How Paul Gross’s Due South shaped early male/male fandom and why his casting in Heated Rivalry matters

The short version

Paul Gross, now announced as NHL Commissioner Roger Crowell in Heated Rivalry Season 2, was the lead actor in the 1990s buddy-cop TV movie and series Due South. The show's central chemistry between Gross's Mountie, Constable Benton Fraser, and his Chicago partner Ray Vecchio created a dedicated fan base that produced some of the earliest widely circulated male/male fan fiction in English.

What Due South was and why it mattered

Due South began as a TV movie about a Canadian Mountie who travels to Chicago to solve his father's murder and was adapted into a four-season series that aired on CTV in Canada and CBS in the U.S. Its mix of procedural cases and comedy relied on the "odd couple" pairing of Fraser and Ray, and that pairing generated more than mainstream viewership: it generated a sustained fandom.

That fandom wasn't limited to casual appreciation. Fans read romantic meaning into Fraser-and-Ray interactions and created slash and yaoi-style fiction—stories reimagining the partners in explicit romantic or sexual relationships. These fictions circulated in printed fanzines and on early internet forums, becoming a formative chapter in anglophone slash culture.

Paul Gross's role in the fandom

Why this matters for Heated Rivalry viewers

Because Gross's legacy includes his starring role in Due South and the show's influential early slash fandom, his casting activates nostalgia among elder millennial viewers who grew up with that series. The article argues that if not for Gross's earlier work and the fan communities it helped create, contemporary gay romance fandom—at least as represented in shows like Heated Rivalry—might look different.

Concrete implications

• The "Ray Wars" example shows how casting changes can splinter fandoms and increase fan production (fiction, discussion, debates).
• Gross's apparent openness to Due South's fan communities is a reminder that actors' past relationships with fandom can influence reactions to new, even antagonistic roles.

Bottom line

Paul Gross's Due South provided an early template for male/male fan fiction communities in anglophone pop culture. His casting in Heated Rivalry brings that back into conversation, connecting 1990s slash culture to today's queer TV fandom dynamics.