How 'Heated Rivalry' is scoring points for Canadian television

The creators explain why the steamy romance series could not have been made anywhere else

- Story by Max Gao

Connor Storrie, left, Hudson Williams, Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady on the set of "Heated Rivalry."

HOW DID A GAY HOCKEY romance made by a little-known Canadian streamer become a global phenomenon?

The answer, as it turns out, was by leaning into female and queer audiences. Since the debut last November of “Heated Rivalry,” which chronicles the clandestine love story of two fierce hockey rivals, the series from Bell Media’s Crave has emerged as an unlikely success story, defying a broader trend of media consolidation and waning commitments to diversity in Hollywood.

The mastermind behind the show's success is Jacob Tierney, who read author Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” series during the COVID-19 pandemic and then optioned all of the books after reading a Washington Post story about the proliferation of romance novels. After writing a pilot on spec, he approached the executives at Crave — where he had previously produced “Letterkenny,” “Shoresy” and “The Traitors Canada” — about green-lighting a series. From the outset, the gay writer-producer had a clear idea of how he wanted to adapt the “smutty” story for TV, starting with casting relative newcomers Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, respectively.