The first season of “Heated Rivalry” on HBO Max may have ended two weeks ago, but that has done little to slow the show’s momentum.
On Wednesday afternoon, several dozen people, most of them quite young, gathered around the marquee for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in Midtown Manhattan, ready to shout their lungs out. The throng surprised NBC employees — a security guard likened the crowd to when Harry Styles stopped by “The Tonight Show” at the height of his popularity.
It was all to catch a glimpse of Hudson Williams, one of the stars of “Heated Rivalry,” who was in the building to appear on Mr. Fallon’s show that night.
“Heated Rivalry,” a steamy Canadian series about a pair of closeted gay hockey players, has become one of the television industry’s biggest surprises in recent memory. Not because it is a megahit like “Stranger Things” or “Bridgerton” or even “The White Lotus.” In fact, its viewership barely puts it among the top 15 streaming original series in the United States right now.
What executives didn’t expect was how it took off. The show, which was produced by a Canadian network, Crave, and licensed by HBO Max, premiered in late November to little fanfare and virtually no promotion. Yet “Heated Rivalry” quickly started to generate week-to-week jumps in viewership that are unusual in the streaming era.
During its debut week on HBO Max, “Heated Rivalry” accumulated roughly 30 million streaming minutes, a figure that failed to qualify among the 50 most-watched streaming original programs, according to Luminate, a research group. By the week of Dec. 26, when the season’s sixth and final episode was released, time spent streaming the show was up more than tenfold, eclipsing 324 million minutes, Luminate said.
That fast growth is “highly unusual,” said Tyler Aquilina, an analyst at Luminate, who compared it to “Baby Reindeer,” an out-of-nowhere hit for Netflix in 2024. “It is rare for a show to build in that way.”
Casey Bloys, the head of HBO Max, who licensed “Heated Rivalry” from Crave, put it this way: “It is clearly a word-of-mouth sensation.”
The show centers on two professional hockey stars — one a Russian, the other a Canadian — and their journey from furtive hookups to a full-blown romance. The many sex scenes have especially been a hit with viewers.
“Heated Rivalry” was created by Jacob Tierney, who wrote and directed every episode, and was adapted from a novel by the same name. The two lead actors — Mr. Williams and Connor Storrie — were unknowns.
Mr. Bloys became aware of the series only a couple of weeks before it was scheduled to premiere in Canada, he said, when a colleague asked if he would like to license it. Mr. Bloys binged it over one weekend in November.
“I couldn’t believe it was available,” he said. “It was a very obvious yes.”
It did not cost HBO Max much, either. The company paid only about $600,000 per episode to license it in the United States.
Given the “hot sex” on the show, Mr. Bloys said, he figured “Heated Rivalry” would “make some noise.”
“But I did not anticipate that it would turn into the kind of the social phenomenon that it is,” he continued.
Usually it is Netflix that is “very good at turning these seemingly random shows into overnight sensations,” said Mr. Aquilina, the analyst. Netflix has more engagement than any subscription streaming service in the United States, and features a more powerful recommendation engine than any of its traditional Hollywood competitors.
HBO Max has considerably less viewing time and a recommendation engine nowhere close to that. But attention grew thanks to social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and X.
“Heated Rivalry” has hardly slowed down. For the week of Jan. 2, the show was viewed for over 254 million minutes, its second-most-watched week, according to Luminate.
Over time, the demographics of the audience have changed. On Dec. 22, four days before the finale streamed, 53 percent of the show’s viewers were female, an HBO spokesman said. By the end of last week, roughly two-thirds of the viewers were women.
The show stands as a rare success story for a program that centers on gay characters. Other recent series with gay characters, including Netflix’s “Boots” or Hulu’s “Mid-Century Modern,” were canceled after a single season.
Mr. Bloys said that HBO Max would continue to license the show but that all creative decisions would belong to Mr. Tierney and Crave. “They clearly know what they’re doing,” he said.
For now, the show’s stars, Mr. Williams and Mr. Storrie, are basking in their newfound fame.
Both actors will be presenters at the Golden Globes on Sunday night in Beverly Hills, Calif. Then Mr. Storrie will fly cross-country to appear on Seth Meyers’s late-night show on NBC on Monday. Given the unexpected crowd for Mr. Williams’s appearance on “The Tonight Show,” NBCUniversal is preparing to greatly increase security around 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Monday.
John Koblin covers the television industry for The Times.
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