"This Is Such a Bad Idea": A Recap of Heated Rivalry, Episode 1
It was NOT a bad idea. Promise.
Come on in to the Internet’s hottest club: Heated Rivalry. It. Has. Everything. Chiseled jawlines, panting, hockey sweat, muscles, and that thing where two people who think they’re not allowed to be in love suddenly want nothing more than to lick each other from head to toe. It’s racy and romantic; intense and intimate; addictive and attractive as all hell. So many conversations about this series include, “Oh, but it’s much richer than you think,” and yes, that is true, and I have caught myself giving that caveat as well. Because it is! But you know what? Who cares if it weren’t? It doesn’t have to be! It doesn’t need to be anything more than Hot Horny People Catching Feelings; it’s still worthy entertainment and escapism. The fact that it does have extra layers is a bonus but not a prerequisite. Romance as a genre is so often placed at the bottom of the totem pole automatically, so much so that people are conditioned to defend their interest rather than celebrate it in uncomplicated bliss the same way people fete other novels. No one is asking readers to explain why they’re reading sweeping historical sagas, or books about men and their middle-aged masturbatory ennui and creeping depression, so why should anyone have to justify wanting to immerse themselves in love and lust and pleasure? And why does the world play into the notion that the only people enjoying this must be horny and lonely? Screw that. Pun intended.
If you did not know: Heated Rivalry is a six-episode series based on Rachel Reid’s man-on-man romance series, of which it is the second. The first, Game Changers, is covered in episode three as a standalone and then as part of episode five. Bless our neighbors to the north, whose kindness our nation really does not deserve right now: Canada produced this show and dropped it on its streamer Crave, before letting HBO import it (the two have an existing relationship; when we lived in Vancouver, we watched a LOT of stuff on Crave, like Hacks). Please send them a hearty thank-you for giving this to us without a whiff of a tariff. The sex scenes are aplenty, and they don’t shy away from letting these men go to town on each other — nor should they — but they are extremely carefully shot so that you never see genitalia. That intimacy coordinator, the actors, and the entire production team did really thoughtful work here to pump up the steam and the chemistry without making the guys do full-frontal.
I watched Heated Rivalry before I read the book, and the adaptation is faithful to its most memorable dialogue and mostly does an excellent job distilling and communicating the plethora of inner monologues, thanks also to the hard work of its actors. It also centers a lead character who is autistic, though it does so silently. Reid confirmed that she modeled Shane Hollander after her own sons, whom she realized were neurodivergent after the book was published, so he never labeled himself as such (and she reckons he wouldn’t have understood that about himself at that age anyway). Actor Hudson Williams took that to heart and folded in aspects of his autistic father’s personality and mannerisms. I didn’t know any of this when I watched the first time, and it’s a brave choice because a lot could be written off as wooden acting until you really look at the subtle things Williams is doing with it. So it’s been informative and rewarding to go back through and see it now, and I think it’s great that the show’s creative team ran with it.
Here’s the character rundown: Shane Hollander (Williams) is the reserved, hot, shy Golden Child of North American hockey; Ilya Rozanov, played to glum perfection and with astonishing accent and linguistic work by Connor Storrie, is the brash, hot, cocky import from Russia. They’re scouted at the same time, drafted at the same time, and instantly pitted against each other by a league desperate for a marquee rivalry. It is, in essence, “What if Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin have been in love this whole time,” as they debuted simultaneously in 2005. Sid was The Boy Next Door, Ovi was the growling bruiser, and people bought into it and loved or hated them. For the record, Crosby somehow still looks boyish, and Ovechkin suddenly looks like Randy Quaid. Also for the record, I guess: Ovi is married with kids and Crosby has never shared his personal life, which naturally has spawned rumors, although I have no idea if Pittsburghers have fuel for those or if people just make lazy assumptions because he’s not constantly, like, dating a parade of Naders or Culpos or Miss Universes or whatever. Honestly, it’s no one’s business. Gay or not, pansexual or asexual or bisexual or ANYsexual, just do your thing, Sid, whatever it is.
Williams and Storrie have embarked on a tireless press tour in support of Heated Rivalry that has been wacky and joyful and brimming with personality, the most striking takeaway from which has been their genuine affection for each other, both as humans and as partners in storytelling and surreal global insta-fame. (They got matching “Sex Sells” tattoos.) But with that of course comes the dark side of fandom that wants — to an unhelpful degree — for them both to be queer, to be in love for real, to read into everything in search of proof. Showrunner Jacob Tierney came out in vehement support of it being completely irrelevant who either of these boys sleeps with in real life, and Storrie was very kind and diplomatic about it to The Cut (the quote is in the aforelinked article). They seem like such happy angels right now and I badly want to bubble them up and protect them from what can curdle this experience — things I fully believe tainted Outlander for Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe, for example, whose fans at one point became actively angry at them and their various significant others for what they believed was LYING about their true relationship and possible secret babies. I hope Storrie and Williams can hang onto this as a positive experience and that the zeal doesn’t turn any of it dark.
I was going to cover the first two episodes in one swoop, because they’re such sexy fun together, but this got long all of a sudden. There’s a lot of meat on this bone and people like to gnaw on it, puns not intended, FINE, PUNS INTENDED. I also wrote “intented” at first and how’s that for a slip. So let’s just start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, and take it one at a time. It’s probably gonna get explicit in here, but we’re all adults, so. Gird your loins.
Episode 1: Rookies
This show leaps through time and space — it and the book cover a period of about 8 years — and this first episode, as advertised, spans the two-plus years from when Ilya and Shane met at 18 to the end of their first NHL seasons. Whoops, MLH, or Major League Hockey, because we can’t run afoul of the hockey lords by using real team names. They never call it the Stanley Cup, either; it’s just The Cup. I appreciate that they didn’t try to come up with a fake name for that. My friend Carrie asked if it’s weird, as a sports fan, to have made-up teams in here and it IS kind of distracting. The New York Admirals? The Boston Raiders (who were the Bears in the books)? The Montreal Metros? They were the Montreal Voyageurs in the books and that’s way better than Metros; that was once apparently a real minor league hockey team, so somebody must have run into clearance issues. But Montreal Metros just sounds like they’re celebrating public transportation.
Also, I learned that they designed the logos as innuendos based on who was wearing them, which is HILARIOUS and you have to see them: