The Business of Heated Rivalry
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on the show, a conversation with Heated Rivalry creators Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady about their television miracle on ice.
It’s not just that the show was made efficiently and cleverly. Heated Rivalry comes from a Canadian economic system of making TV and movies that is completely different from how we do things in the US.
In this episode of Planet Money, in partnership with the Pivot podcast co-hosted by Kara Swisher, we hear about a Canadian production model for making TV and movies and how it’s different from the U.S. model. And we learn what the experience of making Heated Rivalry teaches us about the current state of both industries.
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The original Pivot episode from New York Magazine and The Vox Media Podcast Network was hosted by Kara Swisher, produced by Lara Naman, Zoë Marcus and Taylor Griffin and engineered by Brandon McFarland. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's Executive Producer of podcasts. This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Kenny Malone, produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Lara Naman. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to |
| 0:06.2 | opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic |
| 0:11.4 | prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.coffman.org. |
| 0:18.4 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:24.0 | The other day, I saw an item of clothing. I was very tempted to buy. |
| 0:28.5 | Possibly the most I would have ever paid for an item of clothing. |
| 0:32.5 | It was a Montreal Metro's hockey jersey, $150. |
| 0:37.3 | The metros are a made-up hockey team from the TV show Heeded |
| 0:41.7 | Rivalry. Official replica jerseys were on sale for $150, but totally sold out. In fact, |
| 0:49.1 | every single item on the official Heated Rivalry merch site is sold out. A sign, I suspect, that the TV |
| 0:55.6 | shows creators were not expecting this level of success. Heated Rivalry is a Canadian television |
| 1:02.0 | show based on a Canadian romance book series. It's streamed in the U.S. by HBO. It's about a pair |
| 1:07.9 | of professional men's hockey players, rising superstars, star-crossed lovers, |
| 1:13.7 | very steamy, TVMA-rated, and it has been a giant hit. I started watching it with my wife. |
| 1:20.9 | I think we did it in two tranches, and we loved it. I love that in your house, you refer to binges |
| 1:26.2 | as tranches. I feel like... |
| 1:27.8 | Tronches. Thank you. Yes, we're very fancy people. That's the perfect Kara Swisher, yes. |
| 1:32.4 | Kara Swisher, journalist, podcaster, media icon, I dare say. And Kara has sort of owned the subject |
| 1:38.6 | area of technology and business for the last 25 years. But today, she is here to talk heated rivalry and business. |
| 1:47.3 | I think one of the things that really struck me of a couple of things is it cost somewhere |
| 1:50.7 | between two and two and three point six million dollars per episode to make, which is really low. |
| 1:56.4 | Yeah, on average, the show was made for a little under $3 million per episode, Canadian. |
... |
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