Nadira: Rebecca! I’m happy to discuss this show with someone who has actually read the book, because I definitely have some questions. But let’s start where the show starts: establishing Garrett Graham and many of his teammates as modern-day rakes. Within the show’s first 15 minutes, after meeting up at his house party, Garrett hooks up with Kendall (Karis Cameron), a member of the groupies for the Briar University hockey team, who call themselves “puck bunnies.”

Their hookup is spliced together with footage of Hannah trying, and struggling, to write a new song for a pop music competition that could earn her a desperately needed scholarship. Garrett goes down on a topless Kendall while Hannah messes with a Rubik’s cube, the couple begins riding each other while Hannah furiously scratches out lyrics she’s written down in a notebook, Kendall’s scream of pleasure is overlaid with Hannah’s groan of frustration. After they finish, Kendall tells Garrett that she wants to be his girlfriend, but Garrett shuts her down with his strict “No Girlfriends” policy. Also, as he points out, they don’t really know each other any other way than biblically.

Off Campus clearly sets the tone with this first sex scene, letting us know that the sex on the show is more graphic than the PG-13 scenes a network romance would demand (nipple! cunnilingus!). However, it’s still a little more melodramatic than Heated Rivalry’s goal of sexual realism. I really liked the way the show set up the two main characters. What did you think, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Not only have I read ONE of these books, I have now read THREE. Since I usually read historical romance, the milieu of these is a welcome change-up. We go from “If a girl is so much as seen alone with a man, she will doom her chances of marriage, and also her sisters’ chances, forever!” to “At this off-campus hockey house, so much sex is being had that it could be more than one housemate who flushed a condom down the shower drain.” (The condom flusher is obviously cocky rich boy Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis, played with dimples by Stephen Kalyn, whom we’ll see a lot more of later on.)

These guys are, as you say, modern-day rakes who are getting a lot of joy out of their time at Briar University, a fictional college that plays hockey against Yale and Harvard and sends players to the NHL. People looking for a new Heated Rivalry, a story about yearning jocks with a secret love that takes place mostly in hotel rooms and the Cottage (™), may find this red-Solo-cup milieu to be a little less provocative, perhaps depending on how you feel about college parties. Also, these guys are straight. They may make a ton of jokes about puck bunnies, but at heart they are “good,” accepting, nonmisogynistic jocks who are best friends with their teammate’s nonbinary sibling. But they remain straight. Disappointing.

Anyway, this first sex montage, with the intercuts between Kendall and Garrett and Hannah and her empty notebook, really worked for me, contrasting Garrett’s carefree horniness with Hannah’s intense drive to achieve. Off Campus is a soap, but it’s a soap with a match cut between Kendall’s Guess-clad ass and Hannah’s book bag, each getting slammed down on a desk—this show is trying!

Rebecca: Here we have two dreams, one nighttime, one daytime, that represent Hannah’s brain working out what it might be like to get together with Justin. In the first, in her unconscious mind, Hannah and Justin are playing piano. She falters and says, “You make me nervous …” Then they start making out. But things begin to get tense. He tells her, “You can do it,” and she says, “I’m going to.” But she obviously can’t do whatever it is, and he starts to doubt. Then, in the second sequence, a daydream, Hannah and Justin are in bed together, and he starts to go down on her. Then he comes back up, and guess what Hannah’s brain has served her? Yes … the man went down as Justin but came back up as Garrett! Shocker to none: All that fake dating, including a fake kiss or two, has got her thinking.

The book is far more forthright than the show about Hannah’s underlying issue, which is that she was roofied and raped as a high schooler, and while she’s had a lot of therapy that’s helped her, she was unable to come with a boyfriend she had afterward, no matter what they tried. The show cuts the boyfriend out altogether but leaves her with this problem. Nadira, surely “I can’t come with a partner” is not an uncommon problem for college-age women (I, uh, find it rather familiar), but obviously Hannah’s situation is unique. When you watched these sequences, as a non–book reader, what did you suspect was going on? And were they sexy? I liked the way the series sort of sped up the pace of the encounters, showing how Hannah’s anxiety was taking over, even in the middle of fantasy.

Nadira: Throughout the first few episodes, the show has been dropping hints via super-quick flashbacks, images really, that Something Bad™ happened to Hannah in the past. Given the context clues and my experience as a woman, it was all too easy to guess what that thing might have been. But Hannah hasn’t revealed it to anyone just yet, leaving her with nothing but that aforementioned anxiety. So I had some vague idea of what was up, even if it wasn’t entirely clear.

There’s only one thing left to do when a romance character is confused about their affections. I don’t know if there’s a quippy name for it, but the whole Bait-and-Switch Dream Fantasizing About the Guy I Swear I Don’t Like thing is practically a tenet of these kinds of stories when a character is torn between two lovers. As soon as Justin and Hannah leaned in for a kiss at the top of the episode, I knew that it was a dream. And later on, when we knew that the second encounter was a dream from the start, as soon as the two began macking on each other, I figured that Justin would, at some point, turn into Garrett. It’s a cliché, but kind of a fun one? I love that both of these scenes were set to different versions of Janelle Monáe’s “Make Me Feel,” which is an absolute banger. Though the best part about this narrative tactic is getting to watch Hannah spiral afterward whenever she’s in front of Garrett.

As an aside: I appreciate how dedicated Off Campus is to a woman’s sexual pleasure. Hannah’s second dream is one of many times cunnilingus is shown here. It’s not even the only display of it in this particular episode. Hannah accidentally walking in on Garrett going down on a random girl earlier on is a part of what triggers his appearance in her subsequent sex dream.

Nadira: By now, Hannah has revealed her past trauma to the hockey center, and has asked him to help her orgasm so that she can do it properly with Justin. Garrett agrees, though he is both deeply touched and flustered that Hannah would trust him alone not only with her secret, but also with this mission.

Hannah comes over to Garrett’s shared house in a super-tight dress, and he offers her a comfortable T-shirt to change into. He looks away while she changes, and when she asks why he has turned around when he’s about to see her naked, he says he is about to, “but not until you want me to.” (Aww!) He lets her pick a song to set the mood, and she sees that one of his most played songs is the Foundations’ “Baby Now That I’ve Found You.” He starts awkwardly dancing, then they’re dancing together and laughing, breaking the tension. They start making out, but when Garrett begins to touch her elsewhere, she gets overwhelmed and uncomfortable. They stop, leading Hannah to confide in Garrett about the out-of-body feeling she experiences during sex, and that she wonders if she’s “broken.” He assures her that she isn’t; she assures him that she trusts him. He offers her an alternative: She should give herself an orgasm. Hannah tells Garrett that it won’t prove anything because she does that “all the time.” “Oh, do you?” he asks, somewhat sarcastically. “Yeah,” she responds. “Good. Then”—and there’s a beat before he delivers the directive—“show me.” EEP! Can you hear me screaming?

They undress slowly, then sit across from each other, with Hannah on the bed and Garrett on a chair, and masturbate while maintaining eye contact. At one point, Hannah looks away. “Stay here. Stay with me,” he instructs. After they both orgasm, Hannah thanks Garrett. They fist-bump and laugh. Just two friends getting over sexual trauma by being unbelievably vulnerable with each other … right.

Rebecca: “Ask a hot friend to help me figure out something about sex, in some ostensibly non-feelings-y and predetermined way that will obviously result in feelings” is 100 percent something I would have done at this age. The difference is that the outcome was never this good! Either male zoomers are just better at sex (uh … are they?), or this is a romance novel adaptation, because in my straight-girl memories of this type of college assignation, the guy you chose wasn’t likely to turn out sensitive, adept, caring, and persistent. The scene has the job of getting you so into the vibe that you believe that Hannah could actually get over her block, and when the camera cuts to his eyes as he says “Stay here,” and then hers, you almost 80 percent buy it.

Nadira: It is also something I would have done at this age, especially if any of my college friends were having sex at the rate Garrett is. Look, I definitely hear you, but I do buy it in the sense that Belmont Cameli delivers the hell out of that “Show me” line, and also in the sense that I think this is how these situations should turn out even if they rarely ever do. Everything about his interaction with her in this scene is so achingly sweet, mostly because he lets everything be on her terms: the music, the pacing, the touching. It may not be common, but I have to hope it’s happened before! Still, one thing we’re missing in this equation is the acknowledgment that the main reason Garrett is so caring and kind, the main reason this works, is because he has feelings for Hannah. He doesn’t know it, she sure doesn’t know it, but we do.

Rebecca: This is the sex high point of the show, right in the middle, as Garrett and Hannah admit to each other that they want to be exclusive. He pulls her toward him by the waistband of her pants, which is pretty hot, and … sex montage! We get scenes of the two in bed—Garrett fingering her with his hand and her waist artfully hidden by sheets, Hannah gasping as yet more cunnilingus unfolds (again, I ask you, is this Gen Z or just romance novel?), a full shot of Garrett’s ass with Hannah’s feet wrapped around it during missionary—intercut with images of their lives starting to merge, with Hannah in the stands at hockey games and making lasagna with his housemates. The sequence ends with Hannah’s head flung over the edge of the bed, coming loudly, as her mother’s voice is heard from her phone. Hannah’s problem is, apparently, extremely solved. That was easy! Too easy?

Nadira: I love the fake-dating trope because it’s so nonsensical—literally no one would ever agree to date someone, even falsely, that they didn’t actually like on some level. The waistband callback to when Garrett first proposes their arrangement in the pilot is so good because it shows that truth: They’ve always liked each other, even from that first moment. And now they have a bunch of sex. Like, a lot! (On the Gen Z front, I think it’s a little bit Gen Z—women’s empowerment has come a long way—and a little bit genre.)

It is a bit too easy. I would have liked a sex scene that showed her and Garrett actually working through her bedroom blockage, but I guess I’ll settle for this hot montage instead. Speaking of, and maybe this is the zillennial in me, I kept getting hung up on how it was possible that her phone answered her mother’s video call by itself? Whatever! I like this couple, and I like seeing them happy!

Nadira: Episode 6 pivots away from our main romance to focus on Allie (Mika Abdalla), Hannah’s best friend and roommate, and dimpled Dean. Allie recently broke up with her longtime on-again, off-again boyfriend, and shortly thereafter (like, less than 48 hours later), she hooks up with Dean. This is revealed in a montage of them having sex in random locations, like backstage after a theater performance, in the kitchen of the local restaurant where Allie and Hannah work (unsanitary), and in Dean’s room while Garrett and Hannah are home. At one point, as the two are having sexytime in a super-sudsy bathtub at the boys’ house, their other roommate, Tucker (played by The Pitt’s Jalen Thomas Brooks), walks in to get something, forcing Allie to dunk herself under the water and hold her breath until he leaves.