Prime Video Turns Its Attention to New Adult Romance
Amazon's Prime Video is turning its next wave of programming toward New Adult, a genre for characters aged 18 to 29, according to Deadline.
Young Adult stories, the category Prime Video has already built hits on, usually follow teenagers aged 12 to 18. New Adult sits in the gap between that and grown-up fiction, with characters in their late teens through to their late twenties. The label is thought to have emerged in the late 2000s, with publisher St. Martin's Press among the early users of the term.
The streamer's clearest New Adult success so far is Off Campus. It follows a romance between Briar University hockey captain Garrett Graham, played by Belmont Cameli, and college junior Hannah Wells, played by Ella Bright. The show launched in May. Deadline reports that it became Prime Video's third most-viewed debut season ever, behind The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Fallout. Prime Video renewed it for a second season before its launch, meaning it was ordered again before viewers had seen it. Some readers will know the books as YA, but the show's audience sits closer to New Adult.
Every Year After is the other title in the spotlight. Based on Carley Fortune's novel, it was renewed for a second season after its June debut. Season one uses a time jump to place Sam Florek, played by Matt Cornett, and Persephone "Percy" Fraser, played by Sadie Soverall, in their late twenties. Prime Video describes the show as a story of first loves and the choices that mark people for good.
Season two draws on the sequel, One Golden Summer. That book follows Charlie Florek, aged 35, and Alice Everly, aged 33. Michael Bradway has been cast as Charlie.
More titles are already lined up. Prime Video has a show based on Elsie Silver's Rose Hill series, which runs to four books, and a TV adaptation of Lucy Score's Things We Never Got Over. Earlier this year the streamer also launched "Obsession Is In Session," an initiative that celebrates young adult storytelling and fandom culture. Prime Video has also commissioned Boys of Tommen, a romantic drama based on books by Irish author Chloe Walsh, which Amazon describes as a BookTok sensation. BookTok is the book-recommendation community on TikTok.
For viewers, the change is simple to spot. More of the shows on the service will follow characters who are older than the teenagers of earlier YA hits, while keeping the romance at the centre. For the crews and writers' rooms behind them, a new genre means new scripts to write, cast and shoot. Each new order is also a chance for a book to become a finished series, and that is the step that matters most to the readers who have been waiting for one.
