trust.

Garrett, in turn, fails a semester in philosophy and risks being kicked off the team if he doesn't urgently improve his academic performance. So a deal is born: Hannah agrees to help him with his studies on the condition that he will play the role of her boyfriend — in exchange for tutoring and guarantees that he will stay on the ice. The first season, consisting of eight episodes, fully adapts "The Deal" and builds the world of Briar University through a company of hockey players who have to maintain a balance between sports, parties and growing up.

Each subsequent season, according to the creators, will be dedicated to a new couple from the team, similar to the Bridgertons, where each season follows a different member of the Bridgerton family. In parallel, the romantic line of two other characters, Allie and Dean, has already been launched in the first season, which will become central in the second.

The role of Garrett is played by Belmont Kameli, known for the movie "Wise Guys", Hannah is played by Ella Bright. The supporting cast includes Mika Abdallah as Allie, Antonio Cipriano (Logan), Jalen Thomas Brooks (Tucker), Josh Huston (Justin), Steven Kaylin (Dean) and Steve Howie (Shameless) as Garrett's father. The show was filmed in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia under the name "Lillian Way"; hockey scenes were shot at the real Thunderbird Sports Centre stadium, and the fraternity of hockey players portrayed the real engineering fraternity Sigma Phi Delta.

The main series are centenarians. A selection of eight shows

How did Briar and the BookTok phenomenon come about

The book series "Off Campus" is five novels by Canadian Elle Kennedy, written since 2015. According to Deadline, the series has sold about 3 million copies through Amazon in 24 markets. Books existed long before the BookTok era, but it was TikTok that gave them a second life: in 2023-2024, influencers with paper books in their hands provided Kennedy with a new wave of readers — mostly young women who discovered the “new adult” as a genre.

Kennedy herself is the producer of the series, which is rare for adaptations. According to her, the creators changed a number of details compared to the book (in particular, the profession of Hannah's second love interest), and she was pleased with the result.

The series was developed by Louise Levy in tandem with Gina Fattor, who previously worked on teen and drama shows for American television. They act as co‑showrunners of the project and are responsible for adapting the book structure of the anthology to the serial format, where each couple gets its own season, but the characters continue to intersect in common storylines.

What the critics say

At the time of its release, the series received 93% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes with an 89% viewership rating — the third result among all Prime Video shows in 2026, after Fallout and Invincible. According to Movieweb, the series also has the highest total critical and viewer ratings among romantic shows over the past year.

The Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads, "Off Campus thrives on the passion and deliberate exploration of relationship dynamics in a film adaptation of a romance novel that genuinely honors the genre and all its pleasant conventions." The Collider reviewer called the series "the perfect combination of passionate romance and soap drama."

The publications note that the market for "hockey romances" is now oversaturated, but the advantage of "Off Campus" is that it skillfully combines genre cliches — from fake relationships to "team stars and nerds" — with a more thoughtful conversation about injuries and social pressure among students. The only frequent complaint concerns the middle of the season: by the fifth episode, the narrative sometimes becomes overloaded and vague, but in general, critics agree that the series works precisely because it is not shy about its melodramatic roots.

Jennifer Lopez, The Green Dress and the Return To the Floor

The most discussed cultural effect of "Off Campus" was not only his own popularity, but also a surge of interest in Jennifer Lopez's old hit. In the second episode of "Off Campus," a Halloween party scene unfolds: the character Allie (Micah Abdallah) appears in a replica of Jennifer Lopez's legendary green Versace dress from the Grammy Awards in 2000, and Dean (Stephen Cailin) appears as Mavrik from "The Best Shooter."

The scene instantly spread across TikTok and Instagram (owned by Meta, a recognized extremist organization in Russia): Users recreated the choreography and posted videos to a recognizable track. According to Billboard, during the tracking week of May 15-21, On the Floor gained 15.1 million streams worldwide and returned to the Billboard Global 200 at No. 117 for the first time in 15 years. On the Global Excl. U.S. chart, the track debuted at No. 80 with 12.5 million streams outside the United States.

Lopez contacted Mika Abdallah, and together they recorded a video clip recreating the scene — it also went viral. The singer appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show on May 27, where she discussed the upcoming Netflix movie Office Romance, and couldn't contain her amazement.

For Lopez, On the Floor is one of her ten hits in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, where the track reached number three in 2011. For Pitbull, this is the third hit in the Global 200. The song was originally released in February 2011 as the lead single of Lopez's seventh album, "LOVE?” and topped the charts of 37 countries.

The phenomenon of the "resurrected hit" and the role of TV series

The story of On the Floor fits into a steady trend: TV series regularly bring back tracks that seemed to be a thing of the past forever. The most high—profile precedent is Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush, who returned to the top of the UK chart 37 years after her release after the fourth season of Stranger Things in 2022. The same effect was produced by "Very Strange Things" with the Metallica track Master of Puppets and the TV series "Euphoria" with a number of retro hits.

According to analysts, the mechanism is the same everywhere: the scene creates an emotional context, viewers search for the track in streaming immediately after watching, algorithms pick up the growth and promote it further. In the case of On the Floor, this was reinforced by the viral effect: users weren't just listening — they were replaying the scene, creating an endless stream of user-generated content around the same audio.

Music critics point out that On the Floor was originally created as a global dance anthem with an instantly recognizable intro and a universal club aesthetic. This makes the track the perfect soundtrack for party scenes, which is why it fits so seamlessly into the Halloween episode "Off Campus."

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Second season and sequel plans

Amazon renewed "Off Campus" for a second season back in February 2026 — a few months before the premiere of the first, which in itself speaks to the studio's confidence in the project. By the time the debut season was released, studio representatives and producers confirmed that work on the sequel was already underway, and filming should begin soon.

On May 28, it was officially announced that the second season will be dedicated to Allie and Dean: showrunner Louise Levy confirmed that their romantic line will be central. In the books, their story comes to the fore more actively only by the third volume of The Score, but in the series the creators deliberately accelerated the development of this line. The finale of the first season leaves Allie and Dean in a tangled love triangle, and it is from this point that the second season begins, developing the consequences of their choices.

In parallel, actress India Fowler has already been cast for the second season in the role of Grace Ivers, a character from the second book in the Logan series, The Mistake. Apparently, her romantic line with Logan (Antonio Cipriano) will develop in parallel as a second plot thread, following the same pattern that worked in the first season with Allie and Dean.

Elle Kennedy also announced a new novel in the Briar universe, "Bad Idea," which is scheduled for worldwide release in early November 2026. The main characters are Ivy Di Laurentiis and AJ Connelly, representatives of the next generation of characters. Readers are already speculating about whether these characters will appear in future seasons of the series.

On May 5, Medialogia presented the results of the Russian series rating for the first quarter of 2026. The absolute leader was the project "Very Strange Things", which scored 15,948 points. In second place is the series "Lilies of the Valley" (8829), and in third place is "The First Department" (7745). The fourth place was taken by the anime "Magic Battle" with 6419 points, and "Sled" rounded out the top five with 3563 points.