Week-to-Week: TikToks take Gay Hockey Romance Transnational
You need to read this headline in a WWII-era newsreel voice to really capture it, FYI
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Last month, I wrote about the development process that made Heated Rivalry a distinctly Canadian show, despite the global nature of the fanbase for Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series. My conversation with writer/director Jacob Tierney and producer Brendan Brady happened the day they left for France’s MIPCOM, where they hoped to sell their show to global distributors.
Myles McNutt
For the aforementioned fanbase, this process has been excruciatingly slow. Every day, Canadian distributor Crave posts new content on its social feeds, and the Instagram and TikTok algorithms do their work to pass it along to fans across the world. The refrain of “only on Crave Canada” at the end of every caption became a dagger in their hearts, a constant reminder of the show’s lack of distribution outside its home and native land. (They even developed a conspiracy theory that its absence meant the show had been picked up globally, only for it to return in the next post).
The fans’ desire has been clear: they want to be able to watch this show at the same time it debuts in Canada. However, each passing day seemed to make a day-and-date global release an increasingly unlikely scenario: what distributor would purchase a show and then debut it in only a few weeks, with little time to prepare a promotional campaign of their own?
Yesterday we got our answer: with only 9 days until its debut, HBO Max announced it acquired U.S. rights to Heated Rivalry, and will debut the season alongside Crave on November 28. It isn’t the global deal that would please all fans at once, but it comes alongside HBO’s acquisition of day-and-date rights in Australia (along with deals for New Zealand and Spain), and dramatically expands the show’s initial footprint. It’s also a striking vote of confidence for the (potentially fleeting) transnationalism of social media algorithms, as an American streaming service hopes that a social campaign designed for a small market has done enough work in a large one.
Crave’s approach to Heated Rivalry’s social media content was clear from the beginning: when the show was announced, it was still in production, and stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie were tasked with filming TikToks in full costume. Using the platform’s “Duet” feature, Williams and Storrie appear alongside BookTok creators expressing their anticipation for the series, ensuring that fans know that the series is being created with them in mind. That same principle has informed their ongoing efforts, which work to either hail or emulate fan engagement.
@heatedrivalrycrave #duet with @julietfoxreads Oh hey, Ilya and Shane! 👋😍 Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams star in the upcoming @CraveCanada Original #HeatedRivalry. Stay tuned for more. 👀 #booktok #tvshow #rachelreid#booknews ♬ original sound - julietfoxreads
To their credit, the Crave team has been doing this with incredibly little to work with. The majority of their social content has come from seemingly one day with Williams and Storrie, with the pair filming informal TikToks/Reels alongside more formal videos with the pair reacting to fan art and online comments. The goal in this case is to make fans feel like their contributions are being acknowledged, and—in the parlance of fandom—that they are being “fed.” It’s everything you’d expect to see from social content for any film or television show right now, combining video trends from the aforementioned platforms with direct interaction (like TikToks where the pair reply to comments on their initial TikToks with no conception of personal space for some reason).
It’s been enough to keep fans satiated, building solid followings on both Instagram (23k) and TikTok (43k), but there’s obviously demand for more. As the show’s key art went public, the social team were able to feature some behind-the-scenes content of the Harlequin-style cover shoot (pictured above), but they’ve otherwise had to resort to making their own fan content. For better or worse, the social team only seems to have access to what fans do: the show’s single trailer, which has accumulated somewhere around 1.5 million views across platforms by my estimates. They’ve been remixing it into everything you’ve expect: edits for each character, clips set to pop songs, and whatever else they’re able to wring out of the 90 seconds available.
@heatedrivalrycrave Shane and Ilya know all about secret little rendezvous. 😉 Watch the two-episode premiere of #HeatedRivalry Nov 28 only on @cravecanada ♬ Perfect speed audio - 1D Audioz
While they’ve posted some of this content as Instagram Reels, the majority of their fannish creations have been on TikTok, where they’ve accumulated both a larger audience and a larger collection of viral videos. Eight videos have managed over 400k views, extending far beyond the show’s immediate following (and reaching the equivalent of 1% of the Canadian population). Each new video is a new opportunity to extend the show’s audience, who themselves start creating videos of their anticipation for the series or their experience picking up the book in response to the hype around the show. And because TikTok currently functions as a global platform like Instagram, the algorithm is no doubt serving this content beyond Canadian borders. Although every post does insist that it’s “only on Crave,” as noted, the network has obviously been posting in ways designed to inspire jealousy from those abroad, on platforms that allow for containment to be broken so long as there is demand (in this case crossover with BookTok and Bookstagram’s romance communities).
This content is the only reason why HBO Max would be willing to launch this show so quickly. While Crave might not have been marketing to Americans directly, they’ve been sending English-language content to a platform accessible to American audiences, and it creates a foundation on which they can either create content of their own or continue to use what Crave has to offer. HBO Max has already started to engage with fans directly: as I noted last month, fans organized to directly request the show from U.S. platforms, and in their announcement video their social team specifically included tweets from fans pleading with the platform to bring the show to the U.S. (while Crave posted a similar video featuring pleas for them to release the show internationally).
@hbomax Things are heating up. #HeatedRivalry premieres on HBO Max on November 28. #HudsonWilliams #ConnorStorrie ♬ original sound - HBO Max
It’s a choice that puts them in line with Crave’s strategy, but its function at the moment is to hail the existing fans. What’s less clear is what HBO Max can do in order to expand the audience beyond the already-converted. This isn’t just their problem, to be clear, as it’s something Crave will face as well. Right now, in addition to your usual TV ads and the like, Crave has logically relied on fans to serve as their marketing team, with algorithms helping their engagement expand the footprint of the series and the fanbase around it. And while we know this is activating the “sleeping giant” of romance fans, and I don’t want to suggest this wouldn’t be enough to be “successful,” the show is designed to break down some of the boundaries tied to its subject matter. Tierney and Brady have consistently positioned the show as a prestige take on a mass-market genre, and I’m still waiting to see what selling that to audiences looks like given the predominance of content clearly intended for the existing fanbase. I honestly wondered if this might mean a new trailer, but HBO Max has simply rebranded the one Crave already created.
Although not quite the same as appearing on HBO outright, the pickup from HBO Max is still unprecedented for a Crave original, and places the show into a very different set of conversations. At least for now, those conversations are still nascent, and with the Thanksgiving holiday coming swiftly in the U.S., I’m not necessarily certain how much coverage we’ll see from below the 49th parallel. But books like Heated Rivalry are built on the basis of word-of-mouth, and so while pre-release hype is still a desirable outcome, the show existing in the world—well, parts of the world—is going to bring on a new set of opportunities that these social teams will be leveraging.
However, while I’ll certainly be following that process closely, I want to acknowledge that what just happened with Heated Rivalry may not be possible sometime in the near future. As the U.S. government continues the process of forcing ByteDance to “sell” their U.S. business interests to American companies, whatever result emerges will sever U.S. users from the global algorithm. While global content would apparently still be accessible (the plans remain very unclear), the algorithm that will drive the app will only be based on U.S. content, and the impact this has on transnational promotion like this remains unclear. Right now, the MM Romance corner of TikTok moves comfortably across borders, but there’s no guarantee that remains the case if and when U.S. billionaires try to remake the algorithm in their own self-interest.
Given that it’s fair to say that Heated Rivalry was able to make this deal with HBO Max based on the clear evidence of fan enthusiasm, and that this enthusiasm crossing borders gave them the confidence to launch it in only nine days, the current reality of TikTok is a huge part of what made this possible. The fact that reality may be going away returns me to my conversation with Tierney and Brady where they acknowledged the fortune that lined up in their favor to let them make the fully Canadian show they wanted to make; similarly fortuitous circumstances have lined up to bring that show to an extra 400 million people, including most of the subscribers to this newsletter.
Where things go from here will depend on the show itself, yes, but also the platforms that helped bring it to the world.
Episodic Observations
- Yes, its U.S. release means that I’m going to cover this weekly, because I’ve known about this show for almost a year now, and the fact it exists is still kind of wild to me and I have Many Thoughts. I’m also due to followup with Tierney and Brady about their experience selling the show globally, as well as the show itself, so stay tuned for that.
- So this is the first Crave original to be picked up by HBO Max, and it will technically be the first Canadian series to debut on the platform—although two series appeared to be picked up back in 2022, the Wikipedia page (and a quick Google) suggests they never appeared.
- I’ll be curious to see if HBO agrees to pick up some of the merch burden, given the tariffs that are no doubt going to hit Americans trying to order from the Canadian storefront.
- As for why the show hasn't been picked up in more markets, there's a bunch of potential reasons, but I'd argue that translation/dubbing would be the most significant in delaying the release in other territories. There's also some speculation that the U.K.—the notably absent English-language market from this release—may be a case of waiting for HBO Max to launch in the territory early next year (which might also be while The Pitt is still unavailable in the U.K.).
- As for other TV, I still think the existence of Squid Game: The Challenge is stupid (and didn’t watch season one as a result), but the show itself is well-produced and engaging, and I can’t be too mad at a reality show that—because it follows the conceit people die when they’re eliminated—has contestants delivering sob stories and then being immediately and amusingly erased from existence, never to be heard from again. (It was a bit of Netflix Competition overload with Physical: Asia, and we also binged the Japanese Final Draft on a lazy afternoon recently).
- Not enough of you are reading Sam Rosenberg’s reviews of I Love LA, but I need you to understand they are voluntarily watching Entourage to gain critical perspective, so you should really be respecting this self-sacrifice more.
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