Why Is Everyone Obsessed With Off Campus! Is 2000s TV Finally Making a Comeback?

Everyone is watching Off Campus. Your millennial colleague, your younger cousin, that friend who swore she was done with college dramas. Anahita and Jesselina have a theory.

Tracing back their years in boarding school and the unlikely education that happens in the in-between spaces. When you're told you're not good at something you've put your heart into. When Cosmopolitan is contraband. When there's one television, the seniors have the remote, and you squeeze yourself onto a shelf just to catch an episode of One Tree Hill and quietly begin imagining a life far outside those walls. And it turns out those shows were doing more work than anyone gave them credit for, which is exactly why shows like Off Campus and Heated Rivalry feel refreshing and important right now, not just as good television but as a genuine counter-offer to a culture that has lately been writing young people with so much spite and so little empathy. The mean girl trope, the toxic bad boy, more stereotypes and less character arc.

A light-hearted conversation that will make you glow with nostalgia, and quietly hope that the future is possibly coming around, to a good rom-com, to better storytelling, and maybe, just maybe, to the idea that 2000s nostalgia is having its moment for a reason.

PS: Don't miss Jesselina's Hindustani classical music audition from 2007.

• Gandhari, a Monologue and Anahita’s Stardom (02:43)

• "You're Not an Actor But You Could Be a Narrator" (06:23)

• Jesselina’s Hindustani Classical Music Audition That Cannot Be Undone (08:15)

• Cosmopolitan, Mills and Boon and the Sex Education Our Mothers Started (11:16)

• The Hot Pink Flip Phone Heist (14:51)

• Friday Nights, Plastic Chairs and the Senior Who Always Had the Remote (16:32)

• One Tree Hill, OC, Friends: The Shows That Raised Us (19:32)

• The Delayed Consumer Theory: A Psycho-social Analysis (29:00)

• Off Campus and Heated Rivalry - The Radical Act of Writing Young People Well (32:38)

• Friends Got Us Through Our Darkest Times (49:52)

• Humor Is Intelligence and We Will Die on This Hill (48:10)