I’m not sure anyone should be surprised that Off-Campus is Prime Video’s latest hit series. Not after the success of Jenny Han’s adaptations, especially The Summer I Turned Pretty series, which is also a Prime Video title, just like Off-Campus. And of course Heated Rivalry. All of them are books with extremely invested fanbases who are extremely active on social media, and BookTok has had a proven impact on movie and television performance.

Season one of Off-Campus is about Hannah and Garrett, played by Ella Bright and Belmont Cameli, just like the book by Elle Kennedy, called The Deal. I read the first three books in the series when they came out – The Deal, The Mistake, and The Score. Since season two was greenlit well before season one even premiered, so Prime Video had confidence in the show. The big question, though, is whether or not the TV series would follow the order of the book series. And that question got a lot louder now that we’ve seen the cast, and how the story plays out on screen.

Because Allie and Dean, the OTP of the third book, The Score, have become almost as popular as Hannah and Garrett, who are the focus of season one. As mentioned a couple of times already this week, Allie’s JLo scene, in which she wears a copy of JLo’s iconic green Versace dress, and dances to “On The Floor”, has become so viral that the song, from 2011, is now JLo’s biggest hit on streaming, surpassing the billion streams mark, and it’s charting again on Billboard. And Mika Abdalla, who plays Allie, was on Instagram the other day with JLo recreating the sound from the episode.

Which is why there’s been sooooo much speculation about whether or not Prime Video and the showrunners would ride this momentum and make Allie and Dean, played by Stephen Kalyn (he’s Canadian), the OTP of season two, skipping over the second book. For weeks now viewers have been in the comments, theorising and debating what the decision will be. And today Prime seemed to confirm it.

With the caption and the two featured couples in the video, they didn’t leave much room for mystery. It’s going to be Allie and Dean. Production will apparently begin next week. No spoilers but … like… the story is already there in the books – Allie and Dean’s story is steamy but there are also high emotional stakes. Get ready for the drama and also, maybe, get ready for the cast to become a much bigger heatscore in Vancouver which is where they shot season one, mostly undisturbed. Now, though, they’re on a whole new level of recognition.

Over 15 years ago, when Twilight was in Vancouver, it was bedlam at times with the interest in Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. I’m not sure if Off-Campus is at that level, since there still was monoculture back in the Twilight times and pop culture is much more fractured now, but I’m curious to see how people react – or don’t – to the Off-Campus crew returning for season two.

Photo credits: John Lamparski/Shutterstock

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