The US Is Trying to Annex the Ultra-Canadian Heated Rivalry

Avid viewers of Jacob Tierney’s homo-hockey smut sensation Heated Rivalry—girls and gays, overwhelmingly—are likely unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the National Hockey League. So, it might come as a surprise to anyone not tuned in to Canada’s national sport (I can count the games I’ve sat through on one hand) that the league’s thirty-two teams include only seven Canadian ones. Since their expansion in the 1920s, a consortium that began as 100 percent Canuck has been steadily overtaken by Yankee enormity. So it goes in North America.

The overwhelming success of this emphatically Canadian show has been clouded by the tenor of most of its coverage in the American mainstream. Despite the fact that the series was an all-Canadian production, co-produced by Bell Media’s Crave and co-sponsored by the Canada Media Fund, editorial has frequently attributed Heated Rivalry as “HBO’s.” HBO Max snapped up the rights nine days prior to the premiere—over a month after the trailer went viral, when fans south of the border were reportedly mobilizing to pirate the series—but you’d be hard pressed to glean that from media coverage.

The only prominent piece to acknowledge this chain of production and distribution at the time was a profile in GQ. Paying lip service to the show’s Canadian bona fides in a condescending tone, the article describes HBO’s chairman and chief executive officer Casey Bloys as having “rescued” the show from its “snowy purgatory.”

The show’s coverage plays into a long track record of the United States annexing Canadian success—and Canadian success stories being lured away from their home turf (Mary Pickford, one of the first true film stars, was born in Toronto). Hollywood has a history of snapping up our countrymen, milking their novel eccentricities, only to gradually sand them down; celebrities like Denis Villeneuve, Rachel McAdams, and Ryan Gosling have been successfully assimilated to Tinseltown, but thankfully, there are those like David Cronenberg, Keanu Reeves, and the late, great Catherine O’Hara who managed to preserve their quirks despite the demands of transnational success. Beloved CanCon like Schitt’s Creek, which fell prey to American influence by anonymizing its setting for broader audiences, and Letterkenny, which did not, help illustrate how such undiluted quirks can also be co-opted. Heated Rivalry—whose successes and failures are unapologetically its own—strikes a remarkable balance between broadness and specificity, but this cuts both ways, more easily allowing our southern neighbours to swoop in and bleed the show’s talent dry to feed their own content mill.

These are the kinds of normalized cultural conquests that pave the way for larger, realer ones. “Fifty-first state” prattle should send chills down any Canadian’s spine, but the call may be coming from inside the house; a series of bills impinging on our rights and freedoms—specifically C-5, C-8, C-9, and C-12—threaten to bring us closer to the dystopian realities of our southern neighbours.

The connection between a sex-soaked Crave series and the slouching of our country toward fascism might seem tenuous, but in an age when our screens are more entwined with our lives than ever, the conception and consumption of mainstream media can tell us an awful lot about where we’re heading.

That season two of Heated Rivalry will reportedly be made with the same lack of direct involvement from HBO, and Tierney will be given time to craft it on his own terms—increasingly a rarity for queer artists in this increasingly conservative continent—is a good sign. When our prime minister actually met with two of the show’s stars, he gave the creative team props for making the show in Canada when American studios had asked Tierney to “tone it down.” “What’s the point in that?” Carney asked with a wry smile. Here’s hoping that this Canadian gem continues to resist the seemingly inexorable pull of American industry and remains true to its roots.

Read more from our Heated Rivalry Series:

• Heated Rivalry Holds Up a Mirror to My Deepest Self • Heated Rivalry Is Millennial Optimism Porn • Heated Rivalry Proves Hockey Has Basically Always Been Gay • The Queer History Behind the Heated Rivalry Soundtrack • Just How Big Is Heated Rivalry? Really Big