Isla Moon pitched her idea in Cannes and got told, more than once, that it was pretty much impossible. So the 25-year-old Canadian OnlyFans creator did what she’s made a habit of doing when the industry says no: she built it anyway, personally financing more than $4.5 million into Reel Rivals, a reality competition show featuring adult entertainers deep-sea fishing off the coast of Miami. It premieres on UK Amazon Prime September 3.
Moon wanted to expand into mainstream entertainment and kept getting rejected by casting producers the moment they found out what she did for work. “I got so tired of being told no that I decided to make my own seat at the table,” she said. One producer she’d previously worked with told her point-blank that the concept was basically impossible. That producer no longer works with her, and the show he doubted is now launching on one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world. Talk about vindication.
Fishing wasn’t a random hook, either. Moon says it’s been a part of her life and content for years, and she built the show specifically around creating mainstream opportunities for adult entertainers rather than just picking a gimmick that would generate headlines. Her own summary of the concept is disarmingly simple: “Pornstars fishing, lol. That’s how I usually explain it to them because it gets people to ask questions and makes them a bit shocked when they hear that.” The series follows adult performers sport fishing for sharks, sailfish, and barracuda off Miami, layered with confessionals, mini games, and the kind of personality-driven footage designed to show audiences who these creators actually are outside their online work. Moon’s pitch for why it stands out doubles as a pointed observation about the existing fishing content landscape: “A lot of the fishing content out there is created by boys, but what about glam? What about the fashion?”
Keeping the show sexy enough to match its premise while staying inside mainstream streaming standards required real on-set calibration. Moon recounts one swimsuit-changing scene with performer Cherie Deville where a producer, trying to find the right take, asked her to adjust her suit “a bit more this time,” prompting Deville to deadpan, “Do you want me to get naked?” and the entire room to collectively, blushingly say no. It’s a small moment, but it captures the unusual production challenge of making a show that’s suggestive enough to justify its premise without tipping into content that would sink its Amazon Prime distribution entirely.
The shoot wasn’t without some chaos. Neighbors repeatedly called police on the production despite valid filming permits, forcing Moon to hire her own on-set officer just to manage the situation. Someone she says turned out to be perfectly pleasant, if visibly unprepared for the cast he was assigned to protect. The bigger scare came on day one of actual fishing, when hours passed without a single catch, and Moon watched her tournament-format schedule threaten to collapse entirely. “If I go out on the ocean and I don’t catch any fish, we don’t have an episode,” she said. Relief arrived at sunset, when the season’s first-ever sailfish finally bit. By the final day of a month-long shoot featuring 12-hour days with a crew of 40 to 50 people, Moon says the scale of what she’d built genuinely hit her for the first time as she stood for a group photo with the team that helped her pull it off.
Under the novelty premise, Moon frames the show’s real purpose as more of a corrective. “I want people to understand that we’re actual humans first of all,” she said. “People forget we’re humans behind a screen.” Her hope isn’t to convince anyone that adult performers deserve respect they don’t already have. She’s clear that they’re already smart, funny, and capable business operators. It’s about giving audiences the chance to actually see that, rather than staying flattened into the narrow box the industry usually gets reduced to.