Ryan Reynolds had already bought a football club and put it on television, so Michael Bublé and Drew Scott called him before buying into a struggling junior hockey team. As Bublé tells it, the answer came in three words: don’t do it. That phone call sits in the first episode of Hometown Giants, a Prime Video docuseries about the Vancouver Giants of the Western Hockey League, where two famous owners want a championship and their players, most of them teenagers, want a shot at the NHL.

Bublé has relayed the rest of the conversation in interviews. Reynolds’s reaction, he said, was “What are you doing, idiots? You know what you’re getting into?” Bublé’s own explanation for ignoring him is a joke about national habit: “All Canadian celebrities, they buy a sports team, that’s just what we do.” The series is sold on that joke. Its own press material points somewhere else: at the people who have the most to lose.

What Hometown Giants is about

Hometown Giants is a sports documentary series from Prime Video’s Canadian slate, produced by Scott Brothers Entertainment with Amazon MGM Studios. It follows the Giants through a full season of major junior hockey, the level where players between sixteen and twenty compete for a place in the professional game. Prime Video’s synopsis puts the owners’ goal plainly: restore a team that has not won a championship since 2007.

The season it covers comes with a reset at the top. Before it began, the Giants hired Hnat Domenichelli as general manager, after six seasons running HC Lugano in Switzerland, and Parker Burgess as head coach, fresh from a Clark Cup title with Muskegon in the USHL. Prime Video promises the front-office side of that reset: the trades that reshape the roster, the decisions made under pressure, and a season it describes as being “on the edge”.

A crooner and a Property Brother in the owners’ box

Neither owner is new to the building. Bublé became a part-owner in December 2008, when a co-owner sold his stake and majority owner Ron Toigo, a friend since the 2006 World Junior Championships in British Columbia, offered it to him. His father, Lewis, came in alongside him. Scott, one half of HGTV’s Property Brothers and a Vancouver native, joined the group in September 2023 with a line that doubles as a mission statement: “Being an OG giant from Vancouver, I’m excited to come home! Big things to come.”

That history matters because of the format. Two men who have followed this club for years agreed to have a season of it filmed, and in an access series every bad night on the ice becomes material. That is why the Reynolds call carries weight: the one friend who knew what a documentary crew does to a club owner told them to walk away.

The players carry the real stakes

The owners sell the series. The roster is the reason to watch it. Prime Video’s own description of the players is unusually blunt for a press release: “They’re teenagers living away from home, finishing high school, navigating first relationships, and chasing NHL dreams they’ve built their lives around—even though only a few will ever make it.”

Two names come up in the platform’s summary. Ryan Lin, the team’s top prospect, faces the spotlight as the trade deadline approaches. Torretto Marrelli fights to stay with the club. Around them, rookies adjust to the speed of major junior hockey, veterans fight for ice time, injuries threaten the season, and a 15-day road trip tests the group away from home.

Lin’s season is already on the record. The right-shot defenceman led the Giants in scoring with 57 points in 53 games, was named captain after the trade deadline, and went 21st overall to the San Jose Sharks at the NHL Draft. He is listed at five-foot-eleven, small for his position, and he is heading to the University of Denver next. Watching the series now means watching a draft-year season whose ending, for one player at least, is public knowledge.

Why Prime Video built a hockey Welcome to Wrexham in Canada

The comparison with Welcome to Wrexham has followed this series since its announcement, and the Reynolds call makes it explicit. The difference is the age of the people on the ice. Wrexham filmed grown professionals fighting for promotion. Hometown Giants films teenagers whose professional careers have not started yet, in a league built to feed the NHL.

Prime Video unveiled the series at its Amazon Upfront in Toronto as one of six new unscripted Canadian originals. Brent Haynes, who runs original programming for the service in Canada, described the strategy as a search for gaps in the market: “On the originals side, we’re just looking for those grey spaces that we can fill within Canada.” Junior hockey is the gap this one fills. Amazon has decided it travels: the series drops worldwide, beyond the Canadian market that commissioned it.

The club’s history explains the hunger. The Giants won the Western Hockey League title in 2006 and the Memorial Cup, the national junior championship, in 2007 as tournament hosts. Since then they have reached the league final once, in 2019, and lost it in overtime of a seventh game. The franchise now plays in Langley, outside Vancouver, at the Langley Events Centre.

Hometown Giants is built on a trade the owners can afford and the players cannot. Bublé and Scott can ignore Reynolds and come out of a bad season with a story. A teenager who loses his spot at the trade deadline comes out with a different one. When the people paying for a championship are also the ones putting it on camera, who answers for the teenager the season leaves behind?

Hometown Giants: episodes, release date and where to watch

How many episodes are there? Six, released together rather than weekly.

When does it premiere? All six episodes arrive on Prime Video on October 16, 2026, worldwide, not only in Canada.

Is it scripted? No. It is an unscripted documentary series following the real Vancouver Giants roster, staff and owners during the 2025-26 season.

Who is in it? Owners Michael Bublé and Drew Scott, plus the Giants’ players, families and coaches, and a phone call to Ryan Reynolds in the first episode.

Who made it? Scott Brothers Entertainment with Amazon MGM Studios, as a Prime Video Canadian original.

Tags: Prime Video, documentary, Ryan Reynolds, Drew Scott, Hometown Giants, Michael Bublé