Jacob Tierney’s adaptation of Rachel Reid’s novels has become a streaming sensation on both sides of the border, trading the ice-rink codes of professional hockey for something more carnal. But beneath the sculpted bodies and furtive encounters lies a more troubling question: when does queering masculinity become just another form of consumption?
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
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“The hockey drama — adapted from an erotic romance novel for the Canadian streaming service Crave — just ended its first season on HBO Max and has left gay men crying at watch parties that feel more like 19th-century religious revivals. If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical,” says Jim Downs, the author of Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, in his review for The New York Times.
There is a certain kind of television that arrives trailing its own mythology, wreathed in advance praise and social media fervour, certain of its cultural moment before the first frame has flickered to life. Heated Rivalry, the Canadian import that landed on HBO Max on 28 November, is precisely this sort of production—slick, confident, and armed with the knowledge that desire, particularly when packaged in the gleaming bodies of professional athletes, remains reliably marketable.
The premise unfolds with the inevitability of a well-rehearsed play: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a Canadian hockey star carved from the familiar template of stoic masculinity, finds himself entangled with Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), his Russian rival whose presence on the ice ignites something that cannot be contained within the ritualised violence of sport. Their encounters are furtive and combustible, shot through with the kind of mutual antagonism that tips, with clockwork precision, into carnal urgency. This is television that knows its audience intimately—bodies are sculpted to geometric perfection, tempers flare on cue, and consummation is never deferred for the sake of narrative suspense.
The numbers tell their own story, and it is one of considerable commercial triumph. In Canada, Heated Rivalry has achieved the distinction of becoming Bell Media’s Crave platform’s most-watched original series in its history. Across the border, HBO Max has positioned it as the streaming service’s top-performing non-animated acquisition since its 2020 inception, and comfortably among the year’s most successful scripted debuts. A second season is commissioned; a third hovers tantalisingly in discussion. Particularly notable is the substantial female viewership—a demographic fact that suggests the spectacle of hyper-masculinity, especially when queered and made safely consumable, retains its magnetic properties.
Jacob Tierney, the creator behind the distinctly Canadian comedies Letterkenny and Shoresy, has adapted Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels with evident ambition. There are gestures, particularly in the later episodes, towards weightier themes: the suffocating codes of professional sport, the intersections of repression and nationalism, the particular cruelties of living bifurcated lives under the glare of public scrutiny. In our current moment—when queer rights face renewed assault, when masculinity itself seems perpetually in crisis—these resonances might have offered genuine insight.
Yet the series never quite commits to the discomfort such explorations would require. The premiere episode, in particular, feels less like serious character excavation than a handsomely produced throwback to late-night cable’s golden age of soft-core aesthetics: heavy on physical friction, remarkably light on psychological texture. Chemistry is asserted rather than earned, declared through heated glances and proximity rather than built through the accumulation of genuine intimacy. Interior lives are sketched in the broadest strokes—troubled family here, cultural displacement there—always in service of the next collision, the next removal of clothing.
What Heated Rivalry ultimately offers is a curious paradox: a story about forbidden desire that feels oddly safe, rebellion packaged for maximum palatability. The show borrows liberally from Queer as Folk‘s unapologetic sexuality, Fellow Travelers‘ historical sweep, and—perhaps less flatteringly—the testosterone-soaked melodrama of the short-lived Playmakers. What it produces is watchable, occasionally compelling, and rarely surprising.
The tragedy, if one can call it that, is the missed opportunity. Beneath the gleaming surfaces lies a more interesting story about what happens when identity becomes performance, when the very bodies that grant men power become prisons of expectation. But Heated Rivalry seems content to admire those bodies from multiple flattering angles rather than interrogate what they contain or conceal.
It confirms, with considerable production value and demographic success, what our culture has long understood: we remain endlessly fascinated by watching beautiful men collide, whether on ice or in bedsheets. The spectacle is undeniably effective. Whether it amounts to anything more substantial than entertainment remains an open question—one the series itself seems uninterested in answering.
Read GAY45 Best Queer Films, Series and Documentaries of 2025
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Available on HBO Max.
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