Prime Video’s new series adapts Elle Kennedy’s beloved books into a show that treats trauma, intimacy, and healing with more care than the genre usually allows.

On paper, Off Campus looks like a standard fake-dating story. Briar University hockey player Garrett Graham needs academic help to keep his spot on the roster. Music student Hannah Wells agrees to tutor him. He pretends to be her boyfriend to help her win over someone else. That arrangement is where most romantic comedies would set up camp and stay.

Off Campus does not stay there. The Prime Video series, adapted from Elle Kennedy’s book series of the same name, uses that familiar setup as an entry point into something considerably more layered. Hannah is living with the aftermath of sexual assault. Garrett carries the fear of becoming his abusive father. What unfolds between them is not just attraction. It is two people testing whether they can be known and still be safe.

How the show handles trauma without exploiting it

Showrunner Louisa Levy made a deliberate decision early in development: the traumatic events that shaped Hannah and Garrett would not be shown on screen. There are no flashback sequences, no graphic recreations. The series lands viewers directly in the aftermath and stays there.

That choice shapes everything about how the characters read. Hannah’s trauma shows up as creative paralysis, an inability to write songs, and a complicated relationship with physical closeness. Garrett’s history surfaces as hypervigilance around his own anger, a constant internal auditing of whether he is repeating patterns he grew up watching. Neither arc is rushed toward resolution. The writing allows both of them to exist inside their respective difficulties without pushing them toward a tidy fix.

Levy and her team consulted with experts throughout production to ensure the portrayals held up to scrutiny. The goal, as she framed it, was to avoid the expected failure modes: graphic violence for shock value, and survivor narratives that treat recovery as a single moment rather than an ongoing process.

The Off Campus intimacy scenes and why they matter

The most discussed sequence in the series involves Hannah and Garrett becoming physically intimate. What distinguishes the scene is not what happens but what it represents. For Hannah, it is not a romantic milestone. It is evidence that she can be present in her own body, that safety and desire can coexist for her again.

Belmont Cameli, who plays Garrett, has described the scene as something that works against audience assumptions, built on emotional exposure as much as physical connection. Ella Bright, who plays Hannah, has echoed that framing, noting that the intimate scenes are not incidental to the plot. They are the plot.

The creative team’s position is straightforward: showing that someone who has experienced sexual assault can also have a healthy romantic and sexual life is not a minor storytelling choice. It pushes against a long pattern in television of treating assault survivors as permanently defined by what happened to them.

Where Off Campus sits among its critics

The series has not been without pushback. Some critics have questioned whether centering a love story on a survivor’s trauma risks reducing that trauma to a narrative device, a wound that exists primarily to be healed by romance. It is a legitimate concern. The genre has a poor track record here.

Levy’s answer is structural. By keeping the tone grounded in optimism and centering Hannah’s own agency throughout, the show tries to hold both things at once: the weight of what she went through and the fullness of who she is outside of it. Late in the series, Hannah tells Garrett directly that she has done the work and does not want to be handled with care. That moment lands as character development, not just a line reading.

What the show gets right about healing

Healing in Off Campus does not follow a clean arc. Hannah moves forward and then pulls back. Progress does not look triumphant. It looks incremental and sometimes invisible. Bright has said she hopes viewers who have navigated similar experiences will see something of themselves in that rhythm, the way recovery does not announce itself as complete.

Off Campus is streaming now on Prime Video.