Nice Guys Are Hot Again

Like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, Off Campus’s takeover of my phone happened gradually, then all at once. First came a single—extremely abashed—recommendation from a friend for Amazon’s eight-episode college romance about a star athlete and a music student, followed by what felt like a tsunami of endorsements from adult women far and wide, accompanied by GIFs, reels, images, and custom emoji, all featuring the Byronic hockey player Garrett Graham (played by Belmont Cameli). “He’s fictional, he’s fictional, he’s fictional,” one books influencer intoned to herself about Garrett in an Instagram affirmation. “He is not real. He is written by a woman.” My babysitter sent me screenshots of her group chats, all renamed in Cameli’s honor. Another friend texted: “I actually think it’s a good thing I have to wait a year for the second season. My marriage thanks me.”I have a theory about popular romantic heroes, which is that they respond to—and sometimes complement—the anxieties of the moment. The sneering, helicopter-flying, allegedly 27-year-old billionaire Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades franchise could have taken hold only in the lean years following the Great Recession, when the idea of owning a home big enough to accommodate a sex dungeon felt especially escapist. Twilight’s Edward Cullen, first introduced in 2005, was the chivalric corrective to a wasteland of Girls Gone Wild–style masculinity. The alpha heroes of 1980s romances—ranch owners, corporate raiders, anyone played by Michael Douglas—tended to be emotionally constipated anti-feminists intent on dominating the opposite sex by using testosterone and wads of cash.Garrett Graham—brooding, burly, but also improbably tender—seems like a response to 2026’s sexually abusive chatbots and manosphere influencers. His character is absolutely pandering to women, but given the alternative, I’ll take it. Off Campus, adapted from a series of books by the Canadian writer Elle Kennedy, is about a music stud