Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney is currently working on the hit hockey romance's second season.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney has received a straight-to-series order from Netflix for a new television show about Alexander the Great’s relationship with his tutor, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
On Thursday, the American streaming service announced that Tierney would be writing, directing and executive producing Alexander, a new period series based on Canadian writer Annabel Lyon’s 2009 debut novel, The Golden Mean.
Brendan Brady, who produced Heated Rivalry along with Tierney through their Toronto-based production company Accent Aigu Entertainment, will also work on the project as an executive producer along with Michael Costigan and Jason Bateman of Los Angeles-based Aggregate Films.
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Netflix did not provide any further information on the series or when it might go into production or premiere.
Neither Tierney nor Brady, who were in L.A. getting ready for the 37th Annual GLAAD Media Awards where Heated Rivalry is up for outstanding new TV series, were available for interviews.
“I fell in love with Annabel Lyon’s book The Golden Mean years ago and have been dreaming of telling this story ever since,” Tierney said in a statement. “Brendan and I couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Aggregate and Netflix to bring this insanely compelling world to life.”
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Set in the 4th-century BC, The Golden Mean – which The Globe and Mail called “a crisply written, painstakingly researched book” – was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and won the latter.
A sequel called The Sweet Girl, focusing on Aristotle’s daughter, Pythias, was published in 2012.
In an interview with The Globe last year, Tierney expressed his long-standing interest in historical fiction about Alexander the Great.
He traced the literary genre of male-male romance that Nova Scotia author Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry represents back to British writer Mary Renault’s books about the sexually fluid ancient Greek military leader and king, describing Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972) and Funeral Games (1981) as historical romances. “She worships at the altar of Alexander the Great and [his lover] Hephaestion,” he said of Renault’s take on the period.
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Tierney is currently working on the second season of Heated Rivalry, the international hit hockey romance he makes for Bell Media’s Crave. In an interview with CBS Mornings last week, he said production was expected to begin in August with new episodes expected to be released around April, 2027.
Tierney is one of the most exciting, in-demand creative voices, Jinny Howe, Netflix’s head of U.S. and Canada Scripted Series, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to work with him on Alexander.
“This series reimagines the classic power struggle between mentor and protégé with a raw, modern energy that feels both epic and incredibly intimate.”