How Heated Rivalry Broke The Algorithm, What The Oscars Tell Us About Feudal Media

1. How Heated Rivalry Broke The Algorithm

HBO’s gay hockey romance, Heated Rivalry is the hottest show on TV. 

I know this because the New York Times has taken to running at least one article each day about the drama, most recently about Heated Rivalry-themed workouts. 

And then Saturday Night Live ran a Heated Rivalry-themed Harry Potter spoof.

What’s notable is that this is not the type of show that traditionally appeals to the high culture aesthetes at the New York Times. Because explicit gay sex scenes aside, the plot is essentially a Young Adult-style romance. A well done Young Adult-style romance, but full of broadly drawn characters and negligible nuance nonetheless. 

But that is not what interests me about this show.

What I find fascinating is that it managed to break the algorithm.

You see, Heated Rivalry should not be a success.

It was produced on a (by Hollywood standards) shoestring budget for a Canadian streaming service called Crave based on some mild buzz on BookTok where it had been part of a Harlequin Romance series on gay hockey players, one of those “MM” novels written by and for middle-aged heterosexual women. 

And then fortuitously picked up by HBO just two weeks before its Canadian debut as genre fiction for next to nothing.

The first episode’s ratings were unremarkable. 

And then word-of-mouth kicked in and with each episode, the audience ballooned exponentially, going from 30 million streaming minutes in episode one to 324 million streaming minutes in episode six, the season finale, a tenfold increase.

Those numbers, via Luminate and the New York Times, don’t even begin to touch the amount of buzz the show has received in the month since that sixth episode dropped on December 26, 2025, what with the stars appearing on the Golden Globes and inciting Beatlemania-esque reactions both online and in person. 

Why It Matters

This is not a show that an algorithm would recommend to many people. 

It’s not an easy pick the way, say, the recent George Clooney movie Jay Kelly was.

More than that though, it’s not the sort of show most people would decide to watch even if the algorithm had recommended it to them.

That’s because when something new and different becomes a hit with audiences it rarely happens overnight.

Back in the 1970s, the Norman Lear comedy All In The Family was a massive hit. 

But it took CBS believing in the show for a full year until it hit its stride and audiences began to appreciate it. Because even without an algorithm, a show about a “lovable bigot” from Queens who argued politics with his liberal son-in-law did not strike most people as a laugh riot.

So what made it click?

The same thing that made Heated Rivalry click: word of mouth.

And not just any kind of word of mouth: persistent and sustained word of mouth from multiple diverse human sources.

Meaning, in practical terms, that your brother recommended it to you and then your friend at work, and then your favorite podcaster mentioned that she was really digging it and then there was yet-another-article in the Times and then one in The Atlantic, and then the comedian you follow on TIkTok was making jokes about it… you get the picture.

It’s the same way every other unlikely hit, from All In The Family to Game Of Thrones finds an audience. Because word of mouth is not a one-time thing. It’s a sustained cycle that quickly takes on a life of its own.

And that is not something you can replicate with AI or with better algorithms because algorithms are always recommending things to you which is not the same as your brother, who may get excited enough about a show to mention it every two years.

But we do need to make sure that the conditions exist for it to happen. Not just with TV shows but with movies and music and art.

For the thing is, we will never know what caused Heated Rivalry to become a hit, what ripples in the Serpentine collided and spread and mutated to ensure that this particular series became a hit at this particular moment in time.

Which is exactly as it should be.

Because this is the sort of serendipity we need, the sort that defies the algorithms and shows us something new, something different, something we would never have imagined we’d find joy in.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are in charge of buying content, any sort of content, be brave and listen to your gut. It’s not easy. Easy is finding something that’s just like the other something that was a hit.

Meaning I can guarantee you that at least one series about closeted young baseball players is already under development somewhere.

Probably more than one.

But the problem is that art is like a drug. And every time we take a hit of something that was just like the thing that got us so high the last time the dopamine explosion gets a little less intense, the endorphin spike a little softer. And so like all junkies, we keep looking for the next great high, that thing that will chase away the boredom, give us the rush that gets our synapses firing in every direction.

Listen to your gut.

If you are a consumer—and we all are– don’t be afraid to look beyond the algorithm. To see what’s popular in other genres, with other people. The worst that can happen is you’ll have wasted 15 minutes.

Go for it.

2. What The Oscars Tell Us About Feudal Media

If you want further proof that we are in the age of Feudal Media, look no further than this year’s crop of Oscar Best Picture nominees.

They are a mixed bag of genres and high and low art, but if there’s one thing they have in common it’s that most of them will be unfamiliar to large segments of the audience.

And by "unfamiliar" I mean they have literally never heard of them.

This despite stellar box office numbers, led by the Brad Pitt vehicle F1 which raked in $631MM worldwide.

Compare this year’s crop to the 2006 Oscar nominees. 

Five movies were nominated for Best Picture that year: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night And Good Luck and Munich.

None of them were blockbusters (the leader, Brokeback Mountain, did around $178MM globally) but they all crushed it on another key metric: cultural impact.

Most people in the US had heard of all five movies. And even if they hadn’t seen them, they knew what the movie was about, why people were talking about it, what it said about America and about the world at large.

“Water cooler buzz” is the technical term.

And twenty years later, we no longer have that.

Not even almost.

Why It Mattrs

This year’s Oscar nominations are an almost perfect encapsulation of what happens when we lose our common cultural touchpoints.

They have volume, but they don’t have gravitas.

Meaning that the constricts of the monoculture all but ensured that a movie like Crash, which was all about race and class or Brokeback Mountain, which was all about sexuality, would spark conversations, pro and con, and be instantly recognizable pretty much anywhere in the country.

As in if you were a stand-up comic, you could make Brokeback references in your routine and your audience would immediately get them.

Sinners references? Not so much, even with a $368MM global box office.

Now of course people within specific bubbles will get those Sinners references and for them it is a transcendent film. It’s just that this transcendence does not exist beyond the confines of those particular bubbles as the various algorithms that control our media diet do not extend beyond their walls.

The feudal landscape thus defines what types of movies get made—studios need to think about volume, about which audiences will plant their butts in seats, and write kind reviews on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

Versus thinking about gravitas. And how much the movie will impact the culture. Become part of the Great Movie Canon. And earn multiple millions via licensing and overseas rights deals.

It also defines how we think about movies: not as the pinnacle of mass entertainment, two or three hour masterpieces that sweep through the culture and define a moment, but rather as totems of individual fiefdoms or collections of fiefdoms, defining not the culture of the moment but the culture of a particular piece of it. 

Which is a very different thing indeed.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are the movie industry—and that includes all of the streaming services that now make and show movies—you need to understand how profoundly the medium has changed in a very short window of time.

And to accept that we are not going back.

That means making movies that appeal to specific audiences both domestically and overseas.

To understand how to target those audiences in a way that maximizes profits.

Call it the “pull don’t push” theory of How To Succeed In Feudal Media. 

Also known as “if you build it, they may not come.”

Meaning you need to meet these audiences where they are, to pull them into your movie, to understand that putting it out in the theater or up on your streaming service is not going to be enough and that you will need to use all the many platforms out there to draw them in and get the word out.

And finally, if you are a frequent moviegoer or an industry veteran and you looked at the list of nominees this year and realized you’d never even heard of some of them, or even many of them, know that you are not alone. That looking online this seems to be one of the more common reactions. 

As it will be for many years to come.