Heated Rivalry & 'Big C' Canadian Content, with Bell's Sean Cohan

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Taney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me as always is our editor in chief, Ben Smith. Ben, it's very fitting. It's very cold outside. It's fitting we have a Canadian media executive on the show this week. You're here to warm us up with a steamy hockey show. That's kind of an understatement. This week on the show, we are talking to Sean Cohen. Sean is president of one of the biggest independent media companies in Canada.

0:51It's kind of like the NBCUniversal of our friends to the north. They are owned by a big telecommunications company. But within Bell, they have a linear broadcaster. They've got some cable assets. They've got a streamer called Crave. They've got some radio stations still. But the reason that we're having him on the show this week is to talk about this surprise hit show that they have. listeners of the show are mostly media freaks like me and Ben, and so obviously they have most likely heard of it. It's called Heated Rivalry. It's this gay hockey show that premiered at the end of last year and has become this surprise hit going from this book series to now an international sensation, kind of surprisingly.

1:35Ben, would you have predicted that the gay hockey show was going to be the show of the end of 2025 and of early 2026 for a certain cohort of people. Does that surprise you? Yeah, no, of course it surprises me. I mean, that's what's fun about culture is that the hits so often totally blindside you and are something that you wouldn't expect and we're never thinking about. And that's something I think, I mean, Sean, obviously, he had this very long career at A &E, 15 years. He's like a, you know, central casting American entertainment executive in a certain way. He's now sitting up there in Canada and just with a remarkable hit on his hands.

2:12Well, Ben, I've been to Canada many times. I have to admit, I'm not the world's biggest premier expert in Canadian media, but I've been fascinated by the success of this show. So I'm really interested to ask Sean what it says about the state of Canadian media, what its success abroad says about the journey from kind of viral cult book hit to television streaming sensation. And also, you know, what he's seeing when it comes to the tensions between President Donald Trump and Canada. We're obviously at this really interesting moment in Canadian American relations. How that's impacting the Canadian media is also pretty interesting to me.

2:55Well, I'll stop rambling. We have a lot of questions that we want to ask Sean, and we'll get to them right after this.

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3:46Sean, thank you so much for joining us. We're so excited to have you on the show today. So you're here because you have one of the hit shows of the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, kind of this surprise hit, Heated Rivalry. I think we're really interested. Both Ben and I are fascinated by the process by which the show is, you know, comes into being and then becomes a hit of its stature. The stars are going to be carrying the Olympic torches. I saw this went from a show that was not promoted very much to this huge hit on HBO. But just walk us through the from the beginning to where we are now.

4:25When does this land on your desk? What are your first thoughts about it? Explain that to us. Yeah, first, thanks for the interest. And thanks for having me, Max and Ben. You know, I'd say first, this comes when Jacob and Brendan from Accent, the prod co, and both of them we worked with extensively before, Jacob in the kind of Sure Z and Letter Kenny family, which were more cult hits, but did well. It starts where Jacob reaches out to Rachel Reed, the author of a six soon-to-be-seven book series, Game Changers, and says, hey, jokingly in DMs, I think, has your material been optioned? And she says, no, and starts a conversation.

5:10And then, you know, Jacob works through the process, options it and, and develops a, you know, an approach, brings it to us. And we dug it. And when I say we, I'm going to give my team a ton of credit here. You know, Rachel and Justin from our team, they've been looking for romance. Right. Actually looking for the romance category as a category that's been underrepresented both in streaming and just kind of broadly. in our eyes. And, um, you know, some folks have talked about, well, our Bridgerton as, as one way to think about it. But I think it's more that just like, we recognize that there's a vacuum or there's a gap, uh, in this category, but, um, brought it to us.

5:57I think a bunch of things appeal from the outset to our team. One, obviously we've got all the trust in the world, you know, Jacob and Brendan. It's kind of master of the obvious here. It's got built-in IP, you know, or IP with a built-in fan base, I should say, right? And it's pretty rabid at that. Our team actually went down a rabbit hole, really just studying the, like, this category of books. Because there are a lot of folks that didn't even really know that this genre existed or existed in such volume and that there was so much fandom around it. And what do you call that? What genre? What is this genre?

6:37I want to be careful here. No, it's... This makes me feel so old. You and me both. And we're not that old, Ben. We're not that old. Right. So look, it's romance. It's, you know, I call this thing a gay hockey romance, but it's... I don't know that I want to call it anything that people have gone to, like, erotic or steamy. It's just kind of... People have called it romanticcy. and then you might say well you listen sean romance books have existed since the beginning of time ben the old reference here that you and i would go with would be like a danielle steel or something right that's been that's been around since the beginning of time so i'm unfortunately unable to come up with a good label for it but the team got really interested in found a great deal of fandom in and and it buoyed hope for the show then you add on the fact it's authenticity there's such a great kind of longing and forbidden romance piece to this and of course Canadians and there's a big population around the world that's crazy about hockey and then you throw you layer on on top of that we weren't looking for this necessarily but a nice representation thread I've always been a big fan of showing people themselves or parts of themselves on TV when they haven't seen it before and i'm veering a little bit but as a person of color the first time i saw a different world on tv and saw duane wayne and and whitley you know it's there's something there's something to that and so you know a lot of different elements and of course like i said a trust in the creatives made us really interested now of course along the way there were flags that it was going to be pretty explicit.

8:27That it was going to show a lot of, you know, a lot of stuff that the perception is people haven't seen before. But as our creatives argue objectively and quite persuasively, we're not showing anything that anybody hasn't. It's just that it's, and I quote, it's just that it's queer sex. Yeah. I'm kind of curious about this because as Ben and I were both preparing for the show, we were talking about this journal article, which reported that instead of co-financing the show with some other entity, you guys actually kind of went in alone here. And part of the reason for that was that as you were talking to other potential partners, that there was some concern about wanting to change some of the characters or maybe rolling back the eroticism a little bit.

9:16I mean, it is a fairly explicit show, but you guys felt really confident or confident enough in it that you wanted to invest on your own and you weren't you didn't have some of the same concerns that others had what made you feel confident about this specifically when uh when others didn't have that kind of vision well it starts with the creatives that the partners who were playing with an objective kind of side by side thinking through uh what had been seen there's no frontal nudity for example in the show right and there was that that gave us comfort there is the recognition that one of our competitive advantages is that we can move a little faster and we ought to play to being a little bit more agile.

9:56So part of this is just that when we met with partners, they're moving slow now. Green lights in the U.S. and around the world are moving slow and people, you know, it's that slow maybe. I always argue that a quick no is better than a slow maybe. Well, Sean, can I ask why are you able to move faster than some of your other peers in the space. You know, we've got maybe a few fewer layers. We're a bit of a newer, slightly smaller entrant. We're the largest media and entertainment player by a country mile in Canada, but we're, you know, smaller than the other folks. And, you know, we're a little scrappier.

10:30And so, yeah, we can move faster. And I think I've kind of gone out and said, back to your process question, at a certain point, it came to me. And, you know, we've been seeing the cuts and got more and more bullish on this thing. But at a certain point, you know, you have the moment where you look in the mirror and you say to yourself, is it good? Do you believe in it to our creatives and to our creative partners? Is it objectively defendable? And if it is, then we got to roll. And the lack of a process, the lack of like eight layers, the lack of, you know, fear or the desire to take on calculated risk, I think made us different in this scenario and hopefully differentiates us going forward.

11:17When you were talking to potential co-producers, like what were you hearing from them? I think there was a lot of love for the project. How many times have you folks heard somebody talk about a built-in fan base and established IP, right? And then the fact that there's six books, seven books in this series and that it's a global thing. So there were a lot of reasons you know and and the material and jacob and brendan they adapted this with a lot of tlc i mean it was well done and so there was a lot of love for it but like i said it was um folks it was a mix some folks were moving a little slow some folks wanted to dilute the canadiana or the big c canadian of it you know some folks really a little bit forget the gay sex the really divisive thing Yeah, exactly.

12:05Like, who knew? Big C Canadians is a big problem. Or, you know, some folks, you know, wanted to maybe think about dialing back how explicit it was. And so in the end, obviously, we're fired up to have taken the calculated risk. But I think it's part of a I'm going to sound dull and business speaky, but like it's part of a program or a concerted effort over the last couple of years for us to like aim and communicate to make great global and profitable, to take big swings, to take risk and to work with what we think are some of the best creatives in the world. the Canadians, whether they live in LA, New York, or London, or Guam, or Toronto, right?

12:51I mean, I'll just say, and I'll veer off for one second, one of the things for years people have been talking about up here in Toronto, and Vancouver, and everywhere in between, is they rue the fact that Canadian talent leaves. They move to LA, they move to New York, they move to London. And maybe because I'm an adopted Canadian, a neurotic, annoying New Yorker through and through, I don't really care where they live. I just want to work with great creatives. And it just so happens that wherever they live, there's some great Canadian talent, some that's really well known, obviously, like the Seth Rogen's and Ryan Reynolds and Tom Green's and Elliot Page's and so on.

13:28And some that maybe until recently were slightly lesser known, like Jacob. So to switch to the sort of big C Canada question, as you put it, I mean, you're an American running a, you know, defining Canadian media company. At a moment when there's really like just more animosity than probably in our life, maybe since like Benedict Arnold days between the U.S. and Canada. Do you feel that? Like, does that affect your day to day or do you kind of feel it around the office? Not directed to you personally, but just in terms of how or maybe directed to you personally? Well, I'm cackling because I mean, there's no thankfully there's no team members here.

14:04No, I'm kidding. Do you really think there's animosity? Did you did did Carney and Trump have have have some funny things to say? I didn't hear about this week. look undoubtedly it is a very curious moment in the relations of two very long standing allies right like there's people smarter than me that can talk about the quirks of this moment you know I will say that with my family and so I call myself an adopted Canadian and I am an unabashed neurotic annoying and unabashedly proud New Yorker as well I will tell you I'll relate to you that my family was there at a Leafs game. I forget if it was the Leafs or the Raptors, where the Canadian crowd booed the U.S.

14:50National Anthem. I saw that. And my girls, I've got a four and 11-year-old, they turned to me and said, Daddy, why are they booing us? Which was a very powerful moment for me, a very hard moment for me as a parent. But, you know, of course, it's they're not booing us and so on and so forth. That all said, and the fact that it's a quirky and kind of hard moment between the two, there's a lot of great respect in the creative community, in our business, you know, within Bell, there's great respect across the border between Americans and Canadians. I have been welcomed along the way. And certainly there are moments where maybe I'm a little bit raw or a little sharper than maybe folks are used to here.

15:35And there's definitely differences culturally, but I've been welcomed. And throughout the creative community and the business community, I think there's been a let's get on with it kind of approach that so it hasn't really been a factor. To talk, I was in Davos last week for Carney's speech. And like the thrust of it really was, you know, not the U.S. isn't going away, but the relationships changed forever. And, you know, he had just gone to China and there was a sense like U.S. obviously the most important import market for what you're doing, for whatever, for what most Canadians are doing, but also that they're trying to balance and find other relationships and look elsewhere.

16:11I'm curious, like you mentioned that Heated Ravory was doing well in China. I mean, are you following Carney to look in that direction a little? I mean, Chinese micro drama is obviously this huge thing at the moment. I don't know. Can you do stuff that American producers can't because the U.S. right now is in such a sort of more hostile relationship with China? Well, I'd probably stay away from the China of it, and I'm not going to come out and say we're going to be prolific in the micro drama of it. There's a lot of folks active there. For me, maybe it's reductive or overly simplistic, but we want to tell great stories, right?

16:49And we want to deliver great stories that people want to watch. Do you think maybe it's, I mean, just the success of this project suggests to me that maybe like the broad brush, we're living in this era of backlash and more conservative kind of cultural politics is perhaps oversimplified. I mean, like even betting on this project suggests you didn't totally buy that idea. Oh, I definitely, I didn't, because I think, I think if you look at the stats, there's a big part of the U S population, you know, they want to hide in their puritanical homes or caves. right so yeah and maybe i i just i came up i was brought up professionally in an environment where you just if your people believe in it and you think it's really good and you think there's an audience uh out there for it and you have a trust with great creatives that you're working with you take shots right i don't know that's you know and so i don't want to give us too too much credit in terms of like recognizing that the cultural sees or the current may be a little bit less conservative out there.

17:55But I'll say in retrospect, it's a slightly more progressive environment up here and a slightly more tolerant. And, you know, I guess it goes both ways because we're also, as Carney said, we believe in the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules. But we also, on the flip side, have a scrappiness and an ability to kind of go against the grain a little bit. You were saying that you felt that the kind of romance category was underappreciated, undervalued. Why do you think that that is? And when was that an observation that you guys had and an insight that made you kind of veer into this lane? Well, clinically or like statistically, there are teams been looking at that for 18 months.

18:37For me, I'll admit that I noted it anecdotally when I looked at some of the hits, things that have broken through or been zeitgeisty over the last couple of years on different platforms. So I, I never, you know, it's like, I, I don't necessarily like to sell other people's book, but like, you know, uh, when you think about, uh, nobody wants this, or when you think about Bridgerton, I mean, they work cause they're very good. They're authentic and they're specific. You know, there's a thirst or a hunger for romance out there that I think it was underserved or has been underserved. That's obviously so true.

19:15I mean, nobody wants this. It's like a kind of pure classic romance film. Why do you think there's less of it being produced? That is an interesting observation. Smarter people than I would probably have to, but I think we go through cycles. I mean, we're all, we go through cycle, creative cycles where there's, you know, I'll make this observation. And then the next thing you know, a year from now, there'll be seven gay hockey dramas set in Canada, right? Right. Imitation, pure form of rivalry, all of that. Right. Like, so I think we go through cycles and that very cycle produce an abundance in a certain category.

19:52And then along the way, we'll sleep on another category. But I do think that romance has been underserved for a while. No, it's interesting. And it's an interesting angle that you guys took. And it reminded me a little bit of Ben and I had coffee recently with the CEO of Tubi, who was showing us their big hit teen show where everybody's just kind of making out and stuff. I had never heard of the show. I had no idea. I'm not kind of exploring the category. But it does also seem like and correct me if I'm wrong here, that there is an opportunity to make those types of shows. They don't cost as much.

20:24You don't necessarily need recognizable stars. but if you're identifying the audience that feels underserved, you can kind of make this slightly lower budget hit out of nowhere. Because as we were talking to the Tubi CEO, she was saying essentially like, all we care about is audience. We don't care about, and this is my words, we don't really care about the quality. We don't really care about whether it wins awards. We just know that there's an audience which wants this thing and we're going to kind of serve it to them. Not saying that this show doesn't have that. A lot of people really like the show qualitatively as well.

20:55Yeah, look, and I don't know that I'd separate, like, to me, quality can be part of the formula to get audience. You create something great, and to your point, it wasn't promoted. We didn't spend gazillions promoting this thing, but people, when you make something great, people find it, or at least that's old school, but that's just the way that I've always thought about it. But I think Anjali, who I think you're talking about, a great, very strong leader. But I tend to agree with her. And as a matter of fact, we're partners in Canada. We have a strategic partnership. We represent all of their inventory up here.

21:29And we think of what they're doing with Tubi, with some of the originals, as complementary or kind of fits in interesting ways. The audience is a little different. But also there is a linkage to your point. And I do think, back to your question, I do think there are these creative lanes that are somehow left behind by big players or by the kind of groupthink or the onrush into certain categories. So I think what Tubi's doing in YA and what they're doing maybe at a slightly different price point or execution style, a little bit grittier, you know, I think those lanes are there. It's amazing in a world where so much attention and so much capital flows into making great content, but there is empty space.

22:20And is the lane basically just like injecting TikTok straight into your vans? I don't know. So I even have to ask her about that more so because we haven't quite gotten to that mainlining. Although the way that the ironic thing is in my TikTok, in my Instagram, in my when I use it, my Facebook, in my LinkedIn feed, I will say heated rivalry is like an extraordinary proportion. Yeah, unavoidable. It's unbelievable. Now, obviously, the algo is like, you know, they see that I love it. They see that I spend a lot of time on it, but it is. So I don't know about mainlining, but I am enjoying the presence of that show and some of our other shows in those feeds.

23:07So, Sean, you mentioned before that you guys didn't put very many promotional resources behind this before you launched. I saw as well in some other piece that HBO decided to buy this two weeks before it was set to launch in Canada. Can you explain kind of when it was clear that it was taking off? And I mean, is this was this kind of a deliberate decision that you kind of were hoping for word of mouth? Or was it like, hey, we don't want to spend that much marketing this show. So we're just kind of kind of like hope it works. Talk a little bit about when you noticed a little bit of the shift there.

23:41Well, first, when I say we didn't spend very much, I'm doing that on a kind of a relative basis with regard to how some of the bigger studios or bigger hyperscalers might have spent. We certainly were committed to the show, and we did take a bit more social-heavy in approach, and along the way, were very careful to tap into what we saw as a pretty rabid fan base. But to your question, there were signs along the way that this was special, not just in the cuts when they came in. There was a lot of the social activity that happened, whether it was driven or sparked by what we did or just kind of happened independent, and that was before the show.

24:19The producers and the author were doing kind of book events and the lines were like several times around the block. You know, I'm sure we promoted them, but we didn't. It wasn't like, you know, we had an ad running every five minutes. And so you had these signs, a kind of a rising fervor in the weeks leading up. on top of the fact that every time we saw a cut of this thing, people use the cliche lightning in a bottle a number of times. And we had to maintain our enthusiasm, but like it scaled up as we went. In terms of your question about HBO getting on board a couple of weeks before, we had originally envisioned this show airing in the first quarter of 2026 around the Olympics, which would have been a, You could see the association.

25:13Hockey, Canada, the Olympics. The one time anybody in the States thinks about Canada or used to be. Yeah, but then I hope. I think we think about it a lot these days. I think about it a lot, but you're right. I have, for better or worse, for a very long time. But I'd say we love what we were seeing. We loved what we saw as the built-in base. And so we made the decision to bring it forward. And in doing so, we created some kind of tight timeframes around about getting it out. But while it was closer to air, some of the distribution deals that we cut, we felt the love from a lot of different buyers.

25:51And I thought that it was very important to go day and date with this thing in most of the world. And so I would say it all kind of came together in we knew we had something. I'm not going to sit here and disingenuously tell you that this is exactly what we thought it was going to be. This level of zeitgeistiness, that's not a word, but I said, don't don't shoot me. My father's a retired English teacher and he's going to go nuts on me if he hears that. but uh you know just how much it's in the zeitgeist just how much buzz this has gotten just how talked about i mean this is arguably people have said the biggest hit that canada has ever produced how global is it is it hitting in places you that maybe i wouldn't expect a gay hockey movie to hit like where are you seeing i believe it was number one on imdb for a minute in china huh it was number one on sky now in the uk when it launched and that was two or three weeks that was one of the few places that launched a little later.

26:50It was number one in Australia and New Zealand on their platforms. It was sold throughout Europe, aired throughout Europe on HBO Max. And you'd have to ask them, but I think it's, you know, been a top show for them. So it is, I would say every continent, it has driven outsized results. So that's a long winded way of saying, we thought we had something special, but I'm not going to lie to you and say we knew everything has to line up for it to resonate and ripple through pop culture the way it has. I did not predict an SNL parody, Heated Wizardry, or, you know, that it would be the Toast of the Golden Globes or the Critics' Choice Awards.

27:32Are you annoyed you weren't eligible for an Emmy? uh no you know i think ultimately as someone that straddles the u.s and canada i'm my hope is that we'll look carefully at those rules going forward and i say we the community but in the end what the kids would say game recognizes game and i think the 2b ceo said about you know it's it's not about awards i mean we like the recognition it's it's nice buzz for the show but the biggest hit canada ever produced in probably in the biggest, one of the biggest hits of 2025, 2026. And if the domestic enemies doesn't want to recognize it as such, that's okay.

28:13Well, we need to take a short break, but we'll be right back with more from Sean after this.