HBO chief Casey Bloys has a message for the television industry: stop trying to find "the next Heated Rivalry." And he's right, even if nobody's going to listen.
Speaking to Vulture, Bloys warned against the entertainment industry's favorite pastime—misunderstanding what made something successful and then frantically replicating the wrong elements. "The wrong lesson to take from this show's success would be to have Heated Rivalry in baseball or Heated Rivalry in football," he said.
Translation: Heated Rivalry didn't work because it was about hockey. It worked because it was about something, and hockey was the vehicle.
For the uninitiated, Heated Rivalry is HBO's breakout sports drama about two NHL players whose on-ice rivalry masks a secret romantic relationship. It became a cultural phenomenon not because it checked diversity boxes or because people love hockey (they don't, ratings are brutal), but because it told a specific, emotionally resonant story about identity, ambition, and the cost of living in the closet.
The ingredients were: sharp writing, strong performances, genuine chemistry between the leads, and a premise that felt both timely and timeless. Those are hard to replicate. What's easy to replicate is the surface: "Let's do a prestige sports drama with a social justice angle!"
And that's how you get derivative garbage.
Hollywood is exceptionally bad at understanding why things work. When Game of Thrones exploded, every network tried to make "the next Game of Thrones"—which meant fantasy, big budgets, and lots of sex and violence. What they missed was that GoT worked because of character-driven political intrigue, not because dragons look cool in CGI (though they do).
When Stranger Things became 's biggest hit, everyone tried to make missing that the show's appeal was rooted in genuinely likable characters and Spielbergian heart. We got a dozen failed clones, none of which understood that referencing isn't the same as .
