A Romance That Actually Takes Sex Seriously
When I first heard of Heated Rivalry, I didn’t think much about it. The words Canadian ice-hockey TV series slid into my brain and slipped right back out. But a week later, approximately everyone I’d ever met wanted to talk about it. People kept telling me that it was fun, sweet, and addicting. Most of all, they emphasized that it was really smutty. Every recommendation seemed to come with a warning to not watch with my parents.
The show, which is based on a set of romance novels by Rachel Reid, follows rival hockey stars: Shane Hollander (played by Hudson Williams), the well-mannered guy next door on Montreal’s team; and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a cocky bad-boy Russian playing for Boston. They’re supposed to hate each other—but then they start secretly sleeping together, which gets in the way of the animosity a bit. In the past weeks, Heated Rivalry has become an absolute phenomenon. It’s the most-watched original show for the Canadian streamer Crave since the platform launched in 2014, and after HBO Max acquired the series for U.S. viewing, it became the highest-rated live-action show that streamer has obtained since its start, in 2020. Heated Rivalry and the reasons for its success have been dissected at length by culture, “romantasy,” and LGBTQ critics—as well as on major hockey podcasts. At bars across the United States, live watch parties were packed, squeals resounding.
I can’t say for sure why the show caught on so widely. But since the finale aired last month, I’ve been thinking about one element that I really respect: The series knows the value of good sex scenes—not for thrills or laughs or snapshots of a fleeting moment but for illustrating how the characters’ relationship develops, touch by touch, over time. It takes sex seriously in an era when few shows do.
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When I first started watching, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t explicit in quite the way I’d imagined. The viewer never sees anything that graphic; there’s no Game of Thrones–style full-frontal nudity, though one does glimpse a generous amount of butt cheek. What feels unique about Heated Rivalry, rather, is that it lets its sex scenes play out, sometimes sticking with its characters nearly from the beginning of their encounter until the end in real time. Even without showing everything, the series communicates the nitty-gritty of what’s going on: which acts, how long they take, who’s leading whom, whether the lovers are gentle or giggly or a little combative and when that tone subtly shifts. Sometimes you hear no music at all, just the sound of kissing or heavy breathing.
So many shows and movies introduce a sex scene only to cut straight to the next morning, imparting merely the understanding that the deed has been done. Even Sex and the City, which was boundary-pushing when it started in 1998, frequently skipped to Carrie Bradshaw smoking a postcoital cigarette, the expression on her face the first clue as to whether the interaction had gone well or not. Sexual specifics, when they were given, were used most often as a punch line. (The guy with “funky spunk,” needless to say, shows up in only one episode.)
The 2010s series Girls did have plentiful sex scenes with unflinching intimate detail—often featuring main characters, revealing something of their relationship. Much of it was horrible sex, though, there to make viewers cackle or cringe. (A 2017 Slate article helpfully ranked all 53 Girls sex scenes by “how Girls it was.” No. 1 features Lena Dunham’s character, Hannah, struggling to get her tights off; her then-situationship Adam, played by Adam Driver, saying he’ll “consider” putting on a condom; and Hannah talking through the act until Adam suggests that they “play the quiet game.”) Many shows seem more comfortable defining what makes sex memorably bad than what makes it great or complicated or mediocre. And a lot of them, romances included, don’t even go that far.
That’s a shame—because for one thing, to put it plainly, a lot of people have sex. When a TV critic once asked Dunham why Hannah was naked so often on Girls, she responded, “It’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive.” And she’s right: Life doesn’t stop happening when clothes come off; it keeps going, and what occurs in that time tends to be pretty important for how a relationship plays out. It’s worth taking a genuine interest in.
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A frank sex scene can provide a wealth of information about two characters and the dynamics between them. On Heated Rivalry, Shane and Ilya’s romantic arc builds sporadically over the course of more than eight years. They live in different cities, and they can meet up—briefly and surreptitiously—only when hockey events bring their teams together. But a lot changes with each hookup. Their first time, Shane has never been with a man before, but Ilya has: He leads gently but firmly, with a thumb in Shane’s mouth and then a kiss on his cheek. In a later scene, when the two still-closeted men have been sneaking around for years and are trying to quash the growing feelings they can’t afford to have, the sex is somewhat kinkier but less emotional. (It starts with Ilya ordering Shane around and ends with Shane leaving the hotel confused, drafting a text he never sends: “we didn’t even kiss.”) Near the end of the season, when the two have confessed to falling for each other, one sex scene is particularly playful—it happens while Shane is on the phone—and Williams has said that it was meant to depict the “humor and levity” you might have with someone you’re really comfortable with. If the viewer knew only that sex happened on these occasions, they’d be missing so much of what’s unfolded between Shane and Ilya—especially because these men are extremely bad at talking openly about their situation. “If you skip the sex scenes,” Williams said in one interview, “you miss the story.”
This was all intentional. The show’s intimacy coordinator, Chala Hunter, has said that part of her job was meticulously diagramming each episode in a master spreadsheet to track “the narrative arc that plays out through the intimacy.” She’d regularly check in with Jacob Tierney, the screenwriter and director, to discuss whether a sensual interaction fit the moment: how long the characters had been together, how they’d be feeling emotionally and physically. And even as a professional intimacy coordinator who’s worked on plenty of sets, she found that actually portraying sex rather than “insinuating or implying it” felt new, she told Elle last month: “I was like, Oh, we’re being very specific and fairly explicit here, but to be honest, I found it refreshing and different.”
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The fact of Heated Rivalry’s immense popularity suggests that viewers loved it too. That might seem unexpected: Sex has become less and less common on-screen, according to The Ringer’s 2024 analysis of 40,000 films. The same year, The Economist found that sexually explicit content in the 250 highest-grossing U.S. movies had fallen by nearly 40 percent since 2000, while drug references, violence, and profanity had hovered at stable levels. And some surveys have found that audiences have little appetite for sex scenes. In a 2023 UCLA poll, roughly half of 1,500 respondents, ages 13 to 24, said that sex isn’t needed in most shows and movies; more than half said they want more platonic relationships depicted. The next year, the market-research firm Talker Research surveyed 2,000 Americans and found that 43 percent of respondents think sex scenes don’t add to a story; more than 40 percent of the Gen Z participants said they turn a movie off once they hit a sex scene.
Statistics like these have become part of a discussion about whether the culture is growing prudish and puritanical. Some commentators think that young people are not only having less sex but are also less open to sex altogether. (Others argue that they’re so accustomed to porn that media depictions bore in comparison.) When I read those reports, though, what I sense is largely just fatigue: a frustration with a perceived overreliance on romance and the tropes the genre often entails. Many of the UCLA participants agreed that romantic-relationship depictions “often feel unnatural, forced, or toxic.” They were on guard against what they saw as stereotypes, tired of seeing protagonists always end up together and overfull on love triangles.
On the last front, I can’t relate; personally, I want every movie to resemble Challengers. Generally speaking, though, I understand feeling bored with the same old affairs. Especially in straight romances, the signals are so familiar, you can get up to grab popcorn: the shed clothes draped over an armchair, a shirtless man hovering over his lover, feet tangled at the end of the bed. Then it’s morning; the woman is always inexplicably waking up with a shirt on, or rising to grab a robe.
Perhaps Heated Rivalry is a sign that many people are game for sexy content when it’s done creatively or thoughtfully—when it serves a purpose. If audiences haven’t been enjoying sex scenes, well, maybe that’s because most sex scenes haven’t been doing their job.