How ‘Heated Rivalry’ Became the Year’s Biggest TV Surprise: ‘We’re Now Premium Smut on HBO!’

Sometime in early November, Casey Bloys — HBO and Max’s content chairman/CEO — got a call from Jason Butler, an executive on his team who’s focused on worldwide program planning. Butler had just acquired a Canadian show about gay hockey players called “Heated Rivalry” for HBO Max in Australia: Would he be interested in also looking at the show for the U.S. service?

“He sent the episodes to me on a Friday, and then on Monday we started negotiating,” Bloys recalls. “It was an easy and very quick ‘yes.’ Obviously, I’m a gay man, so I had a sense that it might make some waves. I thought it was very well done. To tell you the truth, I was surprised that it was even available, because this was about three weeks before it aired.”

In Canada, “Heated Rivalry” is now the most-watched original series ever on Bell Media’s Crave streamer. And here in the U.S., it’s now the top-rated non-animated acquired series on HBO Max since it launched in 2020, and is in the top five among all scripted debuts on HBO Max this year.

So why did it seemingly came out of nowhere? Turns out, it’s because it kinda did. “Heated Rivalry” wasn’t supposed to premiere until next year — but once Bell Media and Crave knew what they had in the series, they kept pushing the premiere date up. And up.

“I think we were looking at February,” says executive producer Brendan Brady, the co-founder of “Heated Rivalry” producer Accent Aigu Entertainment with series creator Jacob Tierney, who wrote and directed every episode. “And then it was maybe January. Then Christmas. And then … Nov. 28.”

The scramble to get the show launched has left Tierney and Brady a bit dazed. The duo just handed in the final cut for the show’s Season 1 finale (which drops as Episode 6 on Dec. 26) a few days ago.

“It’s great to be loved — and sometimes it’s exhausting and a lot of work to be loved, so we’re living through that,” says Tierney.

Justin Stockman, the VP of content for Bell Media, admits that the timetable for “Heated Rivalry” was rushed — but for good reason.

“Originally, we were planning to air it in early 2026. But as we kept seeing it, we were like, ‘This is really good!” Stockman says. “The holidays are generally a very high viewing period for Crave — when people are at home, and there’s not as much new television on traditional TV. We were like, ‘We should try to get this on during the holidays, and really capitalize on a lot of eyeballs.’ So we moved it up at the last minute.”

That accelerated premiere became a bit of a challenge for Sphere Abacus, Bell Media’s international distribution arm. Sphere Abacus had already developed plans to start shopping “Heated Rivalry” at the Cannes-based MIPCOM TV market in mid-October. Suddenly, the window between striking those “Heated Rivalry” global distribution deals and the new Nov. 28 launch date was tight.

The story behind the success of “Heated Rivalry” is one of those rare feel-good stories in TV at a moment when the business could use a few more of them. Its origins began during the COVID-19 pandemic, as Tierney (whose résumé includes Canadian hits “Shoresy” and “Letterkenny”) got hooked reading the “Game Changers” novel series, about rival pro hockey players who strike up a secret romance. Those books, by Rachel Reid, are a bit risqué — but they’ve developed a rabid following, particularly among young women readers.

Tierney wasn’t necessarily thinking about TV as he ravenously consumed Reid’s books. But then he read a Washington Post story about the current popularity of romance novels — which mentioned “Game Changers” by name — and told Brady they had to get the TV rights.

“It hadn’t really occurred to me to option it before because of how smutty it was,” Tierney says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know how you put this on TV.’ But then I thought, ‘Maybe this is valuable IP. Maybe this is something that moves the needle.’ So, I slid into the author’s DMs. She was Canadian, which I didn’t know, and she was a ‘Letterkenny’ fan. I was like, ‘May I have your books for a reasonable amount of time and money?’ And that was the beginning of it.”

Since Crave runs “Shoresy” and “Letterkenny,” Tierney and Brady brought the pitch there, but were worried that the highly sexual content of “Heated Rivalry” might give Bell Media executives some pause.

“I wrote the pilot on spec, because I didn’t know if we were going to get people [at Crave] to read this book — which turned out to be incorrect,” Tierney says. “Every exec at Bell has now read multiple books from this series. Everybody was very intrigued by the idea. And they were like, ‘Oh, it’s smutty! There’s not a ton of that on TV these days!’”

Stockman credits Rachel Goldstein-Couto, Crave’s head of development, for working with Tierney and Brady in honing the idea. “Everyone thought the scripts were amazing,” Stockman says. “Then we started taking it out to find anyone to co-finance it with us. The feedback was incredible. Everyone who looked at it was just blown away — although none of them stepped up to co-finance it.”

In hindsight, Tierney and Brady are relieved that Crave didn’t find a co-financer that might have demanded changes to the show. “Rachel at Crave really had this kind of innate understanding that this book works for this audience, and this audience is shockingly big,” Tierney says. “And if you start fucking with it, you’re going to alienate your baked-in audience, and you run the risk of making a show for absolutely nobody.”

Brady notes that the Canadian TV model differs from the U.S.’ in that as the show’s producer, Accent Aigu, owns the underlying show. They partner with a broadcaster (like Crave) for a license fee — and that, plus tax credits, gets you to a certain percentage of the budget. Then you have to find the rest of the money from additional partners.

But in the case of “Heated Rivalry,” Brady says those potential partners all wanted to tinker with the creative.

“We’d been talking with other additional financers who were not meeting what Jacob’s vision was for this show,” Brady says. “They wanted to change the original IP. What if we had a different entrance point? What if we added in all these additional characters?”

None of that made sense, both creatively and budget-wise. Luckily, between Bell’s license and its distribution deals, plus Accent Aigu putting some of its own equity into the project, they were able to pay for the show themselves.

Stockman doesn’t think the “spicy” nature of “Heated Rivalry” prevented them from finding additional financial partners — he instead chalks it up to a difficult time in the industry. “It was a very happy accident that we actually financed it all,” Stockman says. “We were so proud of the creative as we saw the edits come in that it went from feeling like a risk to feeling like we’ve got something massive here.”

And now, in success, they don’t need those partners. As for HBO Max, which climbed aboard too late in Season 1 to be a producer or co-financier, the company still won’t be one or have a say with the show’s creative for Season 2, which was announced on Dec. 12 — and Bloys is fine with that. “We’re not going to be involved,” he says. “I think the last thing the show needs is people meddling in what works. So, I don’t feel any need to weigh in. Clearly, they’ve got a good sense of the show and what works. I will be excited to receive my episodes, and highlight them on HBO Max.”

Bloys wouldn’t disclose how much HBO wound up paying for the U.S. rights for “Heated Rivalry,” but it doesn’t appear to be extravagant: “Another thing I was very impressed with was how this was a very reasonable acquisition,” he says. “I don’t know their budgets, but I’m very impressed with what they did based on the acquisition cost. This isn’t a huge tentpole budget that we’re looking at.”

Tierney says he’s thrilled that the show wound up on HBO in the U.S. — and it makes sense in a way, since HBO fare is licensed to and seen on Crave in Canada. “We were always like, ‘We’re trying to make premium smut here,’ and so we’re now premium smut on HBO!” he says. “That would be the dream. But we’ve been doing this long enough to know that nothing guarantees you an audience anymore. There’s so much good TV out there, that to break through the noise feels like such a gift.”

“Heated Rivalry” definitely broke through that noise. Bell Media execs say they noticed interest in the TV adaptation early on with every casting announcement, starting with stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as the show’s central couple (Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov).

“At every step of the way, when we released the trailer, and as we had a pretty clever social media strategy around drip-feeding the fan base, the reaction kept being stronger and stronger,” Stockman says.

Stockman wasn’t initially expecting the audience to be so female-heavy, given how racy the books can get. “We were told that the target audience of these books is women, and I didn’t know how to believe, because it seems pretty queer,” Stockman says. “But when we started seeing the internet reaction, the vast majority before this show had actually dropped was from women and the female fan base of the books.

“Jacob and Brendan really wanted to stay true to what the fan base would be expecting, and not tone it down,” he continues. “We were happy as we started to see the edits that it had a unique feel to it, where it’s got these pretty long sex scenes, but then there is a real sweetness underneath. It’s not just about the sex scenes… but obviously people are going to talk about the sex scenes! Jacob said at one point, ‘We don’t have to market this to the gay guys, we just have to make sure the women that love the books like it. The gay guys will find it pretty quickly.’”

Here in the U.S., the broad success of “Heated Rivalry” definitely took Bloys by surprise: “I thought it would be kind of a very specific, maybe gay-only show, but it really is a broader audience than that,” he says. “From a business point of view, the money we spent for acquisition was an incredible investment.”

Bloys agrees that the sex scenes are well done — and plentiful, yes, but not salacious. “I’ve been at HBO for over 20 years. I’ve done a lot of shows with sex scenes,” he says. “I think what was interesting about them here was, for anybody who has been closeted for any amount of time, and especially in the show — that kind of high-pressure situation of a professional sports team, where coming out is even harder — the sex was a little bit more reflective of that feeling of ‘You’re never going to find this again.’ It was intense, but to me, it amplified what they were trying to do with the storytelling. That said, I’m not complaining that they were attractive and hot. And I will say, as I told Jacob, very well-directed.”

As “Heated Rivalry” took off, so did the internet memes pushing the show. Stockman says his favorite was one before HBO’s acquisition: “There was a meme of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry on a date, and somebody said, ‘Oh, she’s just dating him so she can watch “Heated Rivalry.”’ We passed that around the office a few times.”

Beyond the success for Crave, Stockman says “Heated Rivalry” has been a boon for all of Canadian production. “I think Canada has gotten a bit of a bad rap, as the place you come to make cheap stuff,” he says. “We do have a lot of great tax credits, but we also have a lot of really great creatives that are globally known. We’ve been really pushing that story, and now it’s great that this show comes out, has a global reception, and is created by Canadians.”

Adds Tierney: “This has been so great for Crave and for the Bell originals department, who now have a flagship one-hour drama that they can say, ‘We did this, and we sold it everywhere.’ We can’t stress it enough, this was so much better than we could have anticipated.”

Now that they’re finally locked on Season 1, Tierney and Brady have turned their attention to Season 2. But you’ll have to be patient: “It can’t be same time next year, because this time last year I’d written five of these, and this time this year I’ve written zero of them,” Tierney says. “So it’s going to be a little bit later, but it’s still going to be soon.”

Tierney knows the demand is high, and they can’t wait too long before bringing the show back. “We understand that everybody’s goal is to not do two years between seasons,” he says. “And at the same time, I don’t want to put out a rushed shitty second season just because the show is very popular. But we’re very aware that our creative partners are enthusiastic and don’t want to wait too long. We’re getting back to work!”