Heated Rivalry Scores On Passion Yet Feels Cautious

Jacob Tierney’s show Heated Rivalry yokes lust and envy between two men into irresistible pleasure. Its trajectory, a quick burst, is immense. Even before release, it snowballed from being a small Canadian show on Crave to one of 2025’s biggest behemoths, eventually picked up by HBO Max. Sky Atlantic acquired it for the UK. It sent straight women into a tizzy, cementing itself as a Boys' Love sensation no one saw coming. What about the show is such a hit with cis women? Is it the bottomless yearning, the reciprocity, the consensual fantasy of it all? Gay smut throws off performance pressure and objectifications in desire. Rather, it’s more equalising. Perhaps, therein lies the appeal.

Whatever be it, Heated Rivalry took smut and ran with it. The show was swiftly hailed for interrupting ice hockey hyper-masculine spaces with gentleness. Instagram, X and all social media platforms exploded with reels and fan edits. Think pieces heralded it, to quote The New York Times, as “gay culture’s next frontier”. Stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie catapulted to global frenzy, hogging every magazine, talk show and award show in North America. They drew the most online traction around the recent Golden Globes. Adapted from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, the show follows Montreal player Shane Hollander (Williams) and Russian player Ilya Rosanov (Storrie) between 2008 and 2014. The time leaps often verge on the erratic and implausible. There’s not much rink action, but plenty intimacy as the rivals spar, flirt and make out. Even the professional rivalry barely registers, despite being an early front.

Heated Rivalry is as much wish-fulfilment as a keening, erotically-loaded escape. The sex is provocative, charged and teasing. It’s unabashed and totalising, the very driving engine. Ilya, haughty and mischievous, knows how to firmly clasp Shane. No elaborate courtship exists here. Minutes into the first episode, the pair hook up. It’s an alluring dance to which Shane steps up quick. Tierney stretches out the sex scenes, yet barely ventures into the explicit. For all the endless display of toned butt, certain tasteful boundaries are set, with neither actor flashing too much. Waxed bodies dominate the screen without being too risqué. Instead, we get impeccable positioning and perfect arcs—a carefully drawn map of seduction and release. Bodies are pounded into delirious satisfaction. Most have been disarmed by the sex, but few detractors chipped in. Jordan Firstman told Vulture, “It’s not how gay people f*ck. There’s so few things that actually show gay sex.” On an Instagram post, François Arnaud, who plays Scott in the show, commented, “Is there only one way to have ‘authentic’ gay sex on TV? Should the sex that closeted hockey players have, have to look like the sex that sceney LA gay guys have?”

The show traverses the relationship from the sexual to the emotionally frank and tender. There’s no room for the latter because both initially deny themselves a future. Neither can fathom their equation progressing beyond sexual need. The fear of consequence is so abrasive that it denies dignity and safe hope. The duo tread delicately in the open, shifting between posturing hostilities. But they forge a private language, cues darting across the room. They take cis aliases (Lily and Jane) for texting. Sexual tension has rarely been as combustible as it’s in a sweat-gleaming post-workout session on the show. A bottle being shared, fleeting touch in the exchange, Ilya’s winks and Shane’s nervously stealing glances—these index the years of tussle and yearning between them. The erotic heat is so immediate that the all-encompassing the empty public space can barely hold it. Williams and Storrie radiate off-the-charts chemistry, propping up scenes beyond faintly outlined characters.

Yet Heated Rivalry doesn’t really break new ground. You might ask if that’s a mandate. Surely, not every queer film/show has to stake new terrain, speak to the ins and outs of queer loneliness. However, Reid’s material is rent with gaping blind spots. It’s clearly riffing off fanfiction, whilst being distended from specificities of queer existence. Hiding and denial are easy fodder for such narratives. The concentration unto Shane and Ilya generates undeniable passion. There’s an emotional velocity fuelling the time-leaping episodes. The two are separated, come entwined, pulled apart again. Reconciliation and distance only intensify the romance. These pangs give a push-pull, rooting us in withheld ecstasy. Through it all, ardour for the other endures. But the wider world reflects in bare glimpses. Years fly by, but the men find no other ancillary interests or casual hookups. Shane is wary of opening up. Unlike Ilya, who’s far more confident in his body, he’s fidgety, masks and mutes thrusting responses and feelings. Of course, both are flighty around coming out, though stakes are much higher for the Russian. For Ilya, it’d mean never being able to return home.

There’s no examination of ecosystems, institutions and families putting identities on duress. Fatigue creeps into Heated Rivalry’s very narrative inclinations. Coming-out is the destination; public legibility the be-all of queerness. The gaze, no matter how passionately keyed into desire, feels limited, incurious as to the two outside their relationship. Ilya’s family and life in Russia gets summed up in an otherwise wrenching monologue. It becomes his confession of love to Shane. A third-episode pivot to another closeted player Scott (Arnaud) and his covert romance is daring and does have a sweet, rousing payoff. It’s when Scott publicly embraces his queerness that Shane and Ilya are emboldened. Their faux girlfriends turn out the strongest allies. As warm and genial it all is, women’s roles here are clipped to support system. The same holds true for Kip, Scott’s partner.

Heated Rivalry rides on its actors stoking infinite lethal charisma. It surely knows how to design memorable moments. In the fourth episode, the locking of stares between Shane and Ilya in a club wields a delicious dagger-jab of hurt and jealousy, set to t.A.T.u’s lesbian anthem “All The Things She Said”. Their lusty games are exquisite. The cottage retreat finale brims with delicacy. Nevertheless, Heated Rivalry rolls time too pat and hazily. The performances spark in scenes, whereas a holistic lack prevails. Its excess sex, though thrilling, cannot wholly disguise a traditionalist, bashful heart.