Author Annabel Lyon says she is thrilled by the news that Tierney would be developing Alexander for Netflix.Supplied
Annabel Lyon is the next Canadian author to see a significant sales boost to her back catalogue thanks to the Heated Rivalry effect.
On Thursday, Netflix announced a direct-to-series order for Alexander, a new show based on The Golden Mean, Lyon’s 2009 historical novel about the relationship between a young Alexander the Great and his tutor, ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Though details are scarce, the pertinent one is that Alexander will be written, directed and executive produced by Canadian Jacob Tierney – whose 2025 Crave gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry remains an international sensation months after its first six-episode season ended.
The romance novels by Halifax author Rachel Reid upon which the show is based also continue to sell like spicy hotcakes: Five books from her Game Changers series were on The Globe and Mail’s paperback fiction bestseller list last week.
Now, The Golden Mean is already experiencing second-hand heat.
By Friday morning, the novel was out of stock in paperback on Indigo’s website and No. 1 in “Canadian collections & readers” on Amazon, with only used physical copies available for sale.
“Following the announcement, we’ve seen a remarkable surge in interest for the book, with fan demand reaching new heights,” Kristi Reilly, Indigo’s senior category manager, fiction, wrote in a statement provided to The Globe and Mail.
Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney lands deal with Netflix for Alexander the Great series
“We are working closely with the publisher to get copies into the hands of Canadian readers as soon as possible.”
Reached over the phone at University of British Columbia, where she is director of the school of creative writing, Lyon said she was thrilled by the news that Tierney would be developing Alexander for Netflix.
It’s a project a long time in the making. Tierney secured the rights to adapt Lyon’s debut novel – which was nominated for the Giller Prize and won the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize – well before he created Heated Rivalry.
Indeed, it was so long ago that Lyon isn’t entirely sure of the exact year. The earliest e-mails she can find from Tierney about The Golden Mean are from 2016 – the year Letterkenny, the Crave comedy the director developed with Jared Keeso, premiered. (Much of Lyon’s electronic correspondence before that has been archived.)
The Golden Mean is about the relationship between a young Alexander the Great and his tutor, ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
What Lyon does recall is Tierney approaching her armed with a couple of scripts that he had already written “on spec” – that is, without a contract or payment.
“I never really considered going with anybody else,” Lyon said. “I trusted his vision for it.”
Over the past decade, Tierney has shopped around his The Golden Mean adaptation. The project went through what Lyon calls “ups and downs,” but was never greenlit.
In Canadian television, it’s hard to get any drama produced, let alone an expensive period piece set in the 4th century BC.
But now Tierney, who won the GLAAD Media Award for best new TV show for Heated Rivalry in L.A. Thursday night, has huge capital to spend both at home and internationally.
In January, Tierney reached out to Lyon after a long period out of touch. “He was like, ‘Oh, I’m the guy who made Heated Rivalry,’” she recalls.
Lyon had heard of the show’s massive success, but had not realized it was made by the man who held the rights to The Golden Mean. (She then immediately watched the show and enjoyed it.)
Brendan Brady, who produced Heated Rivalry along with Tierney through their company Accent Aigu Entertinament, will also be an executive producer on Alexander.
Neither Tierney nor Brady were not immediately available for interviews.
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Thursday’s Netflix release describes Alexander as beginning “as the Athenian empire is crumbling and the world’s greatest mind, Aristotle, arrives in Macedonia to tutor a volatile young prince, Alexander.”
It continues: “Amid palace intrigue, forbidden love, brutal war and ruthless ambitions, their unlikely friendship shapes an empire and alters the course of history.”
Despite that reference to forbidden love, The Golden Mean is not a male-male romance in the vein of Heated Rivalry. The novel’s central relationship between Aristotle and the young Alexander is like that of a father and son, Lyon says.
However, Alexander the Great had many sexual and romantic relationships with male partners over the course of his life – and that informs the novel, she says. “My conception of him as a teenager is absolutely as someone who was gay.”
When Heated Rivalry took off on Crave in Canada (then HBO Max in the United States and other streaming services internationally), Carina Press, the publisher of Reid’s novels, appeared to have been caught off guard. The imprint of HarperCollins Canada’s Harlequin initially struggled to meet demand for physical copies.
Lyon’s publisher, Penguin Random House, was not immediately ready with a reprint either.
“Books are being reprinted and will be available very soon; in the meantime we encourage keen readers to seek out the eBook and audiobook editions,” Sue Kuruvilla, publisher, Random House Canada, said in a statement Friday.