This Summer, Everybody Wants to Go to the Cottage

When Canadian import Heated Rivalry first took over all of culture this winter, it was hard to say which element would have the most pervasive influence. Would it be the explicit sex scenes? The angsty queer romance? Worldwide Connor Storrie–fandom–driven mania? All of those things have come to pass, but as the summer wears on, one feature of Heated Rivalry now feels like the tip of the spear in the hottest new trend in aspirational feelings-forward escapism: The Cottage.

Heated Rivalry’s first-season finale is shaped by the aesthetics and social isolation of the hockey boys’ lake vacation. The space is pristine and remote, surrounded by woods and loons and big muscular-looking boulders for perching on and thinking deep thoughts. This summer, two more shows arrived in its wake to help establish the cozy subgenre of the season: Sexy Feelings by a Canadian Lake. First was June’s Every Year After on Prime Video, an adaptation of Canadian author Carley Fortune’s novel Every Summer After, in which a 28-year-old obituary writer named Percy goes back to her hometown on Ontario’s Kamaniskeg Lake after her friend’s mother dies, allowing her to finally resolve the years-long love triangle she’s been caught within since her teens. Then this month, Prime Video released Sterling Point, a teen soap created by Canadian writer-director Megan Park about a young woman who learns she’s inherited a remote island on Lake Muskoka, where she travels to learn more about her adoptive mother and also get pulled across a closet floor by the hot guy next door who kisses her like she’s never been kissed before.

Those shows, plus the looming prospect of Heated Rivalry’s second season, plus the news that another Carley Fortune adaptation is on the way for Netflix — This Summer Will Be Different, a sweeping love story set on Prince Edward Island — have altogether solidified the Canadian waterfront as the hands-down most desired soap setting of the moment. Is it even summertime if you’re not hearing a loon call while staring into a crackling bonfire? Are you even in love if you haven’t splashed with your paramour in the dark and mysterious waters of a glacial northern lake? Sandy beaches and convertibles and yachts are out. Quilts and dinghies and dark windswept hair are in. 

Despite their shared lakeside locales, these new series have some distinguishing features informing their respective vibes. Every Year After takes place in the small community of Barry’s Bay, so the isolation of a lone cottage is replaced by the seclusion of a little village. Everybody knows everyone else’s business, and everything hinges on the success or failure of the one good restaurant in town. Sterling Point gets to split the difference: Its larger setting of Lake Muskoka has many vacation homes and a well-established culture divide between the wealthy summer vacationers and the year-round residents, so it gets some of the community tension of Every Year After. But it gets some of Heated Rivalry’s pinpoint-small focus, too. Its protagonist, Annie Jacobson, inherited just this one small island on the lake, and much of the show takes place in the gloriously cozy wood-paneled house where her mom grew up. Both of these series, along with Heated Rivalry, originate with different Canadian creators and take on different regional flavors as a result. But village versus cottage versus lake community aside, the appeal of these locations is the same: They are small, private, and removed from the outside world. They’re not places where people flaunt glossy perfection or exorbitant wealth, because the class signifiers are about tasteful luxury. People wear flannel and denim while making out in the storage room of the local watering hole. These places are more real.

Canadian summer lake houses make an evocative backdrop for escapist entertainment in several ways. First, there’s just no avoiding the current cultural baggage of basically any location obviously set in the States. (Look at all these locals in this beautiful rural location! Who did they vote for? Do they have access to health care? Do they own guns? These are not sexy questions!) But Canada is just far enough away to be a legitimate escape, while also carrying a host of related connotations. It’s safe. It has a knotty-wood-floors, no-makeup authenticity. A Canadian lake can also offer a backdrop full of tensions about wealth and luxury and privilege, especially in the case of Sterling Point, without tipping so far into economic inequality that it becomes rage inducing. These are old-school, fancy-houses rich people; these are not crypto billionaires.

The Sexy Feelings by a Canadian Lake genre also has a notable feature that makes it distinctly different from staring at an ocean in California or canoodling on Nantucket: No one looks at or uses their phones. Sterling Point, specifically, makes clear that there’s very little cell service on Annie’s remote island, but even when characters are probably able to use their devices, the whole point is that they don’t. On Heated Rivalry, the cottage is where Shane and Ilya can finally stop texting each other. For Every Year After, cell phones are not completely gone from the world but they become much less crucial when everything anyone cares about exists on this one small lakeshore. The appeal of the sexy Canadian lake is that it actually does feel like an enforced escape from the outside world, a fantasy of falling in love without social media and algorithmic scrolling and dating apps and constant group chats.

Beyond any of the sociocultural flotsam and jetsam, hanging out with your crush on a lake at a northern latitude both softens and distills all the brain-stem-deep associations with what summer means. There’s no climate change on these shows — no Canadian wildfires to mess up the perfect sunset lighting — and the weather is always hot enough to jump in a lake but never sweltering. That perfection is alluring, but it’s also believable, because every one of these shows acknowledges that this period is fleeting. The golden-hour time when all your friends roll around in the grass at 8 p.m. while the sun limns you in hazy radiance only lasts a few short weeks of the year. Sexy Feelings by a Canadian Lake is a genre that allows romance and self-discovery to feel even more precious because time is short. 

Who knows how long this subgenre will have a hold on us. Maybe, like Canadian summer, it will be a potent but short time in our lives. Perhaps Heated Rivalry season two will abandon the cottage in favor of the romance of Montreal at Christmas. Whatever the case, it’s a good moment to take a long sip of Tim Hortons coffee and make yourself comfortable in the nearest Muskoka chair. Summer won’t last forever.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the streaming home of Every Year After.