Trot out a sexy sporting metaphor because the Internet’s favourite gay hockey show has finally arrived.
Heated Rivalry, which airs on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the US, is a six episode adaptation of book one in Rachel Reid‘s Game Changers series. It’s a solid, albeit slightly familiar, conceit: professional hockey players – Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) – may be enemies on the ice, but unbeknowst to their families, the league, and their fans, they’re also lovers in the sheets.
It’s a classic set-up that benefits from some truly steamy gay sex scenes featuring a pair of grade-A beefy actors (yes, you see plenty of skin, but it’s not pornography, so don’t go in expecting dick).
The biggest challenge in Jacob Tierney (Letterkenny)’s adaptation is the decision to retain Reid’s hyper-accelerated timeline, which in the first episode alone covers the pair’s rookie year. The series barely allows either character time to establish themselves beyond a shallow caricature (Shane is a good Canadian boy; Ilya is a temperamental Russian, etc) before it’s time for the next spicy hook-up and another time jump 1-6 months into the future.
Readers of the books are familiar with the speedy narrative, but it goes down much more smoothly in print form compared to live action. At times it barely feels like anything has happened before the action jumps ahead another few months, which leaves little time to develop non-intimate relationships with parents, siblings and friends.
As a result, all of the non-sex scenes feel too brief and inconsequential. Who cares about Shane’s relationship with his momager Yuna (Christina Chang) and milquetoast father David (Dylan Walsh)? Ditto Ilya’s money-borrowing brother Alexei Rozanov (Slavic Rogozine) and memory-impaired father Grigori (Yaroslav Poverlo), who we meet in the second episode at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The acknowledgement about the dangers of being “out” in Russia are welcome, particularly at a time when not much has changed IRL, but Heated Rivalry handles this like all of its other conflict: it’s barely raised before being dismissed, which guarantees it carries no real weight or impact.
Which leaves the focus on the show firmly on the sexy skin bits.
Obviously there is more to these scenes than just making out and sex. At the start of the season, the nature of Hollander and Rozanov’s interactions are purely physical; their sex marked by the same aggression and animosity they share on the ice. Naturally, over time, successive sexual encounters take on deeper emotional depths, though they’re still marked by a somewhat juvenile and/or boastful level of competition (think: Ilya using sexts to distract Shane before they face off on the ice).
There’s no denying that the sexy parts are fun, silly, and more than a little hot. While the actors’ blocking provides a small modicum of modesty, the two episodes screened for critics feature plenty of pecs, butts, and strategically placed knees that do little to disguise what is taking place. Rest assured thirsty fans, you will be sated by the multiple sexual encounters that occur in each episode.
For now, however, the show definitely falls into “guilty pleasure” territory. The accelerated timeline does no favours to either lead character and, most frustratingly, tends to make the narrative feel extremely choppy. Of the two, Storrie acquits himself better (largely because Ilya is a charismatic rogue) while Shane is a dull do-gooder (no shade to Williams; he simply has less entertaining material to work with).
Still, there’s plenty of promise here. Knowing where the story will go over the remaining four episodes of this first season helps, particularly the knowledge that the hockey lads will eventually stop fighting their mutual attraction and accept that they *actually* like each other. That’s when things really start getting interesting.
For now, however, it’s perfectly delicious Canadian smut with hot (mostly) naked men. I’ll raise a (Stanley) cup to that. 3.5/5
Heated Rivalry airs on Fridays on Crave (in Canada) and HBO Max (in the US)
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