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From book to screen fast: Heated Rivalry’s unusually quick path to TV success
It was only three years ago that Heated Rivalry writer/director/producer Jacob Tierney contacted Game Changers writer Rachel Reid about adapting her books to the screen
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Last November, Heated Rivalry took the world by storm, building off of the momentum from the Game Changers books by Rachel Reid. The show, originally produced by Crave and then picked up for streaming by HBO Max, has enjoyed an unprecedented level of success in a relatively short amount of time. In the film and TV industry, book adaptations can take years from when their rights were originally optioned by a studio to actually make it onto the big or small screen, if they ever manage to get greenlit in the first place. And at BookCon 2026, the creator of the Heated Rivalry TV show, Jacob Tierney, highlighted how brisk the process was from when he first contacted author Rachel Reid about his desire to adapt her books to when the season 1 finale hit screens around the world.
"Making this show has been very atypical to television because - when was that [initial Zoom call with Reid], three summers ago?" Tierney began, asking confirmation from Rachel Reid. "That as August of 2023," she replied.
"So three summers ago. That's insane for a TV show to have been optioned, not exist at all, sold [for distribution], aired, in three years. That does not happen. Like, even at the fastest pace at which things move, it's like every step of the way with this show, instead of somebody slowing it down, they were like, 'Actually, are you ready tomorrow?' from everything from shooting to the release. The show was supposed to air in February of this year, and it got pulled up to late November of last year," Tierney said.
Elsewhere in the panel, Tierney and Reid confirmed that episode six of Heated Rivalry was finished being edited only eleven days before it aired. So this show truly zoomed through the timeline before it hit all of our eyeballs.
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