Off Campus spotlights Elle Kennedy with Briar University hockey
Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus has been reviewed as a new screen adaptation of her hockey romance series, with calling it “in all senses, a straight copy of Heated Rivalry.” The review places the show in a crowded corner of romance television where another hockey series, another fan base, and a familiar college setting are all being sold at once.
“Off Campus is, in all senses, a straight copy of Heated Rivalry,” the review says, linking Kennedy’s heterosexual romance novels to Rachel Reid’s gay romance books and framing the new series as part of the same genre pipeline. “It is deeply soothing and incredibly moreish.”
Briar University and one class
Belmont Cameli plays Garrett Graham, the captain of the Briar University hockey team, while Steve Howey plays Phil Graham, described in the review as a hockey legend. The setup is built around hot twentysomething hockey-playing college students, and that college-age frame is doing a lot of the commercial work here: the show is selling the same sports-romance mix that has already proven sticky enough to warrant comparison to another series in the space.
Garrett Graham is failing in one class, and Hannah Wells is smashing it. That mismatch is the engine of the story, not a decorative detail. It gives the adaptation a built-in academic pressure point that sits alongside the locker-room and dating material, keeping the series anchored in a campus world rather than drifting into pure romance fantasy.
Ella Bright as Hannah Wells
Ella Bright plays Hannah Wells, a music major who is poor and whose scholarship is abruptly terminated. The review also notes that she pivots to writing pop songs for a showcase instead of her preferred classical music to get funding. Bright had already come to fame in the UK playing Darrell Rivers in Malory Towers, and the review’s line about her casting is blunt: “without a little brain-prep, the sight of a Blyton heroine here in this steaming mass of hormones will do your equilibrium no good at all.”
That casting choice gives Off Campus a clearer commercial hook than a generic ensemble romance. Bright brings an established young-adult association, while the material asks her to move from classical ambition to pop-song hustle, a turn that makes Hannah less like a stock love interest and more like the person carrying the show’s money problem as well as its romantic one.
Two hockey romance series
Off Campus now sits beside Heated Rivalry as one of two hockey romance series being compared in the same conversation, with the review making the adaptation line impossible to miss. Josh Heuston also appears as Justin, adding to a cast built around the college-hockey world rather than a broader sports drama.
For readers deciding whether to sample it, the practical read is simple: this is Elle Kennedy’s college hockey material translated into television, and the review says the result is familiar enough to feel derivative but smooth enough to keep moving. If that balance holds, the audience most likely to stick around is the one already primed for hockey romance — and the series is clearly being positioned to catch them before the comparison with Rachel Reid’s books gets any colder.
