Slo Pitch, which premiered on Crave on Sept. 25, has already gained momentum in the queer community.Crave/The Canadian Press
Can Slo Pitch – a queer softball mockumentary – piggyback off of Heated Rivalry’s momentum to become Canada’s next breakout sports series?
The show, which premiered Sept. 25 on Crave and is co-produced by Elliot Page’s Pageboy Productions, has already gained momentum in the queer community: An article in online LGBTQ magazine them said that Slo Pitch was for “lesbians, sapphics and queer sports enthusiasts hungry for more horny media for us, by us!” while posts on social media comparing the two programs have racked up thousands of likes.
Recently The Globe spoke with Karen Knox, one of co-creators and stars of Slo Pitch, about how the success of Heated Rivalry has helped elevate all Canadian media, the similarities and differences between the shows, and why queer representation doesn’t need to look like one thing.
In a 2018 interview, you said that a lot of queer media is coloured with deep suffering. Those stories are important to tell, but when the only stories that get told about the community are tragic, it ignores how fun everything can be. Was creating something fun a priority when making the show?
Representation isn’t just seeing a community represented on screen. It has to do with the kinds of stories that community is allowed to tell. No community should have to tell predominantly one story. With Slo Pitch, I hadn’t seen a stupid, bro-y comedy that was predominantly female and queer. And it felt like time to make one. I adore deep moving art films about the queer experience or high camp shows like Drag Race. But I also want the queer community to have a show that’s just about drinking beers and being dumb with your friends.
During the same interview, your collaborator Gwenlyn Cumyn spoke about how as a queer woman, the only roles she was being offered were subplots or tragedies. Almost a decade later, do you think the landscape has changed?
I think that like queer representation as a whole is largely down [a Glaad survey suggested that queer inclusion in film is at a three-year low]. In terms of like roles that I’m being offered, right now it feels like none of them are gay. But at the same time, it’s impossible not to talk about our cousin at Crave, Heated Rivalry.
Everybody in Canada working in the Canadian media scene owes Jacob Tierney a thank you. Heated Rivalry thrust Canada into the cool kids club on a global scale. It’s a phenomenon in terms of what it’s done for queer representation but also for the Canadian television and media landscape.
I’d venture to say that right now, Canadian TV has never felt more relevant. Canada is saying we have our own identity when it comes to the media. We’re not the United States. We’re making shows that are extremely popular around the world. We can really step into that creative power and we can own it.
Do you feel like Heated Rivalry has helped the momentum of your show?
Emily Hampshire, centre, plays the villain on Slo Pitch. Hampshire will appear in the second season of Heated Rivalry.Crave/The Canadian Press
Absolutely, yes. The show couldn’t be hitting at a better time. Catching the Crave wave and getting on the Heated Rivalry express has been so great for our show in terms of helping find an audience.
The two things that the shows have in common are that they’re sports shows and queer shows. Beyond that, the similarities absolutely stop. There are no sexy hotel room scenes in Slo Pitch. The best you’re gonna get is a sloppy makeout in a mildewy equipment room.
Gwenlyn, my co-creator, said that Slo Pitch is not at all sexy, but it is very horny. I think that’s in the grand tradition of frat bro comedies, which is what Slo Pitch is leaning into.
Another reason a lot of people are kind of picking up on the similarities is that we do share a couple of cast members. We have Nadine Bhabha, who was in Heated Rivalry. She wrote a couple of episodes for Slo Pitch. And it was just announced that Emily Hampshire is going to be in season two of Heated Rivalry. She plays our villain character.
Elliot Page’s Pageboy is a co-producer on the show. Can you tell me how that collaboration happened?
We came on board with Bell first. They’d seen the web series version of the show. Pageboy took a look at the slate that Bell had in development, and they went, what’s this?
We had a meeting to talk about what the series was. We described it as a frat bro comedy with a bunch of lesbians guzzling beer in the world of amateur sports. They said they’d never encountered that before. They were stoked to come aboard.
Working with Pageboy helped broaden our perspective with regards to what a global audience might think and making it accessible to the maximum number of people. As an artist that’s become one of my north stars.
The hardest thing to do in the world as an artist is to make something that is profoundly good artistically but also deeply accessible. I hope Slo Pitch is something like that. I hope that so many people watch it.
The interview has been edited and condensed.