Amazon Prime Video has found much success in the YA space with series such as The Summer I Turned Pretty, We Were Liars, Elle and Sterling Point.
Now, the streamer is turning its attention to a similar, but slightly older, and raunchier audience for its next batch of programming: the New Adult.
It has already had hits in this space, which features characters aged 18-29, rather than younger teenagers between ages 12 to 18, with shows such as its adaptations of Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus and Carley Fortune’s Every Summer After, and has lined up a show based on Elsie Silver’s Rose Hill book series and a TV adaptation of Lucy Score’s Things We Never Got Over that dovetail into the growing tier.
New Adult, which is thought to have emerged as a term in the late 2000s thanks to publisher St. Martin’s Press, targets readers and viewers aged 18 to 29 and bridges the gap between Young Adult (YA) fiction and Adult fiction.
New Adult also offers explicit sex scenes (hello, Off Campus). The online book community calls this spice, and it ranks how high each book’s spice level is depending on the amount of explicit sexual scenes. For instance, a story with less detail is sometimes called a “closed-door” romance because, like in movies or TV, the act is merely alluded to, but not fully shown.
Off Campus, often labeled a YA series, fits into New Adult. The first season follows the romance between Briar University’s hockey captain, Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli) and quiet songwriter and college junior, Hannah Wells (Ella Bright). It launched in May and became Prime Video’s third most-viewed debut season ever behind The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Fallout, and was renewed for a second season ahead of its launch.
Similarly, Every Year After was renewed for a second season after its June bow. The TV series, which comes from Amy B. Harris and Leila Gerstein, is based on Carley Fortune’s eponymous book, the sequel of which will serve as the basis of Season 2. While the first book starts with Sam Florek (Matt Cornett) and Persephone “Percy” Fraser (Sadie Soverall) meeting in their adolescence, the time jump in the show’s first season includes the characters in their late twenties. The second book, One Golden Summer, tells the love story of Sam’s brother Charlie Florek (Michael Bradway), who is 35, and his love interest, Alice Everly, who has yet to be cast for Season 2 of the show, is 33 in the book.
“We’re always coming of age, and I love that. I see it in my mom’s generation, I see it with people in their 80s still entering new phases of what life looks like,” Fortune told Deadline in an interview tied to Every Year After‘s release. “I think the 30s are particularly interesting because you have made so many decisions that have set you up for where you are, and it is a great time to sit back or be forced to take a look at what those decisions, where they have put you, and is that where you [want to] be? The stakes go higher.”
Next up are Rose Hill and Things We Got Over. Rose Hill is a four-book series of contemporary romance novels that feature interconnected stories set in the same fictional town: Wild Love, Wild Eyes, Wild Side, and Wild Card.
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The first season of the series will follow the story from the first novel, Wild Love, which centers on best friends and neighbors West Belmont (Jake Weary), a rancher with commitment issues, and brooding record label owner Ford Grant (Sean O’Pry), who’s long carried a torch for West’s sister, Rosie (Hannah Galway). And when country-pop star Skylar Stone (Sadie Dickerson) breezes into their rugged mountain town, the heat gets turned way up in this romantic family drama.
The streamer is already casting the Rose Hill series in anticipation of success. Sean O’Pry, Hannah Galway, Jake Weary, and Sadie Dickerson have already been cast as the couples that lead the first two books, Wild Love and Wild Eyes. A few key characters from the latter half of the quartet have also been cast. Prime Video has a history with this strategy, having also banked on buzz around Off Campus by intertwining the love stories of the main four hockey teammates from the very beginning of the series. While Season 1 focuses on Hannah and Garrett, Stephen Kalyn’s Dean DiLaurentis and Mika Abdalla’s Allie Hayes were heavily teed up to take over for Season 2, and easter eggs were planted for the other two teammates’ love stories in Season 1.
The same pattern applies to Things We Got Over, based on the first novel in Lucy Score’s trilogy of romances. While the first installment features a love triangle between Naomi Witt (Molly Griggs) and the Morgan brothers, Nash (Tommy Martinez) and Knox (Matthew Noszka), the following two books delineate to center two more Knockemout romances. Knockemout is the small town in Virginia where the series is set. Soft spoiler alert, the second book features the romance of the brother Naomi doesn’t end up with, and the third features local librarian Sloane (Sarah Jeffery) and Lucian (Sean Teale).
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While Rose Hill is marketed as a series of single dad romances, and the Knockemout trilogy follows two brothers and their best friend, these two series are considered women-led — a genre that is still undersupplied across film and television, according to a report from Luminate.
Rose Hill and Things We Never Got Over also both deal with more mature themes including parenthood. In Wild Love, the first Rose Hill book, O’Pry’s character Ford Grant realizes he has a biological child after sperm donation on a whim to get concert tickets. Things We Never Got Over forces parenthood on Naomi, whose twin sister Tina leaves her daughter Waylay (Megan Stott) behind for her more responsible sister to take care of. While Off Campus is set in college, the book series still deals with heavier topics as well, like Hannah’s rape and Garrett’s father’s abuse in Season 1.
It’s not a coincidence that Off Campus, the Rose Hill books and Things We Got Over trilogy all come from the same romance publisher: Bloom Books. The imprint even uses obsession in its marketing for books it brings to life.
Rose Hill leans western like Netflix’s recently cancelled Ransom Canyon, and Prime Video is aiming to rope in more than if not the same audience that fell in love with Off Campus. These shows should also appeal to older millennials given that a number of the characters in these books skew older. That being said, the New Adult category strikes the balance between those not yet old enough to pay for their own Prime Video or Amazon Prime accounts (new subscribers) and audiences of older women who may already have said subscriptions, which may have factored into the cancellation of female friendship centered buddy comedy Ride Or Die.
Should the streamer continue with Obsessed Fest, it will be interesting to see how it markets its expanding slate of book adaptation romances. It will also be interesting to see if social media fan edits, which Head of Marketing for Amazon and MGM Studios Sue Kroll admitted to staying up late watching at the inaugural Obsessed Fest, will diverge when more of the New Adult shows arrive on Prime Video.
Amazon is also leaning into New Adult on the film side: Ana Huang’s Gods of the Game trilogy has been optioned for a trio of film adaptations by Amazon MGM Studios, Lauren Asher’s Throttled will get a feature adaptation from the studio as well. Both Huang’s and Asher’s books are published by Bloom.
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They follow successful film adaptations of non-Bloom books like Casey McQuiston’s college-set Red, White & Royal Blue — which is getting a sequel film —starring Taylor Zakar-Perez as 21 year-old Alex Claremont-Diaz and Nicholas Galitzine as the slightly older Prince Henry plus Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis starring Lili Reinhart and Tom Benton, which is set in graduate school at Stanford University, and Hazelwood’s Love, Theoretically.
Then, there’s Fourth Wing, a romantasy series based on Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series, which centers 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail (to be portrayed by Esther McGregor). A huge book in the romantasy genre, Fourth Wing does fall into the New Adult age range category, but romantasy — a combination of romance and fantasy — often includes much more elaborate world-building. Amazon MGM Studios will also stretch its film romance offerings with the dark romance adaptation of Butcher & Blackbird, which has just set its lead cast.
Amazon is not alone in spotting the growing New Adult trend. Netflix, which has been in on the YA trend for many years, has lined up an adaptation of Fortune’s This Summer Will Be Different, and Shawn Levy is developing a series based on Elsie Silver’s Chestnut Springs novels. The streamer has also optioned the rights to Ana Huang’s Twisted Love and its sequels for a TV series adaptation.
On the film side, Netflix also has Guarding Stars, based on Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard and In a Holidaze, based on the book by Christina Lauren, coming out in November and December, respectively. The two holiday stories feature characters in the older New Adult age bracket. Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps and Alex Cooper’s Unwell Productions are also behind a feature film adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s Deep End.
Apple TV’s got The Buccaneers going for it, but that book adaptation falls more in the vein of period romances like Bridgerton. Apple TV also recently won the rights to Rebecca Yarros’ upcoming novel Peculiar Stars, which publishes November 17. Hulu took a big swing with an attempt to adapt Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses, but the rights have reverted back to Maas, who has two more books in that romantasy series on the way.
Ahead of Amazon’s Obsessed Fest over the summer, Peter Friedlander, Head of Global TV, Amazon MGM Studios said there was a halo effect from Off Campus on Every Year After. “One success begets another,” he said just a day before Every Year After received its second season renewal, like Off Campus had done. Sterling Point’s Season 2 renewal signals continued domination in the YA space for the streamer too, as do the upcoming second seasons of We Were Liars and Elle and The Summer I Turned Pretty‘s concluding film.