How did Heated Rivalry’s Producers Make Their Massive Hit?

0:06Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher. Today, we've got a special bonus episode, and it's not about anything terrifying or depressing. It's about the most addictive, delightful, surprise cultural phenomena of the decade, heated rivalry. I'm joined today by the show's creator, Jacob Tierney, and executive producer, Brendan Brady. Welcome, you two. You guys are a hoot already. Thanks, Cara. We've been beset by some tech issues, but nonetheless, the gays will prevail. Well, the success of the show is about so many things, queer joy, sex, inclusion.

0:40It's an amazing business story. And that's really what I wanted to talk about. But first for the fans, are we getting a standalone episode before season two? I love saying now, this is Brendan. So I would say that like much like the best parts of this show, just enjoy the year. Enjoy the year. Is that on your teacher? No, soon. Trademark, trademark. We've trademarked it. Yeah. Okay, because that means no. That's a no. We'll see here. This is Jacob speaking now. Here's the truth and that nobody actually wants to hear is that we just don't know yet. We actually only finished this show basically a week before episode six aired.

1:27And so this has been a massive surprise and endeavor. and endeavor. And we didn't really have a moment to catch our breaths before answering questions like this. So the truth is we're getting a plan in place. We will have more information for folks soon. We understand that there's an appetite for a lot of this. And we're just trying to figure out what we can physically accomplish in the next year. In the next year. So one thing, this show has been a giant PR boost in your entire country. Here's Prime Minister Mark Carney at a recent media event. You had to, speaking of, feel the yearn, but go ahead.

2:00The world knows that Shane Shane and Ilya are rising hockey stars who fall for each other as they face off in one of the greatest rivalries the game has ever known. But they're also two young men who are terrified of being their fullest self. And we live in an increasingly dangerous, divided and intolerant world. A fundamental Canadian value is that people should be able to be whoever they want to be, to love whoever they want to love. So the narrative has become that it was a little show out of Canada, obviously, made in Canada because American distributors were afraid of the sex content. Why don't you start, Jacob, the reaction, first of all, and the kind of what you think is happening here from, I mean, I'm sure you've answered this question, But he sort of articulates it rather well, is that people are upset and divided.

2:59And this brings a respite. But I think it's more than that, in my opinion. But why don't you start, Jacob, and then you, Brendan? I mean, I think that there's, I think that what the show did in a kind of an unpreachy, untrying to teach you a lesson way is just present queer joy. And I think that that's its soft power. You know, that's the thing that I think people are surprised by and that has hit people, at least from what I'm getting. And I think that while there are queer stories out there, I don't think there's a lot of joy. And I don't think that the kind of profound joy that you only find in romance, really, that kind of heart-filling, fantasy-fulfilling, desire-fulfilling things that you get to see don't happen to queer people in media.

3:52and I think that that is the kind of whoosh of it all. Especially men. Especially. There's a lot of lesbian content out there. I can tell you not for the L word. I think especially men and I think that, yeah, we just don't, to have a story that chooses to not, and you know, there are obviously, our queer lives are filled with trauma and I get that and I think we all know that, but I think that this shows desire to not focus on that, to focus on other parts of the queer experience. as fantasy and i fully admit it right it's a romance it's from a romance novel romance um that that i think that that's the partly the reaction to it um there's a lot i don't pretend i can explain but i do right it is that that is kind of that's the big difference yeah it's different experience for gay people versus straight people i think and because i was always waiting for the hit yeah i think we all are and i think especially because they have sex so early and we are trained that if we have sex, we will be punished.

4:50So if we can not have sex, we might be able to be happy, but we can't do both. You don't get to have a sex life and be happy. If you want to have a sex life, get ready to die. And if you want to be happy, get ready to not have sex. I think like the other part of this, uh, which Jacob has talked about a lot, and it was kind of how we were pitching this when we were going out to people, which is, this is a story written by women and it's consumed primarily by women and we don't take female uh desire and stories seriously in media a lot of the times um i think a show uh like this that came out of nowhere is kind of we were when we were pitching it we were really crossing our fingers hoping that we were right we were like there is a built-in audience there the these books are consumed so there's so many readers of all types of romance novels, they're there and they are yearning for these stories to be told.

5:46So I think that was the other secret sauce in this is just like, this is a massive fan base that have not had their stories taken seriously, and they got to see it taken seriously, and they loved it. Well, talk about that because romance, I always say, everyone's like, well, it's so popular. I'm like, it's a romance novel. Romance novels are popular. It's one of those genres that people don't realize how big it is how big and as a genre it's been around since the dawn of time like it's as old as a detective story you know it's as old as all of like romances there would have been a time when when jane austen would have been considered romance i mean that's right these are that's fair and it's dismissed i think to brendan's point it's dismissed despite the fact that it it the romance genre carries the publishing industry in terms of And I think it's dismissed because of the misogyny that we all endlessly live with because it's something that appeals to women, is often written by women and consumed by women.

6:39And so why would any – I've said this before. I was like if this show was about a boy with a gun, somebody would have optioned this book 10 years ago. Well, a hockey player with a gun. Any boy with a gun. Anyway, talk about this, but getting it made. Like we talk on this success on what it symbolizes. The difference between Canada and the U.S., though, even how these productions are funded. Let me talk about this idea of it was made in Canada because American distributors. And let me play very quickly a part of Mark Carney's speech about that and how it was funded. On behalf of Canada's new government.

7:16Look, I'm a politician. I'm not above taking credit for the Canadian funding that helped you share this story with the world. I might not have been here when the decision was made, but I'm here now. So, yeah, I made I greenlit this thing. I stood up to the Americans. That's amazing. That was an amazing speech. Yeah. So I think that, like, you know, this speech that he gave was at an event called Primetime, which is hosted by the producers, Canadian Producer Media Association, like the Canadian version of the PGA. And the point of this was to raise awareness of what's going on in our industry, because the entertainment landscape is under attack right now.

8:02We've been trying to update our systems. And because of Kuzma, because of the U.S. wanting to come in and tell us how to run our country and how our cultural sector needs to be dictated, there's a lot of concern about whether or not we're going to have a system in place that has a system in place. has cultural sovereignty for Canada. And so for us, what was so amazing about this experience and getting to see Mark Carney there is our show was made in the Canadian system, and it is very different from the US. Explain it for people who don't understand. So basically, the Canadian film and TV system has subsidies and equity and grant systems that are propped up by the Canadian government.

8:48So we, you know, when you go to a broadcaster like we did with Crave, which is the streaming platform in Canada that commissioned the show, they go and say, okay, great, here is a license fee. Typically, it'll run between 20 to 30 % of the budget. Then we have a tax credit, both provincial and federal, and that brings another 20 to 30 % of the budget. And then it's always that last little piece that you're looking for, right? So the benefit to us in Canada as producers is it's unfortunate that we don't get necessarily the whole budget out of our broadcasters, but we as the producers own all the underlying IP.

9:29So that is a big difference. So you don't sell it to a studio. Exactly. We are the studio in this system. But the limitations on that are you have to go then raise money. So how we did this with our show is we ended up talking to a couple of studios, some of them American, some of them Canadian. And ultimately, it wasn't the right fit from a creative perspective. And we understand where everybody was coming from. It is a this was, you know, on paper didn't seem like an amazing massive hit right out the gate. And so luckily, when we were going through this process, Crave's parent company, which is Bell Media.

10:11Bell Media is like if Comcast and Disney were merged into one in our country, they own everything from telecommunications to Internet to sports. And they have divisions like Crave, which is a streaming platform. Is it their only streaming platform? They have others. Yes, it's their only streaming platform. So it's like a Disney, Hulu or whatever. Exactly. But they're also, it's like, and they have CTV, which is their ABC. So they have a terrestrial channel and they have streaming. They have cable channels. They have a streaming platform. And they had just acquired a distribution company called Sphere Abacus out of the UK.

10:49And so we were looking for that last 30 % of the budget, and they came in for 20 more percent on a distribution advance. So the last 10 % was Jacob and I putting our producer fees. And we put in almost all of our producer fees, less what we had to keep back because you still have to pay for taxes. So it was a big gamble for us, but ultimately I can – So what you would have earned for this, the fees that are standard, right? That's exactly right. What was the total budget here? So we were just under three million Canadian an episode. Amazing. That's pretty low, which is what? I don't know if you know what a big deal this is, but Brendan is telling the truth.

11:31Yeah. Kara Swisher gets this. She gets the truth. This is exclusive. That's right. We were just under three. Per episode. Per episode Canadian. Right. Because it looks great, by the way. It didn't look on the cheap or anything else. Well, that speaks to Jacob and his amazing abilities. He's directing over 100 episodes of television, so he knows what he's doing. It also speaks to a way in which we like to work, which we feel really is different than the U.S. system or typical production. That is an enormously low amount. For people who don't know, it's very low for television shows. I mean, the salary of— It's low for a sitcom.

12:09It's deeply low for a one-hour drama. It's deeply low for— Those are the salaries of certain people, depending. So, you know, obviously these were not well-known people, but still, it's still an expensive thing. I think most U.S. ones, I feel like$10 million is the lowest they make, right? It depends. It's like between$4 to$10 million an episode U.S. is typical, depending on what your level is. But yeah, I mean, costs have really skyrocketed over the last decade. Is it less expensive to make this in Canada from a production perspective? No, we have an efficient model. And I mean, yes, it is because we don't have the same level of money that is being thrown around.

12:51So we, by necessity, have to spend less. But we also did something here where we shot all six episodes in 36 days. Jacob directed all six of them. We block shot them like one giant movie. we talk about this when studios especially US studios come and say how do you guys do this and we go it's crazy you have all of your episodes written before you go into prep and that's typically when we lose people and they don't understand right because they write it through yeah exactly although that's changing in the US it is it has to it's crazy to do it the other way especially when you're not doing 22 episodes anymore like back in the old model when you're doing this volume of episodes where it's not possible to have them all written well you'd have writers on staff.

13:37You have to just be writing all the time. But if you're doing if the model is eight to 10 episodes, there's almost no reason why this can't be accomplished before you start shooting. So you start shooting. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, we start shooting. And then we do 10 hour shoot days primarily. Like I'm not going to say it's not every day, but we try to keep our hours low. And there's a couple of reasons for this. A, as soon as you get into 12, 13 hours with crews, you end up paying for an additional day by virtue of the overtime. But we also just feel that like, you know, my wife is an assistant costume designer.

14:09She was the assistant costume designer on this show. She's five months pregnant. The departments that, thank you, the departments that get hooped are hair, makeup, wardrobe with these pre-calls a lot of the time. Who are those departments run by primarily women. And so we also just feel that like they're in our business, we need to change this mentality of endlessly shooting 15, 16 hour days, which is where the costs balloon. Right, right. What are you, a lesbian? What's happening here? Anyway, so Jacob, talk about your production style. Besides being, you know, truncated, like making it tight, you keep it, keep it tight kind of thing.

14:48You call it anti-fascist. Explain what you mean by that. Well, I mean, I guess what I mean about that is there's a desire often for perfection that is, I think, not only unachievable, but also insane and cruel to be even attempting. There's no reason to do, if you're doing 25 takes of a scene because you don't like the performance of the actor, I'm an actor. I've been doing this since I was four years old. The problem is the scene. It's not the actor. You haven't written it properly. If you're not accomplishing what you need to accomplish, there's a fundamental issue. And by torturing people into repeating and repeating and repeating, I don't know what you're gaining.

15:29And so that's kind of. I just did. I just did. It was all day. I was like, why? I kept saying, why? Why is it all day? To do nine different sizes on a close up is insane. All of this stuff is crazy. It's just like it doesn't add to anything except exhaustion and to overworking people. I would and what I like to say is I would rather be surprised by an offering from an actor than control every last aspect of their performance. And I've used a scene as an example. Like on the day when we were shooting, there's a scene in the sixth episode in the cottage after the boys have been caught by Shane's dad where Hudson and Connor have a scene together and essentially he decides that he's going to go talk to his parents, that Ilya's going to come with him.

16:09And when we were shooting it, I thought, I wasn't convinced that I was going to use what Hudson was doing in that scene. I thought it might be too much. He was reacting, he had a big reaction, which is interesting for Hudson because he's a very internal actor, especially when he's playing Shane. And I didn't say anything. And I just kind of watched it. And I was like, this is interesting. I think I can cut around this. I think I can figure out how to get what I want out of this scene. And then when I got to the editing room and my editor put the scene together, she loved what he had done. And I looked at it again with new eyes.

16:39And I was like, oh, I actually love this too. And I'm so glad I didn't insist on some idea that I had in my head because what he brought to the table was more interesting. And it was surprising. And it was full of life. and it wasn't part of some insane jigsaw plan that I had in my head that needs to fit together or everything falls apart. Well, it's a different way of creating, right? It is a different way of creating, but also I do believe fundamentally that film and TV is an ensemble process. It is. Otherwise, go write a book, you know, go paint a picture. There's lots of ways to be in total control.

17:11But as soon as you invite other talents in, as soon as you invite, you're in a medium in which that is a part of how it's going to have to happen. to ask these brilliant people to work with you and then not listen to them or not use their skills. Although that's sort of the director genre, right? Like the director gets to run everything. Yeah, and I think it's a crazy system, you know? Like I want to work with talented people and I want to – what are they doing here if I'm not going to listen to them, if I'm not going to incorporate their ideas, if I'm not going to incorporate what makes them so talented, why I wanted to work with them in the first place.

17:42And so, you know, anti-fascist might be a big statement, But it is kind of – it's a rejection of an idea that everything has to come from one person and like what – you know, the brilliant man idea. It's very top down. Yeah, I've had very little experience, but I've been on several sets. The idea of somebody taking your cell phone from you when you get to work because they want you focused on their art is so – pardon my French, so fucking male and boring and stupid to me. Why does the group – he can't text his wife about dinner because your genius extends that. But it's just exhausting. Yeah, yeah.

18:16It's also long. It's long. It's tortuous. I kept saying to people, I got things to do. Exactly. This is a job. So when you talk about owning this intellectual property, what does that mean now for you all? Because I own all my intellectual property, just so you know. And I think it's important. Explain why it is for you, especially in this space, because that's something that's been an anathema to the industry. Well, I'll tell you what it means is like Jacob and I, you know, worked on a show called Letter, Kenny and Shorzy and the producers of that show made it in Canada as well. And they had a robust merchandise business.

18:50And when we were in post-production, we decided because we have we, you know, retained all the intellectual property behind the series that we wanted to take advantage of that and make a line of merchandise, which we're doing, which is now incredibly like it's it's become this amazing part of our business that we're super excited about. But it also means that ultimately, like when we we made the decision to reinvest our fees, it was because we knew that if this goes really well, we're going to benefit for the next 25 years off of this. And that is the difference. And I think like what, you know, people always ask about, I guess you look at the Canadian system versus the American system.

19:34The Canadian system, you as the producers, if you want to take advantage of being a really truly Canadian show, part of the offering is the broadcasters can't own the IP, the producers get to. And some people will look at that, but the flip side in the US is you're making way more money up front. I don't think that either is right or the other is wrong. I just think that our system is something to protect because what's happening in the US, you can kind of look to and say, I mean, is this fully working right now? Can we really argue that this system is better than ours? No, but I can say that for a hundred years, this business was run on the idea that creators and the people who made it got to own and benefit from what they did for their entire lives.

20:29And I think that that's something worth fighting for. I think so completely. At some point, I wasn't going to make something or someone, and I said, you just have to give me IP. And they said, why do you have to have it? I said, it's none of your business. I said, because I want it. Yeah, exactly. Because it's mine. It's not yours. You didn't come up with it. It's like the old musician, right? It was like, own your own publishing, right? Because why would you let somebody else administer your work and take all the profit from it? That's correct. And like, we're gonna, we have opportunities and we will work in this system that doesn't have that and it'll be fine as well.

20:58But I just think that like, when we talk about, you know, there's so many reasons why budgets have exploded, you know, the economy, like the economy of scale on TV has just completely fallen out because we don't make episode enough episodes. We don't contain them into certain locations, but also it doesn't matter if you have a massive hit or kind of a middling hit, you seem to win no matter what at that level. So I think that there is something to look at as we move forward in these systems of like giving people back end again. Like these old ideas should be new. Right, which they have changed.

21:34So we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have a question from a big fan.

22:04at least When it comes to the new Melania movie, here are some important numbers to remember. $40 million. That's how much Amazon paid Melania Trump's production studio for the rights to the film. It's the highest price ever paid for a documentary. $35 million. That's about how much Amazon spent marketing the film. $28 million. How much went to the First Lady. And$7 million. That's how much the Melania movie made on opening weekend, which is honestly pretty good, and certainly more than many box office insiders projected. So, how did this movie get made? Who's it for? And if this is finally Melania Trump's side of the story, what does she have to say?

22:57That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox. Listen weekday afternoons wherever you get your podcasts.

23:11Over the last several years, AI companies of all shapes and sizes have been desperately trying to get their hands on every bit of available data to make their models better. This week on The Vergecast, we have the story of how Anthropic destroyed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of books and fed them all to Claude. Plus, we have information on who in tech is in the Epstein files, what's going on with Netflix, whether it's Woke, whether it's going to buy Warner Brothers, And whether Peloton is going to successfully sell you a treadmill ever again. All that on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts.

23:50We're back with Heat of Rivals executive producer Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady, who are the people behind this huge hit, Heat of Rivalry. I'm friends with Eileen Chaikin, the executive producer of The L Word, Handmaid's Tale and many other shows. And of course, the groundbreaking sort of gay show in the United States was this one, which was many moons ago. She had a question we're going to play for you right now. Jacob, I love your show. Absolutely love it. Congratulations. Here's my question. Our mutual friend, colleague, agent, Ally, Matt Felker, shared with me the outlandish and stupidly familiar story of getting heated rivalry on the air.

24:29All the rejections that preceded your fabulous and well-deserved massive success. So, do you feel vindicated, pissed, annoyed, smugly satisfied, grateful, just enjoying the process, more determined than ever to tell sexy queer human stories, some other emotion that I didn't describe or perhaps haven't yet even experienced? That's a great question. She's great. For people that don't know, Elward really was groundbreaking at the time. was shocking and showed people happy. Yes, it did. It showed a lot of complexity. I mean, yeah, it was a, yeah, that's a real thank you for the question and thank you for being a fan of the show.

25:13That's so cool. And I'm sorry that Matt Felker is both of our agents. It's a joke. I love Matt Felker. But, you know, I can't pretend there isn't a part of me that's slightly smug. I mean, you know, a show like this, what we're experiencing here with this show is so like beyond the beyond in the land of you can have a successful show as I did with letter Kenny previously, and it does not explode in this way. And this, this level of attention, um, I, you know, I, I try to not, I I'm in therapy and I try to not be, I try to not be toxic exteriorly. And I think that the lesson that I want to take away from this experience is to continue to trust myself creatively, because that is the thing that paid off is that I felt very strongly.

26:01And I luckily had enough backing and support, Brendan primarily, obviously, and then my creative crave family, all these executives there. And, and I did trust something inside me that was like, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing what these folks want me to do. And I just, to be very clear, it wasn't just Americans, it was other Canadians too. It was a lot of people like this. They all like the lean in, like, Ooh, you have a gay hockey show with sex. And they were like, that's not what we meant. too much sex, too much hockey, too little hockey, too little sex, whatever it was, it was all like, why is it like this?

26:31Can it be different? And I really was like, I don't think it should be. I think it should be. What was the craziest thing? My ex-wife started Planet Out and then they merged with Gay.com and one of the venture capitalists said, couldn't they just be hip people versus gay people? And she said, she was like, what? Just hip. The thing that was the most you don't get this note that we got, I think, was the idea of needing a female entry point into the show because women wouldn't watch this show if there wasn't a woman protagonist. And I was like, you know, women read these books. Women write these books.