Heated Rivalry: Episode 1, "Rookies"

This is the first installment of our weekly recaps of Heated Rivalry, the Canadian romance series that aired on HBO Max to great success in the United States in 2025. Future recaps will only be available to paid subscribers, but this premiere edition is available to all.

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Emily: I have become a big romance reader in the past couple of years, but I have never been particularly drawn to either books about men who love men or sports romances. We could probably psychoanalyze the reasons for the former if these articles were not, in fact, about a very good TV show, but my larger point is: I had never heard of Rachel Reid's Game Changers books until they became the basis for a TV show. Heated Rivalry seems to be primarily adapting the second book in the series – the first is about other characters entirely – and already, I'm a little obsessed. They just keep having sex! And playing hockey!

We are not going to wade into the whole "What's up with all the straight women who love mlm romance?" discourse in this, our very first recap, but the Heated Rivalry TV show nails something that I think speaks to why queer romance so often appeals to (mostly) straight people: tension. Like, yes, it's possible to do a romance about a man and woman who fuck, but the dramatic stakes become a lot harder to gin up unless you're just doing a riff on Romeo & Juliet again. Queer romance instantly carries some of that tension, even if it's set in a world sans homophobia (as a lot of wlw romances are), simply because we know that in our reality, queer people are still subject to a lot of structural prejudice and inequality. And Heated Rivalry is set in a world where the NHL is apparently called Major League Hockey and has a yearly Oscar-style awards show with nominees and stuff — but also a world where professional sports remain a deeply homophobic place, one that forces athletes to stay in the closet.

It's worth backing up half a step here to note that this series is about Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two very attractive hockey boys who keep finding themselves drawn together over the course of their last amateur seasons and then their first pro season. (Put a pin in the show's use of time; I'm already obsessed with it.) Though they play on different teams — Shane for Montreal and Ilya for Boston — their talent and seeming rivalry lead to plenty of photo ops and the like. And then they start making time for each other intentionally. From the steamy glances and banter, it's obvious they're both thinking it, and then...

Well, they're having sex. First, Ilya pleasures himself in a shower while Shane can't help but watch, and then they're blowing each other in a hotel room, and then they're blowing each other in another hotel room, and... suffice to say, there's a lot of sex in this pilot. Much more than in most!

It seems like the amount of sex in this show was its initial claim to fame before it became one of the biggest shows on TV right now, and yes, this is an abnormally large amount of sex for any TV show, much less one about two men who are having that sex. I both understand why this threw people — we're not used to this! — and a little annoyed that the sex wasn't immediately understood as the character development tool that it was. But it does seem like any discussion of Heated Rivalry has to begin with sex. So, Lily, what do you think about sex, both as a human institution and as depicted in the Canadian television series Heated Rivalry?

Lily: Hello, Emily! Boy, am I excited to discuss Canada's most valuable export, Heated Rivalry. Let's go, Canada!

I'll be blunt and say that the amount of sex in this show made me a little anxious going in. Not because I'm a prude — I mean, I am a little bit on an interpersonal level, but one of my favorite movies is David Cronenberg's Crash, so suffice it to say I can handle some sex in my art — but because so much of the discourse around Heated Rivalry, at least in the group chats I'm in, has been about the sheer amount of sex in the show, how cool it is that this show is mostly sex, and so forth. It made me worry that the show's sex would be... I don't want to say gratuitous, but a kind of fanservice. Sex for the sake of making people talk about how much sex the show has in it, not for the sake of character or aesthetics or theme.

How wrong I was! The sex scenes in Heated Rivalry's pilot are, as you mentioned, an exceptional means for some complex character development, particularly for my beloved disaster son Shane Hollander. He's in a complex position vis a vis his sexuality: he knows he's queer (and owns sex toys to that effect!) and is intensely attracted to Ilya, but he feels deep anxiety and shame about that attraction and the possibility it could be public, implicitly (at least in part) because he's already facing stereotype threat as a visible Asian Canadian player in an overwhelmingly white sport.

That's a lot of character to establish, and what impressed me about this episode is just how much of that comes across in the first few seconds of Shane's first liaison with Ilya. He jumps straight to giving Ilya head but then is stiff and anxious about having sex on the actual bed in the room, up to and including neatly folding his pants after Ilya goads him into taking them off. As a writer, I'm blown away by how efficient it all is. This is a show that knows how to use sex.

I think the sex scenes here also speak to another reason so many women, including straight women, love mlm romance: there's a fluidity to it that can only exist outside restrictive gender roles. I've given het romance novels a fair shake, and while I've enjoyed a number of them, they tend to be the ones that are least invested in making their characters stereotypes of Big Strong Emotionally-Repressed Man and Small Female Woman. Too much of the time (for my taste, at least), het romance can offload its characterization onto assumed gender roles, making its characters thin and one-dimensional. Shane and Ilya, on the other hand, are free to be fully rounded people with both masculine and feminine traits (as is true for most people in real life!) and with ambidextrous roles in foreplay and sex that don't map neatly onto the tropes of straight romance.

Speaking of Shane and Ilya: Emily, how are you feeling about our hockey boys so far? What's intriguing you about them? What about their lives do you want to see explored in more depth?

Emily: Well, as a woman who has been known to be attracted to men in my time, it must be said that these are very handsome boys who are... let's say realistically hot. That sounds like a weird compliment, but I want to explain it slightly more.

The past however many years of entertainment have too often given us supposedly ideal male specimens with the straight male gaze in mind, which is to say guys who are all muscled out to a degree that they don't seem at all human or approachable. They are he-men who are constructed — and I do usually mean constructed — with male viewers in mind, namely male viewers who might feel some insecurity about their realistic bodies that might have a bit of paunch or schlub to them. Think of essentially every Marvel superhero, and you'll get what I mean.

Of late, this has been changing, at least a bit. David Corenswet in Superman is realism hot, despite playing the superhero, and both Glen Powell and Michael B. Jordan have become major stars without tilting all the way into performing this alienating masculine perfection. These are all hot men who don't seem stacked to the gills with muscles atop muscles. And the "here are the guys; they have more muscles than they know what to do with" trend seems sort of cyclical too. Harrison Ford was incredibly built in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, to the degree that a tiny thread of that movie's promotional cycle was about how much he'd been working out, but if you see him in that movie now, you just see a guy who has clearly been working out but is not unrealistically jacked. And then, of course, he gave way to the Sylvester Stallones and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world. Our ideas of masculine perfection are always in a tug-of-war between what people who are attracted to men are (usually) attracted to and what straight men believe we should be attracted to, often built atop their own insecurities.

Shane and Ilya are, of course, played by absurdly good-looking actors, and they're both in incredible shape. But it's pro athlete physique, not superhero physique. They're two guys in their 20s who clearly take care of themselves but don't seem like they're endlessly injecting PEDs or whatever. And the fact that they seem like they have bodies you might see at the gym is key to why the first episode works, I think. It's clear showrunner Jacob Tierney (who wrote and directed every episode) has a deep understanding not just of what people who are attracted to men might want to see in an onscreen guy but in how to present a different, attractive onscreen man seeing that attractive man in turn. The shower scene where the two can't stop looking at each other is so important in this regard. We're watching them, but we're also watching them watch each other, and the way their eyes drift downward across each other's bodies toward what's just out of frame proves key to understanding the unlocking of desire between the two of them, especially when it comes to the far more repressed Shane. (I assume this show is going somewhere with Ilya being Russian, in re: that country's crackdown on the queers in the last couple of decades, but don't spoil me on that in the comments, please.)

Did I just talk about how the boys are hot? Yes, I did, but I put an intellectual gloss on it to seem less salacious. Hopefully.

This first episode is largely about Shane and Ilya, but we're also getting some inklings of who our supporting players will be, especially Nip/Tuck's Dylan Walsh, who is here as Shane's dad, a man who just seems happy to be along for the ride. Which supporting players are speaking to you at this early date?

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Lily: Emily, thank you for being willing to write six hundred words about how the boys are hot! As someone with the sexual orientation of "it's more convenient to just say lesbian even if I guess there are a couple exceptions around the edges," I personally am glad there is someone to offer boy hotness coverage around these parts. (None of the three to four men I've ever been attracted to had anything resembling Big Buff Boy physique, so I guess I'm in your court here!)

I'm really digging Shane's relationship with his mom, Yuna. There's a real and immediate sweetness to the way Hudson Williams and Christina Chang act around one another that's laced with just enough tension about Shane's role as a public figure and his, ahem, heated rivalry with a certain newly minted Bostonian that I suspect it'll be the source of much juicy drama later in this season. (Which is to say, yes, I caught the line where Yuna tells Shane to "fuck [Ilya]. Right up the butt." Not gonna lie, I think it would have been a pretty hacky joke in the hands of a lesser actor, but Chang sells it.) I'm intrigued by the fact that Shane is the more firmly closeted one of our two lovers despite the fact his loving, supportive family stands in stark contrast to Ilya's abusive father and (at best) financially ill-equipped brother, and I'm excited to see how Chang and Walsh play with that tension in their performances.

I'm also fascinated by Svetlana! It's a bit hard to tell at this point whether she's Ilya's girlfriend or just someone in a friends-with-benefits situation with him (I'm guessing the latter, but we'll see!). But in being personable and flirty and so many other things Shane typically is not, she's already bringing out a new side of Ilya. Plus, if the show keeps plowing through the 21st century at its current rate (we cleared two entire years just in episode one!), we'll run into Russia's large-scale homophobic state campaigns of the 2010s very soon, which I'm sure is going to lead Ilya — someone who's closeted, yes, though not as closeted as Shane (if that makes any sense), but also someone whose bisexuality may allow him to hide from the eyes of the press more easily — to make some difficult and messy choices vis a vis his two lovers.

One character I'm not vibing with at all, at least not yet, is François Arnaud's Scott Hunter. I'm told by my friends who are deep in Heated Rivalry fandom that Scott is a character from another book in Rachel Reid's Game Changers series, and, while he only makes a few appearances in this episode, it's clear that the creative team is very excited to show him off. I suspect I'm going to struggle with the whole interconnected-romance-series aspect of Heated Rivalry; it's the intensity and claustrophobia of the show's focus on Shane and Ilya that intrigues me here, and the more we cut away to protagonists of other books in the series, the more frustrated I bet I'm going to become.

But back to that timeline for a bit! One of Heated Rivalry's coolest formal choices is to put a ton of time jumps in each episode, such that just this pilot takes place between late 2008 and, I think, the middle of 2010. How are you feeling about the way the show's using time?

Emily: I love it!! As someone who now primarily thinks about TV in terms of making it, the casual leaps forward in time are exactly the sort of thing I might shy away from putting in a script, but here's Heated Rivalry, making it safe for all of us to treat each new scene like it's another season premiere, post-time jump. To be sure, Tierney is helped by the fact that he has extremely popular source material to play with here, but he's also frontloading the time jumps in a way plenty of other shows drawn from similarly popular source material have obscured.

If you've read Back to the Island, the Lost companion book Noel Murray and I published in 2024, then you've read me going long on the distinction between a romance and a love story, noting that romances are often about proximity and love stories about separation. Two people keep bumping into each other (perhaps literally) until they realize they belong together — and then they have to be ripped apart from each other and fight their way back into each other's arms somehow. And both romances and love stories typically have different relationships to time. The romance is usually ultra-compressed in some capacity because when you find The One, we want to believe the realization will happen in an instant. The love story usually sprawls across a vast amount of time because finding The One is different from loving that person. You know?

What I'm already intrigued by in Heated Rivalry is how liberally it borrows from both of these arbitrary categories made up by me, Emily St. James. It is unquestionably a story about two people who need to slowly but surely realize they belong together... but it also acknowledges that by tearing them apart all the time, they'll have time to recalibrate and reset to their "I can't be in love with that guy" priors, then have to seduce each other all over again. As such, time must pass. We'll see just how much across the course of the series!

Lily, one last important question for you: Are you going to read all six books? And preorder the seventh? Because I might. Also: When are we going to weigh in on the "Heated Rivalry is actually sapphic because the boys are nice to each other" discourse?

Lily: I always love learning about intensely cursed discourse secondhand, so thank you for that. Personally, I think Shane/Ilya is not sapphic owing to the fact that they're guys, but that's just my opinion.

We'll see about the books! My wife's read Heated Rivalry and really liked it; quoth her, "the writing was meh, but it really got me." I am kind of a prose snob and often struggle mightily with the (perfectly serviceable!) line-level writing in romance, so her note about the prose isn't exactly encouraging, but I am already so taken by my boys Shane and Ilya that a binge could well be in order.

Well, that wraps up week one of Heated Rivalry! Emily, it's been a pleasure. I hope you're as excited as me to see more unnervingly large hockey player butts on your screen next week.

Other thoughts we thought:

• I (Emily) will be covering most of this season, but I'm going to step aside for the episodes that feature Sophie Nelisse, a phenomenally talented performer whom I can't write about with any degree of critical objectivity because she stars in the show I write for. Somebody will spell me for the two episodes she's prominently featured in! —ESJ
• I haven't been especially spoiled on this show yet — though, uh, the basic requirements of the genre make spoilers kind of difficult — but I do know that it is using one of my absolute favorite period-appropriate songs later in the season. Here, we get Feist's "Sealion," and I wonder if the show got some sort of tax credit for using a Canadian song. —ESJ
• The limits of my knowledge of Canadian television extend to the term "Cancon," so I'm excited to go on this journey with all of you! —ESJ
• For some reason, every scene in which the characters spoke French made me act like I'd just seen a jump scare. —ESJ
• And for my part, I felt kind of like I was having a stroke at the "Crave Original" branding at the start. Definitely an "I know what those words mean individually, but..." kinda moment. —LO
• When the announcer at the hockey game in the show's first bit described Shane as, quote, "not the most sociable," I felt like I was watching a very polite hate crime. —LO
• The lengthy description of what kind of website YouTube is really helped me understand that we were watching (sigh) historical fiction. —LO
• I used the word blowjob four times in my notes on this episode, which is both way more times than I've ever used it in notes on any other episode of television and also, honestly, feels like an undercount here. —LO
• I need everyone to understand I think the butts are good. –ESJ

A Good Song

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