Icebreaker Spent 70 Weeks at Number One Before Netflix Came Calling. Now Alex Cooper Is Making the Series.
Hannah Grace's hockey romance earned its audience before any screen deal existed. Netflix just greenlit it. Call Her Daddy's founder is producing.
Netflix has ordered a series adaptation of Hannah Grace's Icebreaker. The announcement came June 15, 2026, at the Banff World Media Festival. Amanda Lasher is showrunning. Jade Bartlett wrote the pilot. And Alex Cooper, founder of Unwell Productions, is executive producing alongside Matt Kaplan and Meena Lefevre.
The book did not need the announcement to have an audience. Icebreaker spent 70 weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list before a single episode was approved. The deal followed the readers, not the other way around.
AT A GLANCE • Platform: Netflix • Based on: Icebreaker by Hannah Grace (Maple Hills, Book 1) • Showrunner: Amanda Lasher (The Bold Type, Gossip Girl) • Pilot written by: Jade Bartlett • Producers: Alex Cooper, Matt Kaplan, Meena Lefevre (Unwell Productions) • NYT bestseller: 70 consecutive weeks at number one • Source material: Maple Hills trilogy — Icebreaker, Wildfire, Daydream • Cast: None announced • Announced: June 15, 2026 — Banff World Media Festival |
What the book is
Anastasia Allen is a competitive figure skater training toward Olympic selection. Nate Hawkins is a collegiate hockey player aiming for professional status. When their programs are forced to share rink time, their schedules collide and so does everything else.
The structure is enemies-to-lovers. The setting, two athletes with legitimate stakes and limited patience for each other, is what gives it traction beyond the romance genre. Icebreaker is the first of three books in the Maple Hills series, followed by Wildfire and Daydream.
70 weeks at number one
A 70-week run at number one is not a launch spike. It is sustained word-of-mouth across more than a year of continuous readership. Icebreaker built that run before a streaming deal was on the table.
The hockey romance subgenre has its own audience infrastructure: NHL followers, college sports readers, and a BookTok community that has made athlete romance one of the most searched categories on the platform. Icebreaker landed at the center of all three. Netflix read that audience and moved.
Why Alex Cooper producing this matters
Alex Cooper launched Call Her Daddy as a podcast in 2018. In 2021 she signed an exclusive deal with Spotify reported at $60 million. She is consistently among the most downloaded podcasters on the platform.
Unwell Productions is her production company. Matt Kaplan, one of her co-EPs on Icebreaker, previously produced the To All the Boys franchise and XO, Kitty on Netflix via his production company ACE Entertainment. The production infrastructure around this series is not a first-timer arrangement.
Cooper's audience and the Icebreaker audience overlap directly. Both skew toward younger women who move between podcasts, social platforms, and streaming. This is not a studio guessing at who watches romantasy. This is a person with direct access to that audience deciding to make the show herself.
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What the Maple Hills trilogy gives Netflix
Icebreaker is the first of three books. Wildfire and Daydream are written, published, and have their own readership. If the series works, Netflix has two additional seasons of source material that already have proven demand.
The trilogy structure also gives the writers room a clear arc to work with from day one. That is a different position from adapting a standalone novel, where expansion requires new material and risks losing what made the original work.
WHAT WRITERS CAN TAKE FROM THIS • A sustained bestseller run is a different kind of proof than a launch week spike. 70 weeks at number one means the book found new readers continuously. That is word-of-mouth staying power, not marketing momentum. Netflix read that pattern and acted on it. • The athlete romance subgenre has audience infrastructure. Hockey romance is not a niche. It has a dedicated reader base that travels across BookTok, sports media, and streaming. Icebreaker is the right book to open that category on Netflix. • Creator-producers bring their audiences, not just their names. Alex Cooper did not attach her name to this project. She built a production company, acquired the rights, and assembled the creative team. The distinction matters when the show launches and she promotes it directly to millions of listeners. • Three-book source material changes the series conversation. Studios buy series with the intent to renew. When the source material already runs three books, the pitch for Season 2 exists on day one. That changes how a network thinks about initial investment. |
Plotting the full arc of two athletes who refuse to trust each other across an entire rink-sharing season is the kind of relationship structure that benefits from WriteO's Character Relationship Visualizer before the first scene is drafted.
Sources
Deadline — Netflix To Adapt Hannah Grace's Icebreaker For TV (June 2026)
Variety — Icebreaker Series Greenlit at Netflix, Amanda Lasher Set as Showrunner With Jade Bartlett and Alex Cooper Producing (June 2026)
Hollywood Reporter — Netflix Gets in the Hockey Romance Game With Adaptation of Hannah Grace's Icebreaker (June 2026)