Heated Rivalry 101: Why This Gay Hockey Romance Has Got The World Hot and Bothered

(SPOT.ph) As a critic, you often get the sense that the last two months of the year mean movies have to meet a certain quota. Once the studios have released their summer blockbusters, it’s time to trot out their Oscar bets for qualifying runs before their wide releases over the lean first few months of the year.

TV and streaming series usually stay silent this time of year. But not in 2025. Over Thanksgiving, Netflix released the first batch of Stranger Things’ finale season episodes, with subsequent drops timed for Christmas and New Year’s eve. Prime Video will be dropping the premiere episode of their hit video game adaptation Fallout in mid-December. Meanwhile, up in snowy Canada, streamer Crave released the first two episodes of their own IP-driven show, a little gay hockey romance titled Heated Rivalry, to a reception akin to a detonated atomic bomb on November 28.

To say that Heated Rivalry went viral is akin to an understatement—it’s more like the show bust down the door that was guarded by prestige TV and liberated an underserved fan base. Within minutes of each Friday episode dropping (there have been four so far), obsessive viewers were releasing fan edits on TikTok, producing episode-length reaction videos on YouTube, creating memes on X and Threads. Originally picked up by HBO Max only for release in the US and Australia, viewer demand instantaneously surged across the world.

And now for the good news: HBO Max has picked up licensing rights to finally air Heated Rivalry across Asia, which means Philippine viewers will finally get a chance to see what has so many fans across many international datelines hot and bothered. But here’s a comprehensive, deep-dive primer to make sure that you know what you’re getting yourself into when the show hits local screens starting December 19.

Heated Rivalry follows the secret, torrid affair between two archrival ice hockey team captains, Russian powder keg Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and studiously responsible Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams). The affair begins soon after they are both drafted as rookies into their respective teams, lasting for years. (As of the fourth episode, they’re on their 8th year together!) The pilot episode alone zips across many seasons of hockey play and past major career landmarks; you would be forgiven for contracting a case of narrative vertigo. That is, when you’re not busy battling the sweats from those explicit sex scenes.

The emotional stakes are set up quickly too. Not only are Ilya and Shane carrying on an affair within the toxic, hypermasculine environment of professional sport, they’re also battling personal circumstances that leave them deathly afraid of getting outed. Ilya is caring for a father (Yaroslav Poverlo) slowly sinking into dementia back home, with a deadbeat brother (Slavic Rogozine) who is constantly pressuring him for monetary support, piling financial incentive onto a culture notorious for homophobia.

Shane, meanwhile, is facing the unique pressures of being one of the few prominent Asian-Canadian players in the sport. And so he feels he has to model perfection in game play and masculinity at all times; as he tells movie star Rose Landry (Sophie Nelisse) in the fourth episode, there was one other Asian kid in his grade school, and “I think the other kids forgot to make fun of me because I had a Western last name.” (Plus, Shane is on the autism spectrum, as book author Rachel Reid has stated, a canon addition that series creator Jacob Tierney and actor Hudson Williams have taken note of.)

Yes. Heated Rivalry is based on the second book of a six-book series titled Game Changers written by the Canadian New York Times bestselling author Rachel Reid (it’s a pen name: Her real name is Rachelle Goguen) who, according to her website, writes “cute smut about hockey players and other people.”

From a creative perspective, it makes sense to adapt the second book first. Ilya and Shane’s story spans two books, and so the potential is greater for a richer, multi-season arc. But it is also apparent to book fans that the events of the first book casts a long shadow over the events of Heated Rivalry. And so the third installment is a bottle episode that veers away from Ilya and Shane’s clandestine hookups to focus on the story of New York Admirals captain and hockey statesman Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) as his pre-game rituals bring him into contact with the great love of his life, a juice bar barista named Kip Grady (Robbie G.K.). Like Ilya and Shane, Scott is deeply closeted, and much of the conflict of this inaugural novel stems from Scott dragging the openly gay Kip back into the closet for the sake of their relationship.

Sharp-eared fans of the books have also noticed that showrunner Tierney dropped an introduction in the fourth episode of the lead character of the third book, Tough Guy: a hard-as-nails enforcer named Ryan Price who keeps getting traded to different teams. Tierney’s game plan (no pun intended) seems to be taking shape: Hook viewers with the longest-running story of the series, while creating openings for other characters within the Game Changers universe to have their own adaptations.

Much fan focus has understandably fallen on the two leads, who share backstories with startling commonalities. Storrie, who plays Rozanov, is a 25-year-old native of Odessa, Texas, who was waiting tables in Los Angeles when he auditioned for the role of the bisexual Russian hockey player. At that point, the biggest entry in his IMDb page was playing the inmate who fatally stabs Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck at the end of Joker: Folie a Deux, thus taking on the mantle of The Joker.

Williams meanwhile is a 24-year-old who hails from British Columbia, born of a Korean mother and a British-Dutch father. Like Storrie, he was waiting tables at the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Italian restaurant chain The Spaghetti Factory when he got the call to audition. His biggest claim to fame before Heated Rivalry were all the short films he did as a drama student and server—most of which have popped up on YouTube in the wake of his newfound fame. Williams has made no secret of his wish to play the later evolution of the Robin character, Nightwing. (It would seem being a part of the DC Universe was a goal that Connor Storrie achieved first.)

Tierney is a Canadian showrunner who cut his teeth on the sitcom Letterkenny, about the descendants of Irish immigrants in a rural Ontario town as they interact with the community’s other denizens, which started life as a YouTube series and then eventually went on to run for 12 seasons. He also went on to produce four seasons of the spin-off, Shoresy. Not surprisingly, hockey figures heavily in the plotlines of both sitcoms. Tierney is also an out queer man, and he stated in an interview with the online news outlet Toronto Life that “if someone else options [Heated Rivalry], I’ll be devastated.”

Heated Rivalry is not different so much as it harkens back to the root form of the subgenre. According to film critic Roy Vives Anunciacion, these same-sex romances were triple-X explicit when they started out as yaoi novels published in Japan. When yaoi made the transition to manga comics, then manhwa in Korean and manhua in Chinese, they became less raunchy, finally leading to the sanitized Boy Love (or BL) TV and streaming adaptations which came out of China and then spread to the rest of Far East Asia.

Not to get too deep in the reeds here, but it’s interesting to note that yaoi were usually marketed to a female audience (fujoshi in Japanese), with stories that focused on emotional connection and sexual intimacy. And that’s what Heated Rivalry gives its audience—once you get past the bald-faced depictions of gay sex, you start to notice more subtle cues: an adoring look during a bathroom confrontation, or maybe someone will wake up from a nap first and look at his partner as if he can’t believe how lucky he is. (And—mild spoiler—don’t get me started on tuna melt and ginger ale because I will talk your ear off on their symbolic significance if you let me!)

There is also a visual road map to Shane and Ilya’s trysts: their relationship evolves from stolen glances in harshly lit gyms to shadowy fumblings in dark hotel rooms to a languorous afternoon encounter in a sunlit, all-glass home. The point is, these sex scenes move plot and character development along the way song numbers do in musicals. And unlike the sex scenes in a slice-of-life series like Looking or a period miniseries like Fellow Travelers, Heated Rivalry’s aren’t framed by tragedy or crafted to make a statement; they are focused solely to make you feel the romance. As Tierney told Toronto Life, “There’s a tendency in queer art to focus on real tragedies. Sometimes it feels like we’re still telling stories about the McCarthy era or the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We deserve to have a gay show that is sexy and horny and fun.”

When media outlets first started asking about the lead actors’ sexualities, Tierney squashed that line of questioning immediately. During an interview with showbiz newsmagazine Xtra, the showrunner said, “I don’t think there’s any reason to get into that stuff. I’ll tell you something about the casting of both of these roles. You can’t ask questions like that when you’re casting, right? It’s actually against the law. So what you have to gauge is somebody’s enthusiasm and willingness to do the work.”

When both lead actors echoed Tierney’s sentiments, gay American influencers pounced, saying that this was another instance of already scarce gay roles going to straight actors. Internet personality Blakely Thornton, whose hot takes on pop culture have earned him almost half a million followers across his social media platforms, put it most bluntly: “The idea of two heterosexual actors gaining traction and credence for heightened, soapy homosexuality simply would not sit right with me... In a world full of lollipops, rainbows and lack of systemic homophobia, great! Straights can play gay!... But no, we live in the upside down, we live under a diet Nazi racist bigot. So if I’m gonna watch a homoerotic Red Shoe Diaries on ice, these two actually better be motherf**kin’ gay!”

A week later, gay actor and comedian Jordan Firstman, who appears as a gay stylist in the HBO comedy I Love LA, called out Heated Rivalry as “just not gay,” saying it was about “two straight hockey players pretending to be gay and f***ing.” In response, star François Arnaud, who came out as bisexual in 2020, shot back, “Is there only one way to have ‘authentic’ gay sex on TV? Should the sex that closeted hockey players have look like the sex that sceney L.A. gay guys have?”

Criticism has even come from the world that Heated Rivalry is set in. When Hudson Williams said in an interview with Forbes Magazine that he hoped his character would be one that a lot of people would relate to and connect with, Brock McGillis, who in 2016 became professional hockey’s first out gay player, chimed in with a sobering assessment: “It’s probably more likely to have an adverse effect,” McGillis told the LGBTQ news site Pink News. “And I hate to be negative because I really enjoy the show. But I also don’t believe that many hockey bros are going to watch it. And I don’t think, if they are watching it, they’re talking about it positively.”

Which makes you wonder, what controversy will Heated Rivalry stir up in a heavily Catholic country like the Philippines? Whatever it is, it’s sure to make the experience of watching the show even more delicious.

So what is the takeaway from the success of Heated Rivalry? Since the two-episode premiere on November 28, the show has become Canadian streamer Crave’s number one original series debut, increasing the platform’s viewership by nearly 400% in its first seven days. Not surprisingly, Crave greenlit a second season only four episodes into its debut season. Meanwhile, Harlequin, the original publisher of the books, saw their stocks sell out fast in north America (good luck trying to order them on Amazon), and HBO Max, after seeing the show surge to the top of its internal charts in the US and Australia, widened its distribution footprint across the world.

What writer and critic Ali Lockhart hopes is that the show’s spectacular reception will finally convince Hollywood executives to respect romance, a billion-dollar industry and a genre that accounts for nearly a quarter of adult book sales in America. As Lockhart wrote in her Instagram, “When [adaptations] happen, particularly if it’s of work with an already-dedicated fanbase, the response is electric; think of Bridgerton. Romance fans are desperate—we are begging—for more adaptations, and I don’t know how many more times it has to succeed outrageously before Hollywood starts taking notice.”

For his part, Tierney has another diagnosis for Hollywood’s lack of respect for the genre. “It’s pure misogyny,” he told Toronto Life. “Romance is something that mainly women consume, so it’s not given the same level of discourse.”

Which Lockhart happily cops to: “Romance readers are pretty used to being disregarded by, well, everyone as frivolous or shallow, but we’re frivolous or shallow with lots of money to spend, which is what’s propping up a lot of the publishing industry.” Too often, romance is used as a backstop for more serious plotlines in everything from comic book movies to prestige TV to police procedurals. But that shouldn’t be the case, according to Lockhart: “Why are there forty-six CSI shows but ONLY ONE LIKE THIS? The success of this show—the early onslaught of fanaticism—blows open a lot of doors that filmmakers and television executives were unwilling to even peek into. Look, we’re screaming. We showed up for this. Give us more.”
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Heated Rivalry starts streaming on HBO Max in the Philippines on Friday, December 19.