Deadline has reported that just as Pride Month begins to wrap up, comedian/actor Joel Kim Booster (Fire Island, KPop Demon Hunters) wants everyone to know that he believes it is the gay representation that drew in Heated Rivalry’s successful audience, not the played-out sports tropes. The most-watched acquired scripted series in HBO Max history, from Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky, Letterkenny), spawned insane amounts of competing hockey series, leaving Booster trying to confirm it was the gay characters the fans enjoyed, not the hockey.
With none of the new hockey-themed shows revolving around LGBTQ inclusion, Booster looked to make a bigger point about the current political landscape at large. Booster took aim at President Trump and his administration, framing the recession of DEI initiatives as the reason for that lack of gay representation in new developments. “People are really frightened and risk-averse right now because of this administration and what we’ve seen in the way of censorship or retaliation.” Booster thinks that conservatives are to blame for networks failing to produce and greenlight queer-centered stories.
Booster is right that the Trump administration has targeted DEI, although they claim this is due to unconstitutional reverse discrimination based on race and sex in hiring practices and quotas. Brenden Carr, Chairman of the FCC, argued that Hollywood is not about traditional non-discrimination, but is actually using invidious discrimination. In 2021, at the height of Hollywood DEI backlash, Christian Toto (The Hollywood in Toto, The Salty Nerd Podcast), film critic and author of Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul, spoke out about some of the reasons Booster has found himself in the current climate. He talks about how identity-driven content is a looming financial disaster. In an interview with Daily Wire’s host Andrew Klavan (Lady Ballers, Don’t Say a Word), Toto seems to fire back at Booster preemptively by outlining why “get woke, go broke” has actually occurred.
“This whole ‘get woke, go broke’—they don’t see it, they don’t understand it, they don’t respect it, they don’t process it, and it’s going to take a few more mega bombs before they do.” Oddly enough, since Toto said that in 2021, Hollywood hit a staggering, historically unprecedented wall of disasters. The industry has seen massive, multi-hundred-million-dollar write-offs targeting the very identity-focused content Toto spoke about. Toto prescribes the natural approach to diversity as opposed to the forced approach, which he calls a “virtue bomb.” The show may have been successful not just because it checked one box but because it was a four-quadrant hit. Meaning that it found a way to appeal to all four major demographics, being older and younger males, and older and younger females. With the perfect mixture of sports and high-stakes romance, Heated Rivalry manages to create the Holy Grail of crossover appeal.
With the filming of the second season expected to begin in August and the premiere slated for April 2027, whatever it is that drives the viewers, especially book superfans who are a reliable weapon against viewer drop-off, they will be expected to return en masse.