How Heated Rivalry became a 2025 streaming sleeper hit

In a year when “diversity” was under assault, the Canadian romance series about gay hockey players proved how wrong-headed the attacks were even when it comes to dollars and sense.

CBS is teetering under Bari Weiss, the MAGA version of what MAGA itself has derogatorily termed a “DEI hire.”

The anti-woke crusader—who has no television news experience—put in charge by parent-company Paramount’s new MAGA overlords, the Trump-backing Ellison family, saw her “town hall” interview with Erica Kirk crash in the ratings, down 44% percent in its time slot. The Kennedy Center honors aired on CBS, emceed by Donald Trump, saw the lowest ratings ever on CBS for the awards in the history of the Kennedy Center honors, down 35%.

Meanwhile, gay hockey players are causing a raging ratings inferno on your TV!

Heated Rivalry seemed to come out of nowhere around Thanksgiving, a six-episode series that went viral on social media with a steamy trailer before the first episode ever aired—and the series continues to break the Internet. Produced by Canada’s Crave streaming service on a shoestring budget and with some Canadian government funding—thanks Canada!—HBO Max picked it up, and it has now gone global.

It’s a romance story whose main characters are two hockey stars, played by actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, who are on opposing teams and who publicly appear as adversaries while they’re privately in a torrid relationship that spans years.

HBO Max reports it’s now the top-rated non-animated acquired series HBO Max has had since its 2020 launch. It’s in the top five among all series on HBO Max this year. On Crave, Heated Rivalry is the top-rated original series ever. And it has now been picked up for distribution in countries across Asia, South America, Europe and Africa.

On social media, the fandom is out of control, with hordes of people, many of them women, expressing their obsession with the series, often with high drama, crying, laughing, screaming. Hilarious videos like this one are all over Instagram and TikTok.

@andrea_reads_alot

Andrea on Instagram: "Someone tell me that I’m not alone. Like …

Heated Rivalry is obviously thrilling a lot of people—and making a lot of money for the entertainment and media industry. There are a few reasons all this has happened.

Queer people are creating stuff and making decisions on programming

In a year in which diversity came under brutal assault in Trump’s DEI purge, Heated Rivalry is an example of what happens when entertainment and media companies—and let’s extend that to all companies—have diverse creators and decision-makers serving their diverse audiences: They serve their customers, and they make money.

Heated Rivalry creator and director, Canadian Jacob Tierney, who is a gay, had risen to prominence producing two hit Canadian “bro” comedies, Letterkenny and its spinoff, Shoresy, both of which center on hockey culture. He decided he wanted to make something queer.

In an interview with me on my SiriusXM program earlier this month, he said he didn’t think he’d be focused on hockey again, but he then became captivated by the Rachel Reid “Game Changers” romance novels on which Heated Rivalry is based—novels about men in love with other men but which are primarily read by women.

“I took a step back, and yeah, it was not my intention to do another sports show,” Tierney told me. “That’s for sure. But I fell in love with these books and then started kind of reading about how underrepresented and how undervalued romance is, and realized that there was actually a huge market for this.”

Tierney pushed the boundaries with the sex scenes, which are like nothing we’ve watched on television—broadcast, cable or streaming—among gay male characters: often long, and always scorching and intense.

“Sex is a language on this show,” he said. “I think that also, as queer people, we kind of know that, like, it’s not weird to have sex and then have feelings afterwards. That is not that abnormal, at least for gay men or for men who sleep with men.”

Yet “for all the smut on display—joyfully,” which is all right from the pages of Reid’s books, he explains, “there’s actually something very sincere and romantic at the heart of it. I mean, because it is a romance.”

Tierney wasn’t sure at first what the executives at Crave, and parent company Bell Media, would think of the sex scenes. So he was a bit surprised when they wanted even more.

“Essentially, where I drew the line with the sex was up to me,” he said. “And there were definitely times where they were like, ‘Could this go further?’ And I was like, ‘No, that’s enough. That’ll be enough. Thank you.’”

Heated Rivalry was set to air on Crave within three weeks when HBO Max acquired it for the U.S. market, a timeline that is pretty much unheard of. And that, too, happened because of gay people making smart decisions for the audiences they serve.

As Variety reports, Casey Bloys — HBO Max’s content chairman/CEO — got a call from Jason Butler, one of his executives who works on worldwide distribution and who had just acquired Heated Rivalry for HBO Max in Australia. Butler asked Bloys if he’d be interested in looking at it for the U.S. market.

“He sent the episodes to me on a Friday, and then on Monday we started negotiating,” Bloys told Variety. “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.”

A built-in audience of loyal female fans

The genre of male/male romance novels for women has been growing for years, and Rachel Reid’s books developed a rabid following in Canada and the U.S.

Those readers raced to the TV series, devouring every announcement, every clip, the fan edits and the trailer. All of it went viral, as these women and the queer audience—gay men, lesbians, bi and trans people—churned it up. Still more straight women—influenced by their friends—became new fans of m/m romance, after the series hit. They binge-watched the episodes—repeatedly—and then went back to the novels, which are bestsellers again.

As Tierney noted, he knew this genre had crossover ability to make Heated Rivalry something that would break out from the queer audience and to a wider audience. He also knew he had to stay true to the books.

“I was like, I want to take these [novels] seriously,” Teirney told me. “And what I meant by that was, I want to take this emotionally seriously. I want to respect these characters. There’s an element of fantasy to these books. They’re about rich, glamorous people leading these heightened lives—that’s built in. And so that’s part of the fun, too, I think.”

The crossover success has continued with Heated Rivalry now being soaked up by straight male hockey fans and podcasters watching and reviewing it, including the NHL podcasters Empty Netters, who have a huge following. As InsideHook describes it:

It’s not just that they love the show — they legitimately geek out over it, frequently tossing around words like “hot” and “adorable” when discussing the sex scenes and romantic moments.

They’re secure enough in their own masculinity that they have no problem selecting a “horniest moment” from each episode, and perhaps most importantly, they’re unafraid to admit their own ignorance and ask their viewers questions about the queer experience, encouraging them to chime in in the comments section.

When a show about gay men having very passionate relationships crosses over into the world of straight male sports fans, you know something good is happening in our culture at a time when we certainly need good things to happen.

A welcome lift at the end of 2025

And I believe that’s another reason Heated Rivalry became such a sensation.

We had a really shitty year. And people just needed it—the love, the passion, the amazing soundtrack, all of it.

Certainly for the LGBTQ community it was uplifting and powerful, after the attacks under the Trump regime this year. It’s a story that’s not about our traumas or crises, but simply about love. As Tierney calls it, “it’s pure queer joy.” Young queer people need to see every reflection of themselves they can get in a hostile world in which rights are being stripped—and Heated Rivalry is but one, as we need more—and for older LGBTQ people we surely needed the joy too.

Obviously, lots of other people, straight and queer, needed that antidote to everything horrible in the world too, as the audience exploded with people who gravitated to something that made them feel good.

And how fitting that it came from Canada, a country that was beaten up by Trump all year, and yet shared this gift—without tariffs!—with the U.S. and the rest of the world. Something hopeful, for 2026 and beyond.