genuinely i do think it's crazy how this show hit every single mark for no reason other than pure love of the game. like this wasn't a money grab and it didn't think it would be a big success, jacob just read a book he enjoyed and thought huh i think that would be a cool thing to make into a tv show. and then he brought on hudson and connor and they're fresh and passionate and not bogged down by the industry yet and they instantly became best friends and wanted to just have fun bringing these characters to life. and they didn't have a huge budget but they did the most with what they had and everybody took the show seriously and everybody took the book seriously. the cinematographer worked his magic. the music supervisor managed to snag a well-known queer hit and an up and coming new release and old school gems that have been around since the 2000s. it's canadian to the core, built from the ground up. it takes russians and the russian language seriously. it uses sex in such a specific, meaningful way that almost no other show has done thus far, and especially not in a queer context like this. they interlaced every episode with callbacks and parallelism and self-references. they didn't take themselves too seriously. they took everything so seriously. there is love and care baked into the core of this show and it's deeply queer and it doesn't shy away from the horrors of toxic masculinity and hockey culture but it is also, always, a story of joy and love and happiness. and on top of everything, it's almost word for word, the original source material from the book.