The story of Accent Aigu Entertainment, the Canadian production company behind 2026’s global TV breakout Heated Rivalry, began with a love story — between two dogs.
Jacob Tierney was directing and showrunning on Letterkenny, the cult comedy he co-created with Jared Keeso, which aired on Crave in Canada and Hulu in the U.S. Brendan Brady had been brought on as a line producer. Both Tierney and Brady had dogs: Graham, a Lab/hound mutt, and Murphy, a black Labradoodle.
“Murphy’s a boy. Graham is a girl. I know that’s confusing, but that’s crucial,” says Tierney. “We brought them together, and our dogs fell in love. That’s our meet-cute. For the next season, when we came back to do more Letterkenny, they got us a place where we shared a backyard so the dogs could play together.”
“That was basically our lake house,” jokes Brady, referencing a much-memed scene from the season one finale of Heated Rivalry. “We decided to take it to the next level.”
In 2023, after finishing Letterkenny and working on the first two seasons of its spinoff, Shoresy, Tierney and Brady left to launch Accent Aigu Entertainment. (The name, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Tierney’s Quebecois Francophone roots, was chosen “after several libations,” Brady admits.)
