Off-Campus

Off Campus is not something that I would normally choose to watch. It looked cheesy and predictable but when a friend recommended it I decided to watch so that we could talk about it. And I was incredibly pleasantly surprised.

As soon as it started I knew in general where the plot was going and how the show was gonna end. However because the lead actors had so much chemistry it didn’t really bother me. If you are going to use a cookie cutter plot then you need to give the audience some heat, and they most certainly did.

Even better, the plot didn’t just focus on the main characters. The show had a pretty decent supporting cast of characters that all went through their own trials and tribulations leading to full cast character development.

The first three episodes were as I thought they would be, predictable. The first part of the plot involves our two leads, a hockey player and a music student striking a mutually beneficial deal. He needs tutoring and she wants one of those guys who only wants a girl when she’s taken. They decide to fake date to get her the guy while he gets tutoring. They of course end up falling in love with each other. We’ve seen a million stories like this before. But then something happens. That plot gets wrapped up within the first few episodes and the rest of the season focuses on their actual relationship.

And our leads actually have far more depth than is normally granted to characters in these types of stories. Garrett is a star hockey player who is the son of an NHL legend…his story focuses on him deciding he doesn’t want to be anything like his father, who is a wife-beating, abusive piece of shit. He struggles with whether or not that anger is in him or if it's something that he can overcome. And our end of act 2 break up isn’t because of a miscommunication but instead because he feels like this woman that he loves isn’t safe with him.

Hannah’s story focuses on her ability to write music and how it is tied to her sexual assault. Now I talk a lot about how sexual assault is often misused in media and how it's portrayal often causes more harm then good. I am a firm believer that if that is your only way to develop a character that you are a bad writer. However this show did a few very important things that separated it from most sexual assault plots. The first is that we got to know Hannah before we got to know her trauma. We see who she is as a whole person, we see what her actual goals for the season before we know specifically what happened to her. The second thing is that her story doesn’t revolve around it. It's such a small piece of her story and though the narrative does give time to how the incident changed her, it doesn’t consume her character. And third, and perhaps the most important, we never see the assault. We know it happened, she states it outright. We see its effects when she tries to write lyrics and can’t. We see her spiral when she has to confront the guy that did it, we have all the important information but we never see the assault. And more than that we never get to know the guy that did it. Because he doesn’t matter, he is irrelevant. This is what most sexual assault plot lines miss. And that’s also what makes this series so overwhelmingly obvious that it's written by a woman.

I would recommend Off-Campus because it is very charming, holds some great depth of character and development. Narratively it was extremely well paced and the story was handled very well.