Heated Rivalry showrunner Jacob Tierney took his hit show to Canada after a U.S. platform wanted to tone down its steamy gay romance.

That’s according to Julie Roy, executive director and CEO of Téléfilm Canada, the government-owned corporation that supports the country’s audiovisual industry. During a panel on global audiovisual alliances at Series Mania Forum in Lille, France, earlier this week, Roy said that the series, based on author Rachel Reid’s hockey romance novels, was initially going to be made by an American platform.

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“But he didn’t have the freedom he wanted,” Roy said of Tierney, according to Variety.

According to Roy, the unnamed platform wanted Tierney, who wrote and directed all six episodes of Heated Rivalry, to move the story’s first explicit scene from episode 1 to episode 5.

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That was apparently a dealbreaker for Tierney, who explained how pivotal sex is to the show in an interview with Episodic Medium last October.

“Sex is character development; it’s not just a random sex scene in every episode,” he said, adding that central characters Shane (Hudson Williams) and Ilya (Connor Storrie) “learn about each other, and they learn about themselves through” their intimate encounters.

“He decided to go back to Canada, and kudos to Crave, who had the courage to welcome the full project,” Roy said during this week’s panel. “For me, that’s a great example of not being Hollywood and being authentic. Authenticity is something that really works.”

As Roy noted, Canadian subscription streamer Crave picked up the series in January 2025, with HBO Max acquiring the rights to distribute the show in the U.S. the following November. But as Tierney and co-producer Brendan Brady have recounted in interviews, they still faced pressure to rework Heated Rivalry when looking for outside production partners to help fund the show’s budget.

“We received various notes that would fundamentally change the story, or fundamentally change the tone,” Tierney told Episodic Medium

“We had a lot of people telling us why this wouldn’t work. And they were titillated and interested in the idea, but they were like, ‘Well no, you have to do this, you have to do that,’” he told the Washington Post in December. “And it’s like, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ What you fundamentally don’t understand is that the people that love this love it the way it is.”

Staying true to the source material’s sexy tone paid off. The show was a hit with both viewers and critics, quickly becoming a phenomenon and turning its stars into celebrities. In December, Deadline reported that Heated Rivalry was Crave’s most-watched original series ever. The same month, The Wrap reported that the show was among the streamer’s top five scripted debuts of 2025 and that it was the second-highest driver of first-time HBO Max viewers.

On social media, fans boasted about watching the entire series multiple times, claims backed up by a January report from the New York Times that the show’s viewership numbers hadn’t significantly dipped following the series finale. According to The Hollywood Reporter, average episode views actually increased from 8 million to 9 million in late January.

At Series Mania Forum, Roy said that “a high number of people” are continuing to re-watch Heated Rivalry “for the fifth time.”

Roy suggested that Tierney’s ability to make a faithful adaptation of Reid’s novels at Crave is a testament to “the diversity of Canada, the richness of its perspective and storytellers.”

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