In the sea of WhatsApp chats that make my phone combust at all hours, one in particular seems to vibrate in time with the natural rhythms of American popular culture. Over the years, the chat has evolved beyond commentary on the Richards sisters and Lisa Vanderpump's dogs into something stranger and more useful: a rolling pop culture salon. We discuss everything that is not technically personal to us but somehow manages to feel personal anyway—Scandoval, Hayden Panettiere’s death, Luigi Mangione’s good looks, Hilary Duff’s return to the epicenter of American cultural life.
Occasionally, we solve mysteries before the rest of the internet catches up (ask me about our Lindsay Clancy theory). Mostly, though, we sit around talking (well, typing) about the things that seem to be occupying everyone’s brains at once. A while back, that thing was Off Campus.
The Prime Video series, adapted from Elle Kennedy’s bestselling college hockey romance novels, became the subject of increasingly impassioned dispatches in Beverly Hills, from our sudden attraction to all things hockey to the clothes, the soundtrack, that infamous viral dance video that gave everyone the ick when it came to star Belmont Cameli and the obvious insane attraction between Allie Hayes and Dean Di Laurentis, whose romance will drive the show's second season. https://www.instagram.com/p/DZeFCcxMoJ9/ Beverly Hills has a funny way of functioning as a miniature weather system for popular culture. What starts as an apparently niche obsession within our own chat more often than not turns out to be something much larger brewing elsewhere, and we’ve got the data to prove it. In its first 12 days, when all 27 of us had already binge-watched it, Off Campus attracted 36 million viewers globally, making it the network’s third-biggest debut season ever.
It outperformed The Summer I Turned Pretty, the other Prime Video romance that had already turned young longing into a TV genre. The social-media evidence was harder to quantify but impossible to miss: suddenly, my feeds were full of hockey jokes, memes about millennial women falling for 19- and 20-year-old fictional athletes (guilty as charged), thirst edits and earnest debates over the hottest characters on the show. Romance fans were not merely watching Off Campus; they were litigating it in group chats, on Instagram and TikTok, and perhaps even with their husbands, in person—once those husbands realized their wives were too busy watching two college kids get it on to be, well, getting it on themselves.
But the season lasted only eight episodes, so Beverly Hills immediately came up with a list of shows akin to Off Campus to keep the momentum going: The Summer I Turned Pretty, My Life with the Walter Boys, Every Year After and Sterling Point, to name a few. These are shows about beautiful young people falling desperately, sometimes painfully and quite often erotically in love; they are all in tune with their emotions and young enough to still believe that a single kiss may change the architecture of their lives. I’ve coined a term for the genre: yearningcore.
Think of yearningcore as the aesthetic of wanting something so intensely that the wanting itself becomes the story. It is longing stretched across eight episodes, scored to a devastating pop song (the Taylor Swift kind) and performed by buoyant, attractive people wearing forgettable clothes because the outfit isn’t the point. Seeing characters Hannah Wells and Garrett Graham get together is exciting, but watching the journey and yearning for it to come to that perfect conclusion is even more fun.
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