Ella Bright Leads Off Campus Books Through a Heated Rivalry Comparison
Off campus books entered the review cycle with a blunt comparison: called the Amazon hockey romance series a straight copy of Heated Rivalry. The review also described the show as soapy, spicy and incredibly moreish, putting Elle Kennedy’s adaptation beside another hockey romance built from Rachel Reid’s novels.
Ella Bright and Garrett Graham
Ella Bright plays Hannah Wells, while Belmont Cameli plays Garrett Graham, the captain of the Briar University hockey team. Bright, who came to fame in the adaptation of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, gives Hannah the kind of innate wholesomeness that fits a music major whose scholarship is abruptly terminated.
Garrett is failing in a class that Hannah is smashing, which pushes the pair into the kind of academic imbalance that keeps this sort of college-set romance moving. Hannah then starts writing pop songs for a showcase instead of classical music to get funding, a practical switch that tells you exactly how the series is trying to keep the plot in motion.
Phil Graham and Justin
Steve Howey plays Phil Graham, Garrett’s father, adding a second Graham in the mix around Briar’s hockey world. Josh Heuston plays Justin, and the review says Garrett and Hannah may enter a fake dating arrangement involving him, which gives the story a cleaner TV-engineered hook than the book-to-screen setup alone.
That is where the comparison to Heated Rivalry stops being just a critic’s joke. Off Campus is built from Elle Kennedy’s heterosexual romance novel series, but the review says it lands close enough to Rachel Reid’s same-sport template to invite direct genre comparison from the start.
Briar University stakes
The series is set around hot twentysomething hockey-playing college students rather than professional teams, which keeps the focus on campus-level pressure points instead of league business. For viewers drawn to romance with a sports framework, that means the appeal rests on whether the show can keep its chemistry readable even when the review is already calling it a copy.
The immediate test for Off Campus books is simple: it has to win over viewers who want hockey romance without feeling like a duplicate of another title in the same lane. Bright’s Hannah Wells, Cameli’s Garrett Graham, and the fake-dating path around Justin give it enough moving parts to stand on its own if the series can turn the comparison into a selling point instead of a warning.
