Hate to Love You

Series Information

Title: Hate to Love You

Year: 2026

Platform: ReelShort

Genre: Sweet Romance, Campus Drama, Enemies to Lovers, Social Issue

Cast: Hannah Lowery (Kennedy Clarke), Blake Manning (Shay Coleman)

Format: Vertical short drama produced exclusively for ReelShort, premiered May 11, 2026, adapted from the bestselling novel by Tijan, filmed in California with principal photography completed in early 2026.

Synopsis

Kennedy Clarke's plan for college was not complicated. After a senior year that dismantled her social life with surgical precision, she arrived at Dulane University with two non-negotiable conditions for herself. First: no one would connect her to her brothers, particularly Gage, whose presence on the football team had a history of making people treat her as an extension of someone else rather than a person in her own right. Second: she would not repeat the particular mistake of falling for another one of her brother's rivals. Both rules were rational. Both rules reflected hard-earned experience. Then a class project paired her with Shay Coleman, and the rules stopped being hypothetical.

Shay is the kind of person a campus hierarchy produces when it runs without friction. Star quarterback, the name every student knows before orientation ends, the confidence of someone who has never once had the world confirm a negative assumption about himself. He is not a villain. That is one of the series' more careful choices, and it matters for how the enemies-to-lovers dynamic functions across the episodes. Shay is irritating in the specific way that competent, attractive people who are also fully aware of both those things tend to be irritating. Kennedy's instant resistance to him is not irrational. It is, from her position and her history, the only reasonable response.

The class project forces them into a structure neither of them would have chosen independently. Side by side in political science, working toward a shared deadline, they encounter each other on terms that exist outside the social performance that normally governs campus interactions. What Kennedy learns about Shay in those hours is not that she was wrong about him. It is that she was working with an incomplete picture, and the additional information does not simplify her position the way she might have hoped. Understanding someone better is not always a comfort when understanding them better means the wall you built starts requiring more maintenance than it did when it was just a wall.

The campus the series builds around them is not a protected space. Rumors about assault within the Dulane football team move through the story as a current that neither Kennedy nor Shay can ignore once it surfaces. For Kennedy, whose entire plan involved staying below the radar of exactly this kind of social complexity, the situation forces a decision about what kind of person she wants to be when the stakes are no longer personal. Her brothers' reputations already made her a known quantity in some parts of the campus world before she arrived. What she does with that visibility, when it becomes relevant to something larger than her own romantic situation, is where the series locates some of its most considered character work.

Hannah Lowery brings to Kennedy a quality that the role specifically requires: the capacity to play intelligence and damage in the same register without letting either one dominate. Kennedy is sharp-tongued in the series' early episodes not as a personality trait but as a defensive posture, and the distinction between the two is what gives her eventual softening toward Shay the credibility it needs. Blake Manning as Shay has a performance task that is easy to underestimate: the cocky campus golden boy who also turns out to be worth the complication requires an actor who can make the first half true without making the second half feel like a rewrite. Manning calibrates that transition with enough consistency that the shift feels like revelation rather than contradiction.

The source material's authorship by Tijan, a novelist with a substantial readership built across more than a decade of new adult fiction, gives this production something most original short drama premises do not have: an audience that already has emotional stakes in these characters before the first episode loads. For that audience, the series is a rendering of something familiar in a new register. For viewers discovering the story through ReelShort, it is one of the platform's most grounded campus romances of 2026, built on a protagonist whose interior life has enough texture to carry 85 episodes without requiring the central relationship to do all the work.

Fascinating Curiosities About the Series

Tijan, the author of the source novel, is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer whose fiction typically features female protagonists who are emotionally self-aware about their own damage and male leads who earn trust rather than assuming it. That authorial sensibility translated into the casting brief for the production: the series needed actors who could play people who understand themselves and still make bad decisions, which is a significantly harder brief than the standard enemies-to-lovers setup where characters are simply too proud to acknowledge what they feel.
The two rules Kennedy establishes before the series' central conflict begins are not arbitrary character details. They are the product of a specific history that the series references without overexplaining. Gage Clarke's presence at Dulane the year before Kennedy arrived changed how people on campus related to her at home during visits, and that change was consistently negative. Kennedy's decision to enter university without that association is not about shame: it is about insisting on the right to be encountered as herself first, which the series treats as a reasonable position rather than a character flaw she needs to overcome.
Hannah Lowery built her ReelShort profile across a series of productions that placed her in emotionally complex situations requiring sustained performance rather than isolated peak moments. Her credits include The Return of My Drama Queen, Tell Me Not to Love You, and Escaping the Mafia: I Married a Homeless Billionaire. That accumulated experience with the platform's specific demands, where every episode must establish and maintain emotional stakes in under five minutes, gave her a precision with Kennedy's shifting registers that a less platform-experienced actor might have struggled to achieve across a full series run.
Blake Manning's prior collaboration with Hannah Lowery in Sex Education with My Enemy Stepbrother established a documented on-screen chemistry between them that ReelShort's casting department was clearly factoring into the decision to pair them again in this production. The specific quality their dynamic has, a tension calibrated around resistance rather than ease, is particularly well-suited to a story where the central relationship is supposed to feel like a bad idea that gradually becomes the only idea that makes sense.
The social issue thread involving assault allegations within the Dulane football team places this series in a category of campus romance that is less common in the short drama format than the genre's usual romantic and comedic concerns. Most platform productions of this type keep the institutional environment as backdrop. The decision to make the football team's internal culture a plot element that Kennedy must navigate, rather than simply a setting detail that establishes Shay's status, gives the series a moral dimension that distinguishes it from productions that use the same genre mechanics without the same thematic ambition.
The Casting Networks breakdown for the production, published in California in March 2026, described the campus environment at Dulane University as a world of status, secrets, and social warfare. That framing positions the series not just as a romance but as a social observation about the specific power dynamics that elite university settings produce, where institutional prestige creates protection for behavior that would be less tolerated in environments without that insulation. Kennedy's pre-law aspirations, which she abandons after the realities of political science class collide with Shay's presence, are not a subplot: they are the series' marker of what Kennedy thought she wanted before the story showed her what she was actually dealing with.
ReelShort's release of this series on May 11, 2026, placed it in direct competition with several other major platform productions launched in the same window. The decision to premiere on that date reflects a confidence in the title's ability to hold audience attention against strong contemporaries, a confidence supported by the pre-existing readership for Tijan's source novel and the established platform followings of both lead actors. The immediate clip circulation across YouTube and Dailymotion within 24 hours of the trailer's publication confirmed that the audience the platform was counting on was already present and waiting.