“Heated Rivalry” is here to make the yuletide gay

by Cláudio Alves

HEATED RIVALRY | © Crave / HBO Max

First of all, everybody please say thank you to the Canadian taxpayers – Thank you, Canadian taxpayers! With that out of the way, let’s all come together and celebrate one of the loveliest surprises of the year in television, slipping right in at the end of 2025 to queer up the holiday season.

Written and directed by Jacob Tierney, Crave’s Heated Rivalry adapts the first two books in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series of gay love stories in the world of men’s professional hockey. A good mix of angst and smut, like most projects born out of fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, the novels are a delivery system for romance more than they are great literature, but that’s alright. Sometimes, that’s exactly what the heart yearns for, what the body needs. And, after the first two episodes, it was hard to argue against notions that Heated Rivalry was little more than soft-core under a very thin layer of respectability. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the show has proven itself more interesting. It has also become an international phenomenon…

***!!!SPOILERS AHEAD!!!***

Those first two episodes – “Rookies” and “Olympians” – are a whirlwind of time jumps, spanning over a period of around six years in the lives of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, played by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, respectively. We meet them as teenage hockey players on the cusp of their professional careers, a Canadian perfectionist with a demeanor that suggests someone on the spectrum and the Russian hotshot with a cigarette dangling from his smirk. As far as meet-cutes go, it’s more than a little awkward. Part of it is intentional, part of it may be the product of somewhat cringe-worthy lines taken wholesale from the 2019 novel.

It’s the sort of thing that lives or dies in execution and, thankfully, the actors and their writer-director are up to the challenge. In line with many dramatizations of queer stories, much is made from averted gazes and aborted gestures, a ballet of tantalizing possibilities left unfulfilled under the closet’s looming shadow. Well, they’re only unfulfilled for a little bit because Heated Rivalry isn’t a program interested in teasing coquettishly from here to eternity. Though there’s no full frontal nudity, the show attacks the carnal connection between the characters head-on, using sex as a storytelling device, a shot of eros with a pathos chaser.

Their connection is exceedingly physical and the scenes don’t quite indicate the uncertainty of someone discovering fucking for the first time. This is a romantic fantasy, first and foremost. Still, Tierney and company achieve quite a lot with the torrid affair, stolen moments vibrating with glossy TV sensuality, some bold displays of queerness that strike me as more honest than they’ve been given credit for. Shane and Ilya fuck in the pauses of their life, the space between breaths. It’s an illicit thrill that’s gradually more than just a thrill, whose insularity is underlined by the time jumps and the lack of verbal communication.

Sex is their form of connection and their way of being themselves, being vulnerable in body, without the helplessness that comes with more emotional forms of honesty. This is especially true in regard to Shane, a character who, in those first episodes, provides a look at submissive sexual practices as a release and, in their own way, a liberation that asserts selfhood just as much as it allows for its temporary relinquishment. The hook-up connection also feels extremely gay and extremely of its era while eschewing the social media and app dominance that wouldn’t quite make sense for the two closeted characters. Sometimes, one opens themselves up for a virtual stranger, tenderness exposed in near absolute and, at the end of the night, we still don’t know each other’s names.

Not that Shane or Ilya are ever allowed to forget their names. After all, they are public figures moving within an environment famous for its homophobia and exultation of traditional masculinity. Truth be told, having read most of the Game Changers series since the show started airing, I’m not convinced Reid is that interested in writing hockey as a sport and the show follows suit. What’s more central is hockey as a culture, what pressures it posits, what it upholds and pushes aside, punishes, or pretends isn’t there - including rape culture and the “boys club” attitude that sustains it in later installments of the series. The titular rivalry is partly a reflection of two competitive personalities, partly a media narrative within the story, promoted by an industry where two players hating each other’s guts is a commodifiable violent delight.

Hockey butts here, dildo talk there, some corny jokes, some steamy passages, and the first two episodes conclude on a note of transgressive feeling. When a dynamic understood as purely physical starts to suggest something deeper, casualness becomes a deception comparable to the personas adopted on the ice and its repudiation is forbidden. Much of this comes across in Williams’ performance, whose stiffness and flat delivery deserve applause as character choices rather than criticism for perceived incompetence. It’s all in those looks, that deer-in-the-headlights reaction to an unexpected change or the character’s own feelings.

In summation, the platonic ideal for this romance trope with a dash of autistic insinuation that’s much better expressed in performance than on the page. Up to that point, I confess I was taking Storrie a tad for granted, perchance blinded by his charisma and… well, the hockey butt. But that’s preposterous, especially when one considers the Texan actor learned Russian for the role and, according to native speakers, does a great job at it. Still, his best material was to come in the fourth and fifth episodes – “Rose” and “I’ll Believe in Anything.” But first, a Stucky break. Well, technically, it’s Skip, but that MCU-ness is badly hidden.

Expanding a six-month narrative to around three years while condensing it into a fleet-footed 40-something minute runtime, “Hunter” adapts most of the first novel in Reid’s series. The third episode is quickly paced, sometimes feeling like more montage than drama, delineating the blossoming romance of Scott Hunter, a closeted hockey player for New York, and Kip, a smoothie shop worker with a waiter side-gig and higher education ambitions. Though he’s first-billed in all episodes, this is François Arnaud’s big chance to shine, playing equal parts the besotted hunk and a self-hating ball of anxious secrecy. It’s good work, though not as impressive as the show’s true leads. Robbie G.K. is cute as Kip.

What’s perhaps most important about this third chapter is an acknowledgment that the queer experience is far from monolithic. These behind-closed-doors furtive romances aren’t necessarily the norm, the DL lifestyle imposed, in these particular cases, by the circumstances the characters find themselves in. If the series continues, there’ll be further explorations through characters such as Kyle, a bartender whose queer experience is much more relatable than that of the hockey players main characters. These elements make sense in the milieu depicted, using real-world injustice as an obstacle for love and self-expression in a way that fits seamlessly into the romantic melodrama model Heated Rivalry embodies while providing a queer spin on it.

Moving on from “Hunter,” the two most recent episodes are where it’s at. Both negotiate the needs of two interlacing character studies with a sudden barrage of plot, plot, plot, as Tierney tries to concentrate a good percentage of the Heated Rivalry novel in the blink of an eye. “Rose” is a slap in the face in many regards, using the easy sexiness of the first few episodes to break the viewer’s heart – Shane and Ilya’s, too. How can you not love the opening montage, pairing the brutality on ice with some vigorous anal sex, setting the stage for a quiet afternoon in Boston when the camera finds a different side of its Russian romantic hero?

The entire thing treads the line between erotica and romance and comedy of social faux pas, as it becomes obvious that both lovers want more. I’m sorry, but the forced non-chalance with which Storrie delivers lines about a tuna melt or Shane’s ginger ale is hilarious, even as it reveals the soft romantic man hiding beneath macho indifference that, by this point in the story, is fooling absolutely no one. And yet, these boys are like the great actress characters in the TFE canon, lying to themselves all the way down, to the point where uttering a first name instead of an impersonal “Hollanov” is enough to trigger a panicked escape.

Returning to the behavioral focus of queer media, it’s impressive to see the extent to which all this is communicated in the spaces between lines of dialogue, given that so much of modern TV is designed for passive viewing. The performances reward Tierney’s approach, with Storrie really coming into his own as the self-aware lothario collapsing into himself, all while attempting to keep his cool on the outside. The whole thing escalates into an explosion of emotional avoidance to the sound of “All The Things She Said” – it’s a very Dolan-like needle drop and a good reminder that the director has worked with the French-Canadian enfant terrible.

Shane dives into the depths of comp-het as he starts dating Jennifer Lawre… I mean Rose Landry. Ilya sees it all, the undefined boundaries of their non-exclusive non-relationship starting to suffocate the bisexual Slav, and we’re treated to one more sex montage whose echoes of the episode-opener are difficult to ignore. Much of the camera choreography through Shane’s apartment is the same, yet passion is replaced by a sense of obligation. Rose emerges as that old cudgel of gay men-focused storytelling, where women appear as mechanical barriers to the endgame romance. Or does she?

“I’ll Believe in Anything” is quick to contradict that, with Tierney and Reid decidedly contradicting the trope and, instead, presenting the women in the men’s lives as their most supportive allies. There’s Sophie Nélisse’s Rose, but also Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova’s Svetlana, an old friend with benefits of Ilya’s that remains at his side through thick and thin. Heated Rivalry will not be fetishizing gay male figures through a heteronormative lens nor throwing its female characters under the bus. The adaptation emphasizes this by cutting out the one character – Ilya’s stepmother – that might encourage misogynistic readings of the text.

But this redemption of the supporting actresses in the Shane/Ilya romance is not the episode's focus. Instead, the hour structures itself around the transition from a purely physical liaison with unacknowledged emotional attachments to an outright romance between the protagonists. Many have already criticized the showrunners for delivering an episode without a single sex scene, but this thing is moving too fast to linger on those. Moreover, Tierney’s vision of carnality as a form of communication within the interpersonal drama pays off, justifying the lack of steaminess through a new foregrounding of verbal understanding between the players.

Storrie, in particular, is given some juicy material to sink his teeth into, including a Moscow interlude when Ilya must return home for his father’s funeral. Unable to bring himself to total openness, he confesses everything that’s going on inside to Shane, speaking in Russian. It’s a strange contradiction of a scene, the concrete truths lost in translation to the Canadian, yet the intimacy is crystal clear. So is the need, the ache, all in Storrie’s delivery. Another, earlier scene, finds them talking about their families for the first time, reconnecting after the breaking point of episode four, and it’s, again, the dom top that’s most vulnerable and reaching for a comfort neither man can yet articulate other than through an embrace.

Earnestness isn’t a fault, though many in the current media and critical landscape decry it as such. And as it reaches its final stretch, Heated Rivalry is nothing if not earnest, complete with a shocking injury and hospital bedside yearnings, all in prelude to a game-changing kiss as Scott outs himself on international television during the Stanley Cup celebration. To the sound of Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything,” the camera circles the actors and cutting unites the protagonist quartet. Here, the show does what real life has not, showing us a world with an out gay NHL player. Yes, the construction of the thing is inherently manipulative, but isn’t that true of any character-based work of visual art?

I was moved by this sentimental climax as much as I was excited by the steaminess of the first two episodes, and can only assume Tierney will bring these two threads of his strategies together for the season’s sixth and final episode – “The Cottage” – premiering next week, December 26th. Watching and re-watching this eruption of queer joy also made me reconsider what Jim Downs wrote for Slate about Heated Rivalry. In his article, he accuses the show of perpetuating conservative depictions of queerness, demanding more for us, as a community, than a story moving to the same speed as heterosexual melodrama that stops “at the closet door.”

While I find myself agreeing with many of Downs’ points in what refers to the totality of queer media, I’m also reminded of an old frustration. The conservatism of the Heated Rivalry screen romance is not an exultation or a defense, but a reflection of how such things exist within the milieu that’s being put on screen. It’s the society that’s conservative, not this story. And it’s not just hockey. Look at other major leagues, at football – which you Americans call soccer – and you’ll be hard pressed to find out gay players. So much so that the kiss at the end of episode five is as unprecedented within the narrative as it is beyond it.

Moreover, while Downs asserts that coming out isn’t an ending or a climax but a threshold, he fails to acknowledge that what is being depicted here is not the common experience, nor is it trying to be, and that a different goal need not be read as pernicious or a capitulation to conservatism. Why can’t queer artists and audiences indulge in the same romantic fantasy and forbidden love thrills as heterosexuals have been doing for ages? Why does every piece of queer media bear the responsibility of answering to something bigger than itself? Why can’t it exist on its own terms? Questions of the actors’ and the author’s sexualities add more to this hellfire, not to mention the whole catty questioning of whether a show directed by a gay man knew how gay sex worked.

I’m not saying that Heated Rivalry is above criticism nor that it's a masterpiece. Certainly not – don’t get me started on the budget constraints that lead to impersonal interior scenography, some of the other music cues, the default shallow focus, the restless camerawork, the lack of exploration on Shane’s identity as a biracial player and his latent eating disorder, etc. I just wish it were facing other kinds of criticism than the same song and dance of imperfect representation. For now, I’m content to appreciate it as a queer holiday treat whose flavor proved itself more complex than expected, even if the nutritional value remains questionable. It surprised me, alright, and I can’t wait to meet the Ottawa Centaurs whenever season two arrives.

And once again, for good measure, thank you to the Canadian taxpayers!

Are you watching Heated Rivalry? It’s streaming on Crave for Canadian audiences and on HBO Max in the States. It’s gradually expanding to more countries and platforms.