Like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, Off Campus’s takeover of my phone happened gradually, then all at once. First came a single—extremely abashed—recommendation from a friend for Amazon’s eight-episode college romance about a star athlete and a music student, followed by what felt like a tsunami of endorsements from adult women far and wide, accompanied by GIFs, reels, images, and custom emoji, all featuring the Byronic hockey player Garrett Graham (played by Belmont Cameli). “He’s fictional, he’s fictional, he’s fictional,” one books influencer intoned to herself about Garrett in an Instagram affirmation. “He is not real. He is written by a woman.” My babysitter sent me screenshots of her group chats, all renamed in Cameli’s honor. Another friend texted: “I actually think it’s a good thing I have to wait a year for the second season. My marriage thanks me.”
I have a theory about popular romantic heroes, which is that they respond to—and sometimes complement—the anxieties of the moment. The sneering, helicopter-flying, allegedly 27-year-old billionaire Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades franchise could have taken hold only in the lean years following the Great Recession, when the idea of owning a home big enough to accommodate a sex dungeon felt especially escapist. Twilight’s Edward Cullen, first introduced in 2005, was the chivalric corrective to a wasteland of Girls Gone Wild–style masculinity. The alpha heroes of 1980s romances—ranch owners, corporate raiders, anyone played by Michael Douglas—tended to be emotionally constipated anti-feminists intent on dominating the opposite sex by using testosterone and wads of cash.
Garrett Graham—brooding, burly, but also improbably tender—seems like a response to 2026’s sexually abusive chatbots and manosphere influencers. His character is absolutely pandering to women, but given the alternative, I’ll take it. Off Campus, adapted from a series of books by the Canadian writer Elle Kennedy, is about a music student named Hannah Wells (Ella Bright) who subsidizes her studies with shift work at the stadium where Garrett is a star player on the college hockey team. In the first moments of the first episode, Hannah happens on Garrett in the shower after a late practice and has trouble tearing her eyes away, a meet-nude that later sparks an improbable deal: She will help him pass his philosophy class (with particular attention to Kierkegaard), and he will pretend to be her boyfriend to make her crush, a charmless Australian musician, jealous.
Off Campus is pharmaceutical-grade wish fulfillment. Bright, who’s just 19, and who, until recently, was starring in the BBC adaptation of the twee boarding-school drama Malory Towers, radiates wholesome guilelessness as Hannah; few TV characters have less game or more cable-knit cardigans. Hannah is perfect as a proxy for the harried viewer—sweet, two-dimensional, as wide-eyed as a Powerpuff Girl but much less feisty. Garrett is ambivalent about playing hockey, which he was forced into by his cold and extremely famous star-athlete father (Steve Howey, giving perfect network-procedural-bad-guy energy). Hannah is recovering from a traumatic event at high school that’s stunted her ability to write songs, putting her scholarship at risk. The pair have an instant chemistry that even the belabored Shakespeare-lite subplot can’t impede: The minute they start fake-dating, it’s clear to everyone that they have eyes for only each other, and the series declines to drag things out for too long. (Although I admit—at the risk of alienating every woman in my life—that when the romantic tension was taken away, so was most of my motivation to keep watching.)
You may notice that this is the second hockey-themed romance in the space of seven months to dominate mass culture, although the first to feature a heterosexual couple. And yet the fantasy in both shows seems to be roughly similar: profound intimacy and connection without unequal power dynamics, pure physical pleasure without risk. (As Ava recently put things in the final season of Hacks, “God, there is something so exciting about getting ready for a date with a man. Maybe it’s the tiny threat of being killed at the end of the night.”) The jocks in Off Campus are, for whatever unspecified reason, mutually supportive and emotionally available. They cook. They intuit what women want and need. By the moment, midway through the show, when one hockey player tells another that safety is a cornerstone of female desire, my eyes were rolling around in my head with cynical abandon. And yet such naked projection felt somehow hopeful, as though simply being able to conceive of such evolved avatars of masculinity might help power them into existence.
Consider, by contrast, Rivals, an adaptation of the British author Jilly Cooper’s “bonkbuster” best sellers, now in its second season on Hulu. Set in the 1980s, when Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles novels were first released, Rivals is a tongue-in-cheek period drama about the cutthroat world of regional-television franchises, whose characters backstab and smoke and screw with relish. The hero of the series is a former Olympic show jumper turned Tory member of Parliament named Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a sexy but cruel villain who—in the books at least—beats horses and breaks women. He’s eventually redeemed by the selfless love of an emotionally undemanding woman, a storyline so rote it practically predates literature. One of the reasons this trope is so sticky, the cultural-studies scholar Janice Radway has written, is that before women were allowed to acknowledge having desires of their own, they had to be “overcome” by dominant and even predatory alpha heroes, to avoid being seen sacrificing any of their own virtue. A heroine who’s angelic and self-effacing enough might succeed in softening the hero’s cruder edges, but her desires will always be supplementary to his, never authentic.
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Rivals the show dismisses all this old-school baggage with a raised eyebrow and a heavy wink. With his rakish sneer and ruthlessly tight jodhpurs, Rupert has been thoroughly neutered with irony, transformed into an object for women to pick at. In one episode, he’s forced into faux-medieval garb for a game show; later, he’s dressed in minuscule shorts and drenched in green gunk when his team loses. Hassell brings his best haughtiness to the role, and he can be touchingly vulnerable. But the series seems to acknowledge, in ways Cooper never quite managed, that the kind of domineering, detached masculinity Rupert represents is not just hopelessly outmoded but also deserving of ridicule.
Why does any of this matter? Romances of the kind adapted into Rivals and Off Campus can be more subversive than they seem. Practically, they encourage women to claim leisure time away from the demands of work and family, but they also present cultural scripts for love and marriage that can disrupt our ideas of what’s romantically possible. “We must begin to recognize that romance reading is fueled by dissatisfaction and disaffection, not by perfect contentment with woman’s lot,” Radway wrote in 1983. The five-alarm fire currently stoked by Garrett Graham suggests that what women are really yearning for isn’t a brooding hockey stud with saturnine curls and complicated rage issues but a man who, at his core, seems to like and care about women. “You know girls really hate it when guys are too available,” Hannah tells him in the final episode, a line that encapsulates the tortured history of what romance has presumed women to want. But her gently mocking tone while saying so alludes to their genuine connection as equals, and to progress we can only dare to imagine.
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