A year into Hollywood’s heralded vibe shift toward broader or more conservative tastes, a gay Canadian hockey romance was not an obvious smash hit.

But Heated Rivalry’s explicit sex scenes weren’t the only thing that gave some executives pause, according to the American-born chief of the Canadian company that made it.

“Some folks wanted to dilute the big-C Canadian of it,” Sean Cohan, the president of Toronto-based Bell Media, told Semafor.

Bell pressed ahead with the show, loon references and all, and licensed it to HBO. The result has been a runaway international success, with a reported 9 million viewers per episode in the US, even though it “wasn’t promoted” much prior to its release, Cohan said. (It has also fueled subscriptions to Crave, Bell’s streaming service.) Bell has already ordered another season, as fans in China, Russia and around the world binge Season 1. Even Canada’s culture minister called the show a triumph.

Heated Rivalry’s winning formula, as Cohan described on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast: It’s a romance, a genre that viewers have already demonstrated a yearning for, with hits like Nobody Wants This or the sprawling Bridgerton universe. It had a ready-made fanbase, in the form of readers of the seven-book Game Changers series on which Heated Rivalry is based. And it is unapologetically Canadian — what Cohan called Bell’s “secret sauce.”

“Too many people are trying to make [content] generic or diluted, as opposed to authentic and very specific,” Cohan said. “We can tell great stories — great, global, and profitable. I think that we can take those big-C Canadian stories around the world and people will see themselves.”

Does this mean there’s a surge of sexy Canadian sports shows on the horizon? “While I’ll bemoan the fact that there’ll be like 800 gay hockey romances in three years because of it, I will say, you know what? It’s a great thing for us and for the industry.”

You can listen to the full interview on Mixed Signals from Semafor Media wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.

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