Heated Rivalry didn’t just break through — it rewrote the industry playbook.

​In the five months since its Season 1 finale, the once “unconventional” adaptation has emerged as a breakout success, reshaping expectations around genre, LGBTQ+ storytelling and representation. Based on Rachel Reid’s bestselling novel, the queer hockey drama follows the steamy, contentious relationship between rival star players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). The series has since earned GLAAD Media Awards, a Peabody Award win, and 18 Canadian Screen Awards nominations, signaling both its critical acclaim and cultural impact.

For show creator Jacob Tierney, the reception continues to be as unfathomable as it has been meaningful. “This show has taken all of us by surprise. The impact that it’s had on people was not something one can anticipate,” he says. “It’s been genuinely moving and incredibly meaningful that this has touched people the way that it has, and I will be grateful for the rest of my life.”

Now marked by success, it’s hard to imagine that Heated Rivalry almost didn’t exist because of its audacious concept. While pitching with producing partner Brendan Brady, they observed a pattern: initial curiosity, followed by hesitation. “[Executives] were like, ‘Tell me more about that,’” Tierney says, “and when we did, they said, ‘I don’t think we can do that.’” The issue wasn’t interest but precedent. “No one else was pitching a hot and heavy gay hockey soap opera or romance. We weren’t competing with other ideas,” he explains. U.S. and Canadian buyers hesitated, but Tierney embraced specificity instead of adapting it to TV conventions. “This show, on paper, was not doing what TV is supposed to do, but I knew this was how it had to go. And I was right,” he says. Tierney’s tenacity landed Heated Rivalry on Bell Media’s Canadian streaming platform, Crave, which then led to HBO buying the series for international distribution.

That instinct also mirrors Reid’s approach when she first set out to write the Game Changers series in the late 2010s, each book focusing on the personal and public relationships of different male hockey players.

“I was bothered by many things about hockey culture,” Reid says. “As a fan, I wanted to address some of them.” One of them is the fact that the NHL remains one of the only professional sports with no openly gay players active or retired in its history.

With Reid aiming to disrupt expectations in publishing, Tierney extended that disruption to the screen. Heated Rivalry, while still contending with the strict heteronormative and masculine nature attributed to hockey culture, builds a romance between Shane and Ilya that is neither sidelined nor simplified. It balances the emotional intimacy with the stakes of a sports drama and expands queer storytelling, allowing its central relationship to exist as a fully-realized love story rather than a series of stereotypical traumas. Allowing queer joy to thrive in the face of hardship was a focus that resonated with audiences long underserved by mainstream television, which had only offered a small handful of tragic queer love stories.

“My books are about the effects of toxic masculinity on men,” says Reid, whose characters must learn to wade through societal expectations to express their hearts’ desires.

On screen, that depth is anchored by Williams and Storrie, actors plucked from restaurant-server obscurity. Their chemistry and casting were nothing short of kismet. Tierney explains they saw loads of actors, some of whom, after hearing descriptions that called for “fairly explicit nudity” and “intimate content” no longer wanted to read for the part. However, when the pair did their chemistry read on Zoom, that’s when Tierney and co. knew they finally had something special. “Boy, when [their chemistry] is there, you can feel it,” he says. “I was acutely aware that this doesn’t just happen. It was shockingly good what they had going on.”

Recalling the first day of filming, which included Episode 1’s Las Vegas sex scene and Episode 6’s heart-wrenching gay identity confession from Shane to Ilya, Tierney says that after seeing the pair excel in the emotional wringer, his own “nerves were out the window, I knew I could throw anything at those guys.”

“I was bothered by many things about hockey culture. As a fan, I wanted to address some of them.”

Rachel Reid

With Season 2 in development, Tierney and co-writer Michael Goldbach are focused on expanding the story and pushing Williams and Storrie even further. Expected to premiere in 2027, Season 2 will draw from The Long Game, the sixth installment that serves as a direct sequel to Shane and Ilya’s relationship. The book explores codependency, mental health and the realities of sustaining love under pressure. “You’ve got your happy ending… you get to be in a relationship,” says Tierney, explaining where the couple’s relationship stands at present. “You think that’s when it gets easy? It’s not.”

Reid’s Unrivaled — the seventh book in the series and the third about Shane and Ilya — also arrives in 2027. And she has two untapped standalone novels. “I’ve been spoiled by how good an adaptation can be,” says Reid. “I’ll be particular about who adapts those, but I would love for it to happen.” For TV, discussions continue to expand the Game Changers universe. Tierney adds, “There’s clearly an appetite for more. We’re happy to be the sous chefs of a bunch of shows that people could love.”

It’s clear that whatever the creatives behind Heated Rivalry have in store, it’s more than just a breakout. It’s a growing franchise built on risks that paid off. And if Reid and Tierney have proven anything, it’s that stories once considered too unconventional aren’t outside the mainstream. They’ve been waiting for their time to come off ice and into the spotlight.

The Journey From Pitch To Phenomenon

The story of how Heated Rivalry became a global hit, cultural phenomenon and 24/7 meme-making machine isn’t purely a creative one. For TV’s buzziest show to emerge, it also took bold boardroom decision-making and gritty, financial grunt work.

When Jacob Tierney first approached development execs at Canadian streamer Crave with the idea for the series, it’s fair to say it wasn’t the usual pitch that demands a greenlight. However, Justin Stockman, VP of content development and programming, and his team at Crave parent Bell Media saw something and encouraged Tierney to secure rights to Rachel Reid’s books. “A gay romance targeting women, taking place in hockey. It gets your attention,” says Stockman.

Excitement grew as the first scripts came in, but Crave was at a crossroads. Potential co-developers, mainly in the U.S., were not biting — possibly because of the greenlight aversion that often accompanies industry consolidation. “We weren’t finding takers, but the feedback was so positive that we became obsessed with the concept even though no one was writing the checks­ — we didn’t take it as a rejection, but a symptom of the times,” says Stockman. “It was so strong that we just decided to do it and         hit ‘go’.”

Boy, when [their chemistry] is there, you can feel it. I was acutely aware that this doesn’t just happen. It was shockingly good what they had going on.

Jacob Tierney

Running in parallel to Crave’s greenlight was Bell Media’s acquisition of U.K.-based distributor Sphere Abacus in March 2025. Bell already owned a chunk of Sphere Media, which in turn owned a majority in Sphere Abacus, and with Bell the new owner, fate had now conspired around Heated Rivalry. “It was one of the first things we did together,” recalls Stockman. “They got it plopped in their laps.”

Jonathan Ford, founder and managing director of Sphere Abacus, picks up the story. “We were very fortunate for this title,” he says. “I have to give huge respect to Justin and his team for seeing an opportunity at an early stage that others around the world didn’t.”

Ford immediately went to work. Sphere Abacus had become one of Europe’s top independent sellers following its 2020 launch, and the team began shopping Heated Rivalry as a pre-buy at MIPCOM Cannes last year in October. The market buzz was immediate. Production was well underway in Canada as talks with the likes of HBO progressed. Even so, Ford admits he was blindsided by the noise emerging around the show, as fans petitioned channels to buy it. “We all slightly misunderstood how strong and fervent that fanbase was,” he adds.

Crave clocked on and decided to ditch an initial plan to launch the show around the Winter Olympics in February this year, moving it up to the weeks before the 2025 holiday season — Crave’s busiest time of the year for streaming numbers. “Everything is a gamble in this industry, but because of the feedback and we trust our own taste, it felt it could be really big,” says Stockman. The move became a masterstroke.

In November, Sphere Abacus tied up big-money acquisition deals with HBO in the U.S. and Australia (which would later snap up parts of Europe and Asia as well) in what Ford calls “one of the fastest deals I’ve ever known,” with Movistar Plus+ in Spain and Sky in New Zealand also buying rights. The series was becoming a financial success even before its launch.

For Bell, Heated Rivalry was becoming a “daily growing snowball” as the pop culture momentum took off and HBO cranked its marketing machine up to eleven. “The social media buzz was getting out of control weeks before the launch,” recalls Stockman. The interest had spread well beyond the BookTok world and when the show finally debuted, Instagram feeds were saturated with overnight stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams.

“We’d broken through,” says Stockman. “We were in The Onion — The Onion! And then The Daily Show, then The Tonight Show and then we had Anderson Cooper talking about it on New Year’s Eve.”

Ford, whose company secured more pre-buyers for Season 2, notes how the phrase ‘re-heating’ — watching Heated Rivalry multiple times, has become “endemic” as the series buried itself deep in the global zeitgeist. Storrie presenting Saturday Night Live and the stars’ carrying of the Olympic torch only sent the series further into the stratosphere.

“It’s an exciting place to be,” he says. “Heated Rivalry has elevated our place in the market and every buyer and producer references it. We’ve all been fortunate, but fortune comes for the brave.” —Jesse Whittock