Hey guys! We’re back and better than ever with our reviews on the newest trending show- Off Campus. Many people may have heard about this show because of JLO’s TikTok about her iconic Grammy’s outfit being featured in Episode 2, and others may know the show because of the hundreds of thousands of edits of the 4 male main characters all over social media.
Let’s start with our main critique: there is absolutely nothing original about this series. The humor gives The Summer I Turned Pretty, the whole fake dating thing is copied exactly from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Garrett Graham’s relationship with his father is LITERALLY the same “I’m not like you, Dad” trope that every guy in a teen television show has (Nathan Scott, Nate Archibald, Conrad Fisher to name a few). The entirety of this show really is just exhausted tropes from other teen romcoms/ TV shows.
Hannah’s Spotify playlist being titled “Crushing” with a picture of Justin as the cover was so unrealistic, and the scene where he sees it was so corny and predictable. No normal college student (and she’s not even supposed to be normal, she’s supposedly “smart”) would ever do something like that, so when they showed us the playlist in the beginning we knew that it was coming.
The most anticipated moment in the show, Hannah shifting her attention from Justin to Graham, was SO anticlimactic. The love confession through a song was way shorter than it should have been, and it came off as more cringe than cute. Although we got the ending result we wanted, the execution could have been much better to give us the “awww” feeling through the screen.
However, there were many moments that also made us appreciate the show. After numerous bad female friendships in teen shows, Off Campus finally gave us a refreshing, non-toxic female duo worth obsessing over. Allie and Hannah are genuine best friends who show up for each and consistently put each other first. It gave us flashbacks to Summer and Marissa from The OC, which is also one of the only non-toxic female relationships in teen drama history.
Even if you haven’t seen the show, you may have heard JLO’s song “On the Floor” trending all over your TikTok page. In Off Campus, as many of you may have seen, the side couple Allie and Dean share an iconic scene with this song playing in the background that took the internet by storm. This scene starts off, in our opinion, the most entertaining relationship in the show, and thankfully the main relationship in the next season.
While we did have some critiques about this show, the ending set it up perfectly for a second season. Graham and Hannah finally got together, Dean and Allie became the fan-favorite ship, and the cliffhanger left everyone wanting more. This show is overall a fun, easy-to-watch teen romance filled with interesting characters and only eight episodes which makes it perfect to binge in a single night. Is it insanely predictable? Absolutely. Did we still love it? Absolutely. We can’t wait to obsess over Briar’s students all over again next year, but until then, this season will be on repeat.