Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | July 14, 2026
Between World Cup matches over the last two weeks, I’ve been playing catch-up on a few buzzy series I missed because I was too busy drowning in other buzzy series. Specifically, Prime Video’s monstrously horn-dog hit Off Campus and Britbox’s delightful The Other Bennett Sister. Someone originally told me I’d hate The Other Bennett Sister. They were wrong. They also told me that if I somehow liked it, I’d love Off Campus even more.
They were wrong twice, which is a hell of a terrible batting average.
But look, they weren’t wrong for dumb reasons. It turns out that despite two centuries and roughly forty IQ points of separation between their target demographics, these shows are running the exact same offense: a bookish girl, chronically underestimated, gets dropped into a love triangle she did not request and is, frankly, annoyed about. One version unfolds in a hockey house that smells like a gym bag left in a hot sedan (except when John Tucker is making Thanksgiving dinner). The other unfolds in a drawing room where the most scandalous object is a slightly damp letter that is somehow less damp than everything in Off Campus. Same play, different uniforms. Let’s go to the tape.
The Leads: Hannah Wells vs. Mary Bennett: On paper, Hannah is the better construction. She’s a music student with a trauma history that Off Campus handles with considerably more care than a show this aggressively horny is legally required to, and she gets a killer back-half arc. But Mary Bennett is doing something I have genuinely never seen a show do. Mary is the sister Jane Austen couldn’t be bothered with - the one who sings terribly, moralizes at parties, and gets maybe eleven lines because she wasn’t designed to be a person; she was designed to be texture. The Other Bennett Sister looks at that and asks: what if being unlovable in an Austen novel is the selling point? Watching Mary clock that she’s been losing a game whose rules were written specifically to make her lose is the best thing in either show by miles. Hannah is a terrific romance heroine. Mary is a human being who wandered into a romance and immediately started to question the premise.
Advantage: Mary Bennett.
The Love Triangle: Garrett Graham/Justin Kohl vs. Mr. Hayward/Mr. Ryder: Garrett Graham is a hockey captain with a tortured backstory and big broad shoulders and dreamy eyes. Justin Kohl is a musician with meek bad boy vibes. Granted, he was only interested in Hannah once he found out that Garrett was, which is the premise of the show, but also not a great look for Justin. I’m not going to spoil Off Campus, but we’ve seen this setup a thousand times. Justin is not an end-goal. He is narrative tension. It is not a triangle; it’s a hallway with a door at the end of it, and if you open it, Garrett is not wearing a shirt. Congratulations! The Other Bennett Sister, meanwhile, gives us Mr. Hayward — decent, steady, would make Mary genuinely happy, and would be easy to dismiss as the boring option except the show refuses to let you (and I love it for it) — and Mr. Ryder, a walking disaster in an ill-fitting waistcoat who actually listens to her, which literally no one in Mary’s life has ever done. He’s all charm, but maybe just a little too ahead of the curve. Run away, to Italy, without getting married? What is this, Mr. Ryder, the 1920s! Sit down! The show genuinely loves both characters, and it refuses to completely tip its hand until the penultimate episode. It made me, a grown-ass man, yell “oh, come on” to an empty room at 11:40 on a Tuesday. That’s a love triangle. (I can’t wait for the Christmas episodes).
Advantage: Mr. Hayward/Mr. Ryder.
The Supporting Characters: And here is where Off Campus takes the puck and walks away. The hockey house is stacked. Logan, Dean, and Tucker could each headline their own series, which is presumably why Amazon’s algorithm has already greenlit one. Pick your favorite. I’m a Logan guy myself (I’m told by my daughters he will lead the third season), and while Ally is amazing, I think she can do better than Dean (those two are tapped to lead the next season), who is actually more of a Logan than a Dean in Gilmore Girls terms. Even the roommate subplot is fantastic. The Other Bennett Sister has a real problem here, which is that we have met all of these people. A hundred times. In a hundred adaptations. Frequently starring the exact same six British actors. Indira Varma’s Mrs. Gardner makes it closer than it should be, but Ruth Jones’ Mrs. Bennett wides the gap again. She’s awful. I will never forgive her for what she made Mary do to the eye doctor, John Sparrow. She makes my blood boil, which works in terms of plot construction, but in terms of likability? No. A horse could kick Mrs. Bennett in the face and I would laugh.
Advantage: Off Campus.
The Storylines: Off Campus is a hockey show that forgets hockey exists for four consecutive episodes at a stretch (but at least has more hockey than Heated Rivalry), and its plotting functions almost exclusively as a delivery mechanism for the next contrivance requiring two hot adults to share one bed. And God bless it, it is outstanding at that. But The Other Bennett Sister is attempting something meaningfully harder: threading an original story through the gaps of a book every single person in its audience has already memorized. It has to be surprising and inevitable at once, and it has to pull that off without contradicting a text people will absolutely fight you about in this comment section, at length. And it works. I could not have been more impressed. It is magic, and it conjures that magic without necessarily stirring the lions.
Advantage: The Other Bennett Sister.
The Spicy Levels: Oh, come on. The Other Bennett Sister is working with a look across a crowded room and one (1) ungloved hand. To its credit, it extracts a considerable amount of mileage from that hand. Off Campus is working with an entire episode set inside a hotel room, and nobody can keep their damn shirt on. Britbox is playing a different sport, in a different stadium, in a different century, and I respect the discipline enormously. But you know where the heat is. You’ve known since the first paragraph. That said, and I will stand by this: The least sexy thing in either show is Hannah’s wretched rendition of a wretched sexist ’80s song, “Cherry Pie.” Why? Just why?!
Advantage: Off Campus.
The Verdict
Final tally is 3-2, The Other Bennett Sister, which is the correct result. Off Campus is the better hangout, the better binge, and the strongest argument yet that the contemporary romance genre deserves its streaming budget. But The Other Bennett Sister is the better show. It isn’t especially close, virtually nobody is going to watch it, and that fact is going to make me insane for the next several months.
Watch both.
