When Heated Rivalry premiered last fall, it became an unprecedented international smash success.
The hit series—often referred to as simply “the gay hockey show”—exceeded all expectations. Produced by Canadian streaming service Crave, Heated Rivalry was made on an extremely low budget by prestige-TV standards, running its producers less than $3.6 million per episode. It almost stayed north of the border, with HBO Max acquiring the U.S. distribution rights to the series just nine days before it premiered.
Heated Rivalry became the most-watched scripted title the streamer had ever acquired from another platform, garnering an average of 10.6 million viewers per episode in the U.S. Its two leading men, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, went from little-known actors to bona fide superstars overnight.
Since then, a number of projects have seemingly attempted to tap into Heated Rivalry-mania with stories set on the ice, like Amazon Prime Video’s Off Campus. But few strike as many of the same notes as the upcoming softball comedy Slo Pitch. The series, also produced by Crave, follows a team of queer underdogs in the world of beer league softball.
Slo Pitch is Canadian. It’s gay. It’s sporty. But that’s where the similarities between the two series end. And in a film and television landscape suddenly flooded with Heated Rivalry wannabes, that might be for the best.
Learning the wrong lesson
What made Heated Rivalry such a smash hit? Fans would likely point to the gay romance at its center or the acclaimed performances by its two leads (not to mention the steamy sex scenes that quickly went viral upon the show’s release).
But the film and TV industry seems to have taken Heated Rivalry’s success at face value, greenlighting a slew of hockey-themed media, sans the queer representation. That includes planned adaptations of hockey romance novels Fake Skating and Icebreaker, which have social media users shaking their collective head.
“I see Hollywood learned the wrong lesson from Heated Rivalry’s success,” reads one viral response.
“The film industry saw Heated Rivalry and thought it meant we wanted more hockey,” another poster lamented. “No bro we want more gay.”
But at the same time, just moving a gay romance to other sports also likely won’t work—at least according to Casey Bloys, the content chief at HBO and HBO Max. He warned other creatives that trying to make a one-to-one copy of Heated Rivalry “would be the exact wrong message to take.”
He said as much in an interview with Vulture: “The wrong lesson to take from this show’s success would be to have Heated Rivalry in baseball or Heated Rivalry in football. . . . It can’t be replicated.”
Instead, Bloys encouraged other creatives to take chances on low-budget projects that offer something totally unrepresented on modern TV. Slo Pitch fits that bill, especially in terms of the queer demographic it centers.
Something for the girls
Though Slo Pitch and Heated Rivalry have obvious similarities—being based in Canada, centering sports, and featuring LGBTQ characters—they’re by no means filling the same TV niche.
Heated Rivalry is a dramatic romance where Slo Pitch is a straight-up sitcom (minus the straightness). Heated Rivalry adapts an existing book series, but Slo Pitch is original IP. Heated Rivalry’s main characters are queer men, while Slo Pitch’s are queer women.
That last difference has social media anxious, as series centering LGBTQ+ women often end up getting the axe from streaming services regardless of their success. Netflix in particular has become infamous for canceling its shows led by queer women, including First Kill, I Am Not Okay With This, and Glow.
Slo Pitch has also drawn comparisons to Amazon’s A League of Their Own, which followed queer players on one of the first professional women’s baseball teams. Despite a strong critical response, the show was canceled after one season.
Heated Rivalry drew lots of attention for its majority-woman audience, prompting fanfare on social media over fetishization and the cultural rise of fujoshis, or women who love romance between gay men. Still, the series tapped into a broad audience, something sapphic shows have struggled to do. In a post Heated Rivalry-world, maybe Slo Pitch could be a breakthrough.
Slo Pitch premieres September 25 on Crave in Canada, though there’s currently no plan for the show to stream in the U.S. Fans are already rallying to change that, though, calling on HBO Max to pick up the rights to the series.