Off Campus

The Deal lives inside two heads. Hannah and Garrett narrate in first person, taking turns, so the jokes, the second-guessing and the slow slide from arrangement to attachment arrive straight from the people feeling them. The show has to hint at all of that through glances. That interior voice is the main thing the page offers that the screen can't. The book is also the version with its edges intact. The "hands off" rule that readers still miss is here, along with the original shape of the breakup and a Hannah whose world sits further from the hockey team's. Readers curious about what the adaptation smoothed over or reworked will find the rougher, more possessive 2015 romance that built the fandom. There is more beyond it. Season 1 adapts only The Deal, and Kennedy's series runs to five books, each centred on a different couple. The Mistake, The Goal and The Legacy have not reached the screen yet, so the novels are the only way to follow Logan and the others through their own stories, in the order Kennedy wrote them.

Garrett ends the relationship himself in the show, driven by fear of his own anger and of turning into his father. In The Deal, it is his father who pushes Hannah into breaking things off. The showrunner has named this breakup as one of her main changes, and it shifts the late-season conflict from outside pressure to Garrett's own self-doubt. Justin, the crush who sets everything in motion, plays football in the book. On screen he is a musician in a band, though he shares a fraternity with some of the hockey players. Elle Kennedy has said she liked the change because Garrett now competes with someone unlike himself. Hannah is still a music major, but the show recasts her as an aspiring songwriter who wants nothing to do with hockey. Garrett's campus-wide "hands off" rule around Hannah, a fan-favourite beat in the book, is mostly dropped or reworked, which has annoyed some readers. The show also reworks or skips some of the novel's more problematic behaviour, and TV Guide argues it is mostly better for it. The biggest structural shift is the ensemble. Where the book stays inside the couple's first-person narration, the show brings in Logan, Dean, Tucker and Allie early, gives them their own storylines and lets Hannah's and Garrett's worlds overlap more. It may not follow the book order either: season 2 is set to centre on Allie and Dean from The Score, skipping ahead of Logan's book, The Mistake.