OTTAWA — Unable to sleep after being drafted as rookies to rival teams, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov started their relationship over a competitive late-night workout in a hotel gym and a shared water bottle. The romantic tension gets a lot less subtle from there. 

Heated Rivalry, the breakout hit television show of the season, tells the story of Hollander, the earnest Canadian star of the Montreal Metros’ top line, and Ilya Rozanov, the brash and ribald Russian centre forward for the Boston Raiders, whose on-ice rivalry and occasional trysts develop into a decade-long secret romance over the course of six steamy episodes.

It’s perhaps the biggest risk any Canadian studio has ever taken—and the biggest instantaneous hit Canada has ever produced. The show has gone viral in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and even Russia and China. 

But as in love, timing is everything. The pitch for Heated Rivalry landed at a critical point in Bell Media’s ongoing shift toward international audiences, after years of being squeezed at home by foreign streaming platforms. The combination of domestic competition and fresh investment created an opening for the unorthodox Canadian program to get the green light and reach audiences most Canadian producers had previously only dreamt of.

For its fans—not least a prime minister eager to bask in its reflected glow—the show has been a much-needed break from the real world’s onslaught of bleak news. For industry insiders, though, it has pointed the way to a new type of Cancon that can compete in the global market. Bell Media is now commissioning 300 hours of Cancon a year, calibrated to appeal to audiences all over the world with the help of creatives who are known for pushing the envelope. 

A decade ago, Canada’s media ecosystem was heavily protected by regulation, said Justin Stockman, Bell Media’s vice-president of development and programming. That changed when the likes of Netflix and Amazon moved into the market, he told The Logic in an interview: “We’ve lost half our audience to foreign entities.” Those losses spurred the company to look outside of Canada to make up the difference, Stockman said, but it wasn’t until Sean Cohan joined Bell Media as president in 2023 that the company began to back that strategy with investments in distribution.

Just months before Cohan started the job, Heated Rivalry co-creator Jacob Tierney looked into optioning the rights to Game Changers, a Canadian hockey romance book series with a cult following and a lot of gay sex, that he would later adapt into Heated Rivalry.

His relatively small production company, Accent Aigu Entertainment, was looking for intellectual property, and he took a liking to the series during the pandemic when he started listening to smutty audiobooks in his car. 

“I just followed Rachel Reid, the author, on Instagram, and she followed me back, and I slid into her DMs, like, ‘what’s up, girl?’” Tierney told a conference of media producers in Ottawa last week.

Bell Media, meanwhile, was making big changes. In Cohan’s first few months on the job, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau said he was “pissed off” with the company’s move to lay off 4,800 workers, sell 45 local radio stations and end 24 local newscasts. Trudeau called it a “garbage decision,” in light of the $40 million the government had recently granted the company in regulatory relief. 

“That was a great ‘Welcome to Canada,’” Cohan, a self-described “neurotic, annoying New Yorker,” said of Trudeau’s reaction.

News had been a pillar of broadcasters’ Canadian content strategies, and remains a big part of Bell’s business. Still, the company made the cuts as part of its “transformation from a legacy Canadian broadcaster to digital media and content leader with global impact,” Cohan said in a recent interview with Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast.

Other, smaller layoffs followed as Bell continued its shift.  

Though Bell Media has always sold some of its content abroad, Cohan’s strategy involved aggressively retooling toward distributing Canadian productions in other countries, rather than commissioning ones to run strictly on its platforms in Canada. Bell Media wouldn’t say what its distribution goals are, but Stockman said the chart that illustrates the strategy looks something like a hockey stick, with the shaft extending ambitiously high. 

To that end, Bell signed a series of deals to make and export Cancon, including with Seth Rogen’s Point Grey Pictures, Elliot Page’s PageBoy Productions and Tom Green Productions—companies backed by Canadian actors that have made big, bold productions in the U.S. The plan coalesced around Bell Media’s March 2025 deal to acquire a majority stake in U.K.-based distributor Sphere Abacus, giving the company the infrastructure to launch content in other markets.

The move happened just in time for Tierney, who had been shopping his gay hockey romance. There are only a few places to go to make television in Canada; CBC and Bell Media are the biggest. Though Bell was keen on the show, Tierney was short on financing—even after maxing out the available federal government contributions and tax credits. He started pitching to international distributors and studios to fill the gap, but most had trouble understanding the appeal of a sexually explicit, queer-focused series about two hockey stars, with a heavy emphasis on its Canadian roots.

“You go into the marketplace with a gay hockey romance, you hear a lot of things like, ‘This doesn’t exist, why would you do this? Nobody wants this,’” Tierney told the audience of producers in Ottawa last week. He also received the helpful suggestion to make the show “slightly less gay.”

In the end, Sphere Abacus came on board to make up the shortfall and keep the creators’ original vision for the show intact.

Without the partnership, Stockman said, the series might never have been made. “We would have had to find another distributor,” he said. “It would have been too big a gap to go ahead and produce a show without a distributor on board.”

Platforms in other countries were enthusiastic to buy up the rights, and Heated Rivalry became the first show Bell Media sold in recent memory to HBO, where each episode has averaged nine million views.

Instead of fighting with government officials over layoffs, politicians have been getting in on the show’s popularity. Last week, actor Hudson Williams, a Kamloops, B.C., native who plays Hollander, gifted Prime Minister Mark Carney the iconic Sochi Olympic sweater he wore on the show. Carney posed on the red carpet at the Canadian Media Producers Association conference with William’s leg around his waist.

“I’m a politician, I’m not above taking credit for the Canadian funding,” Carney joked in a speech about the show’s success. “I might not have been here when the decision was made, but I’m here now.”

Heated Rivalry is already set for another season, this one expected to be set mainly in Ottawa. But the accolades offer an incentive, and a healthy dose of pressure, to replicate its success with new IP.

Bell Media is looking for other shows that will appeal to audiences outside of Canada, said Carlyn Klebuc, the company’s general manager of original programming. That will mean tapping into new audiences, and pushing the envelope of what Cancon looks like.

“We have played it safe in a lot of ways, certainly when it comes to sex, love and romance, in Canada,” Klebuc said. “Obviously, if Heated Rivalry has taught us anything, Canada’s pretty steamy. We’re ready for it.”