If you want to measure American cultural regression, take a snapshot of how we are reacting to what’s lighting up screens, big and small, these days.
Exhibit A is the $7 million in ticket sales for the opening weekend of the vapid propaganda piece, “Melania,” one of the strongest openings for a documentary in over a decade. Exhibit B is the national handwringing (not to mention the expressions of confused racist jingoism) that preceded Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language lovefest at the Super Bowl.
And then there’s the extent to which candid gay sex on HBO Max — a full quarter of a century since “Queer As Folk” premiered on HBO — is still being treated as a rare and exotic event.
To be fair, there are compelling reasons why “Heated Rivalry,” the six-part Canadian export, has succeeded in charming American audiences. A love story set among the ranks of a fictional professional hockey league that is modeled on the NHL, “Heated Rivalry” focuses primarily on the evolving but fully closeted relationship between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a Canadian with Asian ancestry, and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). Shane and Ilya are not just hockey players, but are in fact their sport’s biggest names and most celebrated archrivals. To put it in terms that non-hockey fans can understand, imagine what a juicy moment it would be if we had discovered in 1980 that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were secret lovers. Or if, 40 years later, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were found canoodling in a locker room.
The first couple of episodes are spent tracking Shane and Ilya as their physical attraction and serial hookups labor under their need to hide their relationship from family and public view. The biggest challenge Williams and Storrie face as actors is rising above their obvious dreamy hunk status and the distinguishing personality features that are written into their characters. Case in point, Williams, tasked with portraying the sensitive and quiet Shane, often wilts before our eyes. It is unclear whether, as an actor, he lacks charisma or if he is slyly demonstrating how being closeted and sexually under-expressed can rob one’s personality of dimension and flavor. Storrie, on the other hand, is able to push through the brash and blunt swagger of his character, Ilya, to reveal a convincing vulnerability.
What complicates the lives of our star-crossed lovers is that Ilya is actively bisexual, while Shane has barely a faded interest in women. Either way, we see how the weight of shame drags on the romantic and emotional growth of their relationship. What helps provide perspective is the parallel relationship forming between another closeted hockey star, Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), and a civilian barista, Kip Grady (Robbie Graham-Kuntz). In contrast to the series of stolen moments between Shane and Ilya, you come to appreciate the grounding and the liberated spaces that are made possible by Kip’s self-acceptance as an out man.
The multiple sex scenes propel much of the action in “Heated Rivalry,” but, beyond its modest exploration of a gay inner universe in professional sports, the story doesn’t truly get weighty and emotionally stirring until the latter episodes. By episode five, we begin to move beyond a reliance on titillating sex scenes and feverish physical attraction as both sets of relationships begin to unfurl with increasing tenderness and higher stakes. Meanwhile, public tolerance of high-profile gay identities in family life and professional male sports gets dramatically stress-tested.
Created, written, and directed by Jacob Tierney and adapted from the “Game Changers” novel series written by Rachel Reid, much of “Heated Rivalry” comes in rather conventional wrapping. Although audiences have swooned over its romantic and forbidden love trappings, the acting is not particularly noteworthy, the cast and world building is blandly white or white-adjacent, and the production design has the generic quality that often comes with Canadian-made television drama.
And yet, “Heated Rivalry,” mostly through word of mouth, has become a bona fide hit and is now the highest-rated non-animated acquired series on HBO Max since the streaming platform launched in 2020. That’s because there is an irrepressible sweetness and even innocence about these men, these human beings, at the prime of their lives and vitality, who are just trying to find each other in a world that remains hostile to their expression of love. This is not new cinematic territory, but at a moment when queerness impressively flourishes in the WNBA while otherwise being conspicuously stripped from national public policy and public discourse (just earlier this month, the Trump administration removed the pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument, of all places), “Heated Rivalry” is quietly subversive in the way it challenges the assumptions and the rabid fear of a gay planet that dominate male professional sports.