Once it became an instant hit, Heated Rivalry’s success may have seemed preordained. Based on a popular series of romance novels by Rachel Reid about romances between interconnected male hockey players, the show debuted in November 2025 and has become Canadian streamer Crave’s best-performing original show, driving more sign-ups than anything else in 2025 to the streamer (owned by Canadian media conglomerate Bell Media). It was also a hit for international partners that include HBO Max in the U.S., where viewers had watched each episode more than 10 million times by February 2026.
But getting the project off the ground was a struggle for executive producers Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady, who produced it through their company, Accent Aigu Entertainment. Crave’s green light included some initial funding, but the showrunners still needed to find additional backing, asking potential partners to take a risk on an often explicitly sexual gay romance.
I spoke to Brendan Brady, executive producer of Heated Rivalry. This is the story of how Heated Rivalry went from pitch to production to global blockbuster—all in only 18 months.
As Accent Aigu approached possible partners, most were averse to the risk of backing the show. Ultimately, Bell Media increased its investment via Sphere Abacus, a distribution company in which it took a majority stake in March 2025. Brady and Tierney also put their producer fees into the project.
Brady: Early July 2025, we have a green light, and we were off to the races. What we kept coming up against was people loved the pitch, but ultimately what we kept hearing was, “This doesn’t feel like we can sell this in the U.S. for the money you guys want.”
Justin Stockman, VP of global content, Bell Media: When we were looking for [international] partners, everyone who would read the treatments or scripts thought it was one of the most exciting things they’d ever read, but then they would say, “No, we’re not going to be part of it.” When it came time for production, we were like, let’s just fully fund it and we’ll also distribute it because it feels like there’s just so much enthusiasm behind this.
Sean Cohan, president, Bell Media: Acquiring a majority stake in Sphere Abacus in the middle of last year was a commercial risk that has paid off quite nicely. It has reinforced our belief that if you get back to green-lighting good stuff quickly and believe in your creatives, there’s a way through some of the noise out there during a tough time in the media ecosystem.
Production took place from April to June 2025, and online excitement from fans of the books helped stir interest from international distributors, especially at the world’s premier annual TV trade show, MIPCOM, in Cannes.
Stockman: Even before we announced the series at our upfront in June of 2025, superfans intercepted requests to casting agents and figured out it was Heated Rivalry. Then when we announced [the series], it blew up even bigger. You could just feel the groundswell. As we got ready to take it out at MIPCOM [in September 2025], which is where we get our global sales from, we initially were going to air it around the Winter Olympics in January, but we said, “Let’s put it on over the holidays.”
Brady: At that point, we had none of the postproduction done. But [MIPCOM] was actually the first place we had felt a little bit of momentum. People were coming up to us on the Croisette and being like, “Hey, you guys did that gay hockey show, right?” Two weeks after MIPCOM is when HBO came in—HBO Australia was the first acquisition.
HBO U.S. then picked up the show, committing to air it the same day and time it premiered on Crave every week. Response to the show was overwhelmingly positive, giving Crave the homegrown international hit it had been targeting for years. Crave green-lighted a second season, set to debut in spring 2027. It will partially adapt the sixth book in Reid’s series.
Cohan: HBO Max has said it’s the biggest acquisition they’ve had since launch. We trended to No. 1 in Sky in the U.K. A third of viewers have watched it more than once. It’s the thing that’s driven more sign-ups to Crave than virtually anything. At this watershed moment, it has opened the door to lots of great shows that we hope will be cultural lightning rods.