How Hollywood Is Looking for the Next ‘Heated Rivalry’

How hot is Heated Rivalry? In the three months since the steamy Canadian hockey romance debuted on HBO Max, a TV-studio development exec who focuses on literary acquisitions has been fielding pitches from publishers on possible clones. “Book agents have been dusting off their sports romances and kind of tiptoeing into the marketplace with them,” he says. “I just got sent a male-male tennis romance that’s Heated Rivalry meets Challengers.” He’s obviously wary of anything that could come off as an opportunistic knockoff, but he’ll give it a look. “If the wrong lesson is that the queer tennis show gets made, then I don’t want to be right,” he laughs.

HBO and HBO Max content chief Casey Bloys hasn’t heard about the aforementioned book, but he has one word of advice for fellow execs thinking about trying to clone the show: Don’t. “The wrong lesson to take from this show’s success would be to have Heated Rivalry in baseball or Heated Rivalry in football,” he says. Bloys snapped up U.S. rights to the Crave drama late last year because it “was something fresh that people hadn’t seen before.” But now that 11.5 million U.S. viewers (and counting) have experienced it, he argues that rushing to put on a slew of other sports romances would be a mistake. “It can’t be replicated,” he says, pointing to the dozens of (mostly) failed sitcoms about sexy young singles that emerged after Friends exploded onto the scene in 1994. “That would be the exact wrong message to take.”

Programming executives across Hollywood spent this winter buzzing about creator Jacob Tierney’s unlikely hit, trying to understand what else made it connect with audiences so quickly. While Netflix execs famously made their big bet on House of Cards 15 years ago because trends from its DVD rental business suggested audiences would love it, Heated Rivalry stands out because nothing in The Data suggested it would turn into a phenomenon. “We all believed in it in a very non-logical way,” says Justin Stockman, vice-president of content at the Canadian streamer Crave. Stockman and other insiders we spoke to are under no illusion that data won’t be a factor in future programming, but as one longtime agent puts it, Hollywood has been following the same formulas for too long, the result of  a “highly tech-y, corporate, clinical” culture among streamers. “Fear and anxiety are permeating these companies, and there’s paralysis everywhere,” he says.

“If we can bring back really boundary-pushing but still commercial stuff the way we did in the early to mid-2000s? Hallelujah,” he adds, referring to shows such as ABC’s 2004 breakouts Lost and Desperate Housewives. “This is the time to do it.”

According to the insider mulling the gay-tennis book, his development team is already approaching existing and forthcoming books differently as a result of Crave’s success. “Instead of trying to find our own sports romance,” he says, “it’s a great opportunity for us to identify some of those more niche or fervent, loyal fan bases in the book community.” Here’s how he and other sources predict the hunt for the next Heated Rivalry will play out:

While it’s not uncommon for TV shows to incorporate romance into their storylines, it’s usually coupled with other, splasher narrative elements in order to draw the biggest-possible audience. “It’s usually, ‘It’s a thriller, and there’s a big romance component to it,’ or, ‘It’s a ghost story, but there’s a romance at the heart of it,’” says one veteran studio-development exec. But in the case of Heated Rivalry, Tierney fought hard to keep his vision for the show pure (like the source material). “It fully embraced, unapologetically, the romance genre,” the exec says.

Stockman agrees and says he and his team were conscious about letting Tierney make the show he wanted rather than forcing him to check other boxes in order to (potentially) reach more viewers. “We didn’t try to make it something it’s not,” he says. “It’s a story about lust and then longing and then love. You get sucked in by the lust, and then the longing keeps you going, and then in the end, you feel really good because there’s love. It never is trying to be a bunch of other things. Nobody tried to water it down; we let it be what it wanted to be.” Or, as one development exec at a rival streamer puts it, “The beauty of the show is its simplicity.”

“We have said to the marketplace, to the producers that pitch us, ‘We want more romance,’” says Stockman. “We don’t get pitched enough. We’ve heard from other platforms, and they’ve said the same thing. That was before Heated Rivalry. Hopefully this brings in more of those pitches, whether it’s from Harlequin or YA to the more edgy streaming style that Heated Rivalry would fall under.”

While Crave let the vision for Heated remain pure — the show is a romance, full stop — insiders believe the show broke out because of the two words that generally precede “romance” when fans talk about the show. “One takeaway for me as an executive is, you need to have a hooky concept that can be easily explained to people,” says the veteran studio-development exec. “When somebody said to me, ‘Oh, have you seen the new gay-hockey romance?’ Those were three words I did not expect to hear together. And all of a sudden I was like, ‘Tell me more.’ There’s so much content out there right now, you need that kind of hook to get people talking about it, like, ‘Well, now I have to watch.’”

But as important as getting people to sample the show was, Bloys argues that what kept viewers coming back to Heated every week was the way in which the show (and the book series) embraced the exceedingly horny side of Shane and Ilya’s relationship. “That combination of explicit sex and an underlying sweetness is not something you typically see. You either get one or the other,” he says. “Whenever a show hits, you kind of relearn very basic things, and in this case, I think it was offering something new that people hadn’t seen before.” That extends to how Heated wrapped up its first season, Stockman adds. “The challenges they face being solved at the end was part of the magic of the show,” he says. “The other shoe didn’t drop, where they get punished for being gay, which is generally what happens in queer romances. They actually just get to be together.”

Studios and streamers have entire departments devoted to identifying best sellers or book series — many times even before they get published — with an eye on turning them into hit movies or TV series. (See Netflix’s recent smash People We Meet on Vacation.) In the case of Heated Rivalry, the formula got flipped: Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series has had a passionate audience for years, but it only turned into a publishing juggernaut with multiple titles on the New York Times best-seller list after the show broke out. “We tend to see feeding frenzies around these really big books that have a lot of money put behind them, whether from the publishing industry or they’re represented by a big agent,” says the studio exec who concentrates on book rights. “So it’s been really nice to see a show like Heated Rivalry, based on a book that didn’t have as big of a platform, also succeed.”

This exec thinks the show’s breakout status “opens doors” for Hollywood IP-acquisition teams to change up their approach to development. “It allows us to go after material that we might not generally go after just because it isn’t the bright, shiny new toy of the week,” he says, adding that Heated’s success has “supercharged our own internal development” and lead to deals that might not have gotten made even just a few months ago. “There are several projects that we were fans of and unable to get traction on, or books we identified since the show’s success, where we’ve been able to use the example of Heated to move them along in the acquisition process,” he says.

Much has been written about the fact that HBO spent very little — under $600,000 per episode — to acquire the U.S. streaming rights to Heated. But the show’s overall production budget was also insanely small by modern-day streaming standards, with Tierney’s production partner, Brendan Brady, pegging it at “far south” of $3.6 million (U.S.) per episode in a recent interview. “Jacob Tierney did this on a budget — and it looks great,” says Bloys, who as overseer of the HBO brand has not hesitated to spend upward of $15 to $20 million for a single hour of a TV show such as House of the Dragon.

But in his role overseeing HBO Max, the streaming service, Bloys has been on something of a mission to make (or in this case, find) shows that more closely follow the traditional network- and cable-TV business models. The Pitt, which churns out 15 episodes every year at a fraction of the cost of a typical prestige drama, has been the most successful homegrown example of this initiative; Heated, a pure acquisition, has only underscored something Bloys believes too many in his business have forgotten. “Just because something has a blockbuster budget doesn’t automatically mean it’s going to be a success, and just because something is done on the shoestring doesn’t automatically mean it’s not going to be as interesting,” he says. “It’s a reminder that you can make shows at all different price points and all of them can be good.”

The veteran studio-development exec says she has been preaching a similar message of measured frugality. “This is something we say to the writers we work with a lot: When you lower the bar to success by making something more inexpensively, it’s always better,” she says. “That’s because when you make something for $10 or $15 million an episode, it has to be a giant fucking hit. It just has to be. But if your show is $3 million an episode, and it does okay, then it’s coming back, and it gives you an opportunity to succeed like Heated Rivalry, where it comes out of nowhere and really grabs hold of the audience’s imagination.”

In addition to Tierney and Crave making all the right creative moves, Heated also benefited from impeccable timing. Crave’s decision to push the show’s premiere to late 2025 allowed it to take advantage of the increased viewing that always takes place around the holidays, while also making it easier to convert social-media buzz into eyeballs, since people had plenty of time to actually watch what they were reading about online. “It came out at the perfect time, especially around the holidays when you’re craving romance and love stories like this,” says the development exec who works at a major streamer.

But bigger picture, the insiders interviewed for this story also said that Heated’s success can be chalked up to the fact that, as Bloys puts it, “The world is a rougher place than it was a few years ago” — and viewers are desperate for programming to help them manage a barrage of horrific headlines. “People are looking for hope,” argues the streamer-based development exec. “Shows can still be dark and have characters that are complicated to root for. But I think there also needs to be an element of escapism and wish fulfillment.” The veteran studio exec agrees, saying that TV “is meant to be an escape, and if you can deliver that, people will show up.” Heated Rivalry worked, she adds, because it did exactly that. “It’s a particularly joyful show in a world where there’s very little joy from day to day,” she says. “Like, it was just pure delight and fun. Who doesn’t want that in their lives right now?”