Off Campus vs. Every Year After: What Amazon's Latest Coming-of-Age Romances Get Right (and Wrong)

Since the runaway success of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Prime Video's adaptation of Jenny Han's popular young adult trilogy, the Amazon-owned streamer has made significant strides to position itself as the go-to home of coming-of-age romances, filling both the YA vacuum left by the demise of The CW and the years between seasons of Bridgerton, which is still the most prominent example of the romance genre on television. This spring, the streaming service debuted two new entries to the genre: Off Campus, an adaptation of Elle Kennedy's wildly popular series of novels set within the world of collegiate hockey at the fictional Briar University, and Every Year After, based on Carley Fortune's best-selling novel Every Summer After, a best friends-to-lovers story about second chances. Both properties are beloved by their respective fans, and thus both come with high expectations. Unfortunately, only one has succeeded in translating its narrative to the small screen.

Created by Louisa Levy and adapted from Kennedy's The Deal, the first season of Off Campus follows Hannah Wells (Ella Bright), a singer with bright eyes and an unrequited crush on a fellow musician (Josh Heuston's Justin), and Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli), a star hockey player who agrees to pretend to be Hannah's boyfriend to help her attract the attention of her crush in exchange for tutoring. The fake dating trope is a romance classic, and it's easily sold here by the instant chemistry between Bright and Cameli. Both soapy and sexy, the show would have been at home on The CW during its heyday, which makes it nostalgic for audiences who grew up watching the network (or even The WB before it) while whetting the appetite of younger viewers who have been mostly starved of true quality coming-of-age programming since the mid-to-late 2010s. The series has become such a hit since its May release — it is reportedly the third most-watched debut for Prime Video — that fans are eagerly devouring every miniscule scrap Amazon throws their way while they await Season 2, which is already in production and will highlight the relationship between drama major Allie Hayes (Mika Abdalla), Hannah's best friend, and Dean Di Laurentis (Stephen Kalyn), Garrett's roommate and teammate. 

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The creative decision to introduce Allie and Dean's love story in Season 1 despite the fact their romance isn't depicted until the third book is just one of many changes the team made during the adaptation process. And while some readers will inevitably take issue with these choices, the changes have made Off Campus stronger and more accessible to non-readers. In the series, Justin is a fellow musician instead of yet another athlete. This seemingly minor change puts him on the opposite end of the spectrum from Garrett, gives him a shared interest with Hannah, and allows the show to streamline the story by eliminating tertiary characters to spend more time on Hannah's growth. Rather than being forced to perform a new song in the showcase at the last minute like in the novel, Hannah's collaboration with Justin on a song — and her decision to later write and perform a piece of her own — is a much more powerful story, as Hannah finding her voice helps heal the lingering trauma of being sexually assaulted in high school, an event that affects much more than just Hannah's romantic relationship with Garrett.

Other changes are more immediately obvious and more dramatically alter the narrative, and in most cases the show is better for it. As popular as the Off-Campus books have become since The Deal was first self-published in 2015, there are depictions of problematic behavior that the series either smartly reworks or completely paves over. A frustrating third act plot involving Garrett's abusive father (Steve Howey) threatening Hannah so she breaks up with his son — and Garrett's misogynistic decision to tell everyone on campus that Hannah is off limits as a result — is wisely jettisoned in favor of a storyline in which Garrett breaks up with Hannah because he is grappling with his fears of becoming his father after assaulting Hannah's rapist (yet another change from the novel, where he attacked a person who testified against Hannah). 

These changes, along with the logical choice to have Allie and Dean's story overlap with Hannah and Garrett's, create a more balanced, emotionally intelligent drama that still knows how to have fun. The addition of the Drunk Shakespeare storyline in Episode 4 adds levity and chaos while serving as a catalyst for both Hannah to choose Garrett and Allie to stop avoiding Dean. Despite these many changes, the beats of Off Campus' central love stories and overall narrative structure remain largely unchanged (inserting Hunter Davenport into Allie and Dean's story feels like the lone bizarre choice made by the show's creative team, but we'll wait for Season 2 to see how that pans out before officially passing judgment). 

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The same cannot be said for Every Year After. The changes made to Fortune's fan-favorite story have resulted in a series that is probably best described as a loose adaptation, and one that studio executives so clearly want to recapture the sun-filled escapist magic that propelled The Summer I Turned Pretty that it doesn't take into consideration the novel's different tone or notice how thin everything feels despite the gorgeous Canadian backdrop.

On the page, the story follows Persephone "Percy" Fraser (Sadie Soverall), a horror-loving magazine editor from Toronto unable to forge real romantic connections because she can't forget her former best friend-turned-first love, Sam Florek (Matt Cornett). But when Sam's mother Sue dies, a 30-year-old Percy returns to the small lakeside town of Barry's Bay for her funeral, putting her on a collision course with not only the one who got away, but also his cocky and confident older brother Charlie (Michael Bradway), with whom she long ago sought comfort in a single misguided evening that predictably set fire to everyone's otherwise dreamy existence. In the show, the basic details remain the same save for a career change for Percy (she now writes obituaries, which makes little logical sense in 2026 but gives her an excuse to help Sam) and shaving a couple of years off the adult versions of the characters. Seemingly everything else in the novel was up for debate for the creative team, led by showrunner Amy B. Harris, who has said she hopes the show will run for five seasons despite the fact only two novels are set within the world of Barry's Bay (Charlie received his own love story in 2025's One Golden Summer). 

Now some degree of change is unavoidable when translating a story for a new medium, and the fact Every Summer After takes place across multiple years, features only a few main characters, and is told from a single perspective, means a lot of work is needed upfront just to bring it to life, something that is not true of Off Campus, which came ready-made with its setting and large cast of interconnected characters. In order to build out the world of Barry's Bay in the present, secondary characters like Percy's childhood best friend Delilah (Abigail Cowen), with whom she had a falling out in the novel, and current best friend Chantal (Aurora Perrineau), who primarily exists through texts and phone calls, are both transported to the lake where they engage in wholly new storylines of their own. Meanwhile, Sam's empathetic best friend Jordie (Joseph Chiu) — who might actually be the show's secret weapon — is a prominent fixture despite having only a handful of lines in the book. 

These changes are necessary to create a sense of place and give viewers insight into Percy's state of mind without having direct access to her internal thoughts. Building out the friendship between the three women also adds much-needed balance to a story that is otherwise driven solely by Percy and Sam's inevitable reunion. But the individual character arcs are uninspired. Even for a genre that lives and dies by its tropes, Delilah having an affair with Charlie as her own marriage crumbles, and workaholic Chantal leaving her apparently needy fiancé for the enlightened, easygoing Jordie feels limiting (and insulting). 

It's not lost on me how silly it is to complain about a romantic drama focusing on its characters' love lives, but with so much happening in the main love story, it would have been beneficial to see non-romantic storylines or, at the very least, someone in a healthy relationship by contrast. Because when combined with the decision to rearrange the present-day timeline, alter multiple events in Percy and Sam's relationship, and even go so far as to have Sam find out about Percy and Charlie's betrayal in the present day versus having known of it all along, it's a lot to process at once. And it doesn't really come together in a satisfying way. The entire structure of the main arc and the fabric of the relationships at the heart of the narrative are fundamentally altered by these creative choices. 

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Of course, no adaptation is perfect, and even the best and most popular are not one-to-one translations. Peter Jackson famously omitted the character of Tom Bombadil and the scouring of the Shire in his Oscar-winning adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, two decisions that still have fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's novels up in arms more than two decades later. Meanwhile, Bridgerton has strayed far from the books upon which it is based in the name of melodrama and softening the male characters' worst traits. But the major changes made to Every Summer After do not streamline or alter with the intention of rectifying bad behavior. They don't do all that much to enrich the main story either. Instead, they cheapen the characters' emotional journeys in a clear attempt to extend a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Although Percy did not know Sam had forgiven her for sleeping with Charlie years before she returned for Sue's memorial, the reveal in the final act of the novel is one of the book's strongest moments. It's unexpected after spending so much time in Percy's head, but it does not make what happened any less devastating. The honest conversation that ensues is a pivotal moment in both characters' ongoing healing, and the fact the storyline was changed for no reason but to add more drama to an already emotionally fragile moment undercuts its impact. It also makes all the other changes — including Percy and Sam's first kiss no longer occurring during their impromptu sleepover, Sam never proposing to Percy, and the two not hooking up in the present until the end of the season — feel more egregious than they probably are (the icing on the cake, though, is the absurd reveal midway through the season that Sue left the family restaurant to Percy rather than her sons, creating more unnecessary tension between the central trio).

This is, unfortunately, not the story that fans of the novel were hoping to see. It's messy. It feels convoluted, even more so than one would expect from a series with multiple timelines. And yet it will be interesting to see how the show is perceived by those with no prior knowledge of Percy and Sam's love story, and whether the more dramatic choices resonate emotionally or fall flat. Because it's easy to see how we got here: The show follows a blueprint for coming-of-age dramas and second-chance romances, complete with a flawed heroine, hunky love interest, lots of miscommunication, and soulmates who met too young and weren't ready for the challenges (the tropes are the point). But it's also not just the many changes that keep the show from reaching its full potential: It's also that the writing is often weakened by the changes, the acting frequently feels stilted, and the series doesn't do nearly enough to both marry the two timelines and differentiate between them once Soverall and Cornett take over playing the teenaged versions of their characters (a single braid in Percy's hair does not count). 

Readers of romance feel things strongly. They expect the moments they fell in love with on the page to be given the same care and attention on screen (see Sam's emotional "You came home" near the end of the premiere and the steamy anatomy textbook scene as two good examples). And even when a series is fairly faithful to its source material, as is the case of the Canadian hockey romance Heated Rivalry, it sometimes still isn't enough for die-hard fans. So what does this mean for Every Year After? Does it matter that the show and the novel are essentially two separate products linked only by the thinnest of threads? Both Bridgerton and Off Campus are examples of weaker narratives that were improved during the transition from page to screen. But when a story is already emotionally engaging and relatively unproblematic — regardless of how one feels about Percy and Charlie's betrayal, it's not the toxic behavior found in some romance novels — is it worth alienating a passionate, built-in audience for the mere chance of renewal? It's a real risk, and even if romance is the hot topic du jour, there is no guarantee of success. Unlike in Barry's Bay, you rarely get second chances in the real world, so let's hope it was worth it.

The first seasons of Off Campus and Every Year After are streaming on Prime Video.