How Jacob Tierney Pulled Off the Best Romance Book Adaptation of All Time With <i><em>Heated Rivalry</em></i>

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

When Heated Rivalry detonated on streaming last December, it didn't just break the internet — it quietly dismantled every excuse Hollywood has ever made for butchering a beloved romance novel. The queer Canadian hockey love story, based on Rachel Reid's Game Changers series, went from cult BookTok obsession to global phenomenon practically overnight, minting its stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie into household names in the span of a single holiday season. According to Harper's Bazaar, HBO moved fast enough to acquire U.S. distribution rights from Crave just two weeks before the November 28 premiere. That is not a slow burn.

The man behind it — Jacob Tierney, the screenwriter and director who already built his reputation on Letterkenny and Shoresy — is now telling the behind-the-scenes story in print. His first book, I'll Believe in Anything, a collection of annotated season-one scripts published by Little, Brown, lands with a foreword from Reid and margin notes dense enough to warrant a rewatch. Tierney is characteristically blunt about the experience of writing it: "I'm not the kind of person who has a lot of fun reviewing their own work," he admits. He hasn't even rewatched the show since it aired.

What the Genre Actually Requires

Tierney's entry point into romance fiction was, of all things, an audiobook walk with his dog during the pandemic — a format that let the genre's playfulness land before his screenwriter brain could start dissecting it for adaptation viability. "These are naughty," was his first reaction. His second was that Reid's books were funnier and more alive than he expected, which turned out to be the whole key. His theory on why most book-to-screen romances fail is essentially structural: every genre runs on tropes, and the adapter's only real job is deciding whether to lean into them, subvert them, or delay them just long enough to keep an audience on the edge. Horror, he argues, has been doing this with visual language and built-in humor for decades — and romance deserves the same sophistication.

Budget constraints, which were real, became a creative forcing mechanism. When a crowd scene required 5,000 extras he didn't have, Tierney's approach was simple: figure out what the moment actually needed emotionally, then build toward that instead. "If you view every obstacle as a failure, you're fucked," he says, without apparent irony. The show's non-linear timeline — jumping through years of Ilya and Shane's history — came from a close reading of Reid's structure, which Tierney interpreted as characters remembering only the moments that mattered. Not everything that happened, just everything that stuck.

The result is a show that feels both meticulously crafted and genuinely warm, which is rarer than it should be. Most adaptations treat the source material like a liability to be managed. Tierney treated it like a conversation worth having — spice, queerness, hockey sweat, and all. The lesson isn't complicated: respect the genre, understand the tropes, and trust that your audience is smart enough to feel the difference.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.