‘Slo Pitch’ Swings for the Fences

Canadian director J Stevens spent their early 20s playing the “weird niche sport” of Australian rules football.

They were the only queer person on the team for their first year, but by year three, “basically everyone on the team was out, everyone was dating everyone and then everyone was breaking up,” they tell me in an interview over Zoom.

The ensuing drama left them with one thought: “this needs to be a TV show.”

Working alongside fellow Canadian showrunners Karen Knox and Gwenlyn Cumyn, Stevens drew from their own queer sports league experience to create Slo Pitch, a new Crave original series produced by Shaftesbury and Elliot Page’s PageBoy Productions. The show is streaming now, with new episodes dropping every Friday.

The show is landing at a time when queer TV is in a weird place. Like many other queer folks out there, I will watch virtually anything that centres queer stories, but these days, those stories are starting to feel few and far between.

Beloved series like Heartstopper, Euphoria and Hacks have wrapped, Yellowjackets is on its last season and even reality shows like I Kissed a Girl and I Kissed a Boy have been getting the chop. When we do get an exciting new series, it’s hard to get attached: so many queer shows — especially ones focusing on women and gender-diverse characters, including Amazon Prime’s 2022 sapphic baseball show A League of Their Own (RIP) — are cancelled after just one season. Beyond the sudden success of Heated Rivalry, the future of queer TV feels a little uncertain.

But Stevens hopes to offer something new to sapphic viewers and break the one-season curse with Slo Pitch.

“We love seeing beautiful gay men make out onscreen, but there are others who deserve to see themselves as well,” Stevens says.

Queer joy and… ridiculousness

Slo Pitch follows the Brovaries, a beer-league softball team in pursuit of their first championship win after their coach’s longtime girlfriend dumps her and joins another team. The mockumentary-style sitcom draws on shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation with its charming (and weird) cast of characters, will-they-won’t-they relationship dynamics and goofy hijinks.

The show began as an OUTtvGo web series in 2020, where it was popular enough to win a second season and be picked up for distribution in the U.S.

Now Canadian streamer Crave has rebooted the story as a half-hour comedy, with much of the same cast and creative team.

Stevens describes the resulting show as “queer joy and queer stupidity.” It’s easy to see why, with storylines like the team trying to seduce their coach into ending a team “non-fraternization agreement” and staging a sexy car wash to raise money to pay their league fees.

Despite clear stylistic differences, comparisons between Slo Pitch and Heated Rivalry have been everywhere online. Both shows feature queer characters, revolve around a sport and are Crave original series. But according to Stevens, the similarities stop there. “If you’re coming to our show for Heated Rivalry, you’re going to be sorely disappointed,” they say.

Where Heated Rivalry focuses on the angst of hiding your feelings, the steaminess of a secret affair and the drama of coming out, Slo Pitch follows the sitcom formula of a ragtag group navigating silly situations — whose members also happen to be queer.

“I think getting to see queer characters just existing is something we still haven’t seen a lot of,” Stevens says. “Yes, our characters are queer. Yes, they’re dating each other. Yes, it’s messy, but it’s not inherently about their queerness.”

Queer media representation has declined

Of course, comparisons like this happen in conversations about queer media for one major reason: there isn’t enough of it. Onscreen LGBTQ2S(IA)+ representation has generally declined since peaking around 2022 to 2023, according to research from GLAAD, which found representation in film across the 10 largest studio distributors at a three-year low.

While GLAAD’s 2025 research on television found a slight increase in the number of queer and trans characters from the previous year, it also warned that nearly half of those characters would disappear due to series endings and cancellations.

But those stats didn’t dissuade Stevens, who says that while making Slo Pitch last year, they actually felt optimistic about the future of queer stories onscreen.

“The queer TV landscape is ever-shifting. There are moments of hope, then it kind of retracts a little bit,” they explain. They add that shows like FX’s Adults, another half-hour comedy with a mostly queer ensemble, “made it feel very possible to make a half-hour show featuring a bunch of queer characters.”

While developing Slo Pitch for Crave, Stevens says they initially worried about maintaining the voice of the original web series. “Are we suddenly going to get notes, like, ‘Oh, what if a bunch of the Brovaries were men, and what if they were straight men?’”

Those notes never came. Instead, Stevens says the streamer “allowed us to be ourselves and to make the show that we wanted. We were all very pleasantly surprised that we never had to fight back.”

Stevens partially attributes the recent wave of cancellations of shows featuring LGBTQ2S+ characters to general clawbacks in the television industry, with the number of shows being made each year in steady decline since the end of the streaming boom and in the aftermath of the 2023 writers’ strike.

With fewer opportunities to go around, Stevens says it’s more important than ever for streamers and broadcasters to understand that queer stories can be commercially successful.

“Heated Rivalry has blown open the queer TV landscape in a really exciting way, and we feel very grateful that it’s put more eyes on that representation and shown that it can have that broad appeal,” they say.

Showcasing real experiences

Stevens hopes that more series can ride the Heated Rivalry wave and showcase a diverse set of queer experiences. That includes not just coming out stories but stories that reflect “the actual experiences of being queer humans moving through the world”: the good, the bad, the ugly and the unbelievably stupid.

“Audiences just need to show up for all of those [queer] shows so that we can keep making more seasons of them,” Stevens says. “I think the voices are there, the characters are there. We just need the audiences to keep showing up.”

I’m not a sports person, but watching Slo Pitch, I saw a lot more of myself and my friends reflected there than in any show I’ve watched in a long time. It feels special to see core queer experiences — like not being able to avoid your ex because you’re both deeply enmeshed in the same niche activity, or crushing on the latest non-binary baddie to enter your orbit — immortalized onscreen.

If you’re not a sports person either, take solace in the fact that Slo Pitch is not really about its titular sport. It’s not even really about being queer. The show is about a group of people who love one another almost as much as they love beer and aren’t afraid to make fools of themselves in the name of friendship (and softball).

If the future of queer TV depends, at least in part, on audiences showing up to watch, Slo Pitch is asking us to do something pretty simple: tune in, laugh and enjoy queer characters being messy, silly, horny and deeply unserious.

‘Slo Pitch’ is now streaming on Crave.