SNL Aces the Heated Rivalry Meme
The reference points were readily identifiable: a chance meeting between characters from different worlds, a sport involving sticks and a flying round projectile whose nuances would be lost on the average American. Yep, Saturday Night Live was doing yet another Harry Potter sketch—but this time with a spicy twist.
As those descriptions—and the furtive glances exchanged by last night’s host, Finn Wolfhard, and the SNL cast member Ben Marshall, playing Potter and Ron Weasley—implied, a page-to-screen sensation of a more recent vintage was also being spoofed. Count SNL’s writers among the many HBO Max watchers who have jumped on the Heated Rivalry bandwagon, giving us the pretaped sketch “Heated Wizardry,” an elaborate, meme-ready mash-up of J. K. Rowling’s wizarding world and the streaming show based on Rachel Reid’s hockey-themed gay romance series.
For “Heated Wizardry” to land, viewers had to have at least a passing familiarity with each story’s component parts: the enemies-turned-lovers arc of Reid’s protagonists, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov; the broad strokes of Rowling’s boarding school for magical kids. Fans of the former could get a kick out of seeing Wolfhard and Marshall in saucy stretching poses previously struck by the Heated Rivalry stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. Fans of the latter could enjoy the realization of online fan-fiction fantasies pairing Harry with his best friend. And the gags kept coming: Harry and Ron canoodling beneath an invisibility cloak; barely coded sexts sent via owl; Jason Momoa, popping up as Hagrid, punning on the name of Harry and Ron’s classmate Neville Longbottom.
The most telling joke rested in a fake blurb from the equally fake website Hornymuggles.net—“Finally, finally, yes!”—mocking the unwavering attachment of Harry Potter fans. The seventh and final Potter novel was published in 2007, and the eight-part film franchise it inspired wrapped in 2011. But in today’s TV and movie environment, fans, studios, and streamers can’t let any story end. That’s how an in-world textbook from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone became a fundraising tie-in that launched a full-fledged trilogy of shoddy Fantastic Beasts movies, and why the books are being refashioned into what HBO envisions as a decade-long TV series.
The potential for endless extension is especially true of anything as massively popular and lucrative as Stranger Things, the recently concluded Netflix show that launched Wolfhard’s career. Stranger Things’ transformation—from a charming homage to ’80s blockbusters to a sprawling transmedia franchise—was ribbed later in last night’s episode, in a commercial parody imagining a string of continuations. The final beat was dedicated to devotees who had such a hard time letting go that they whipped up the viral rumor of a “secret” series finale.
That flurry of (to quote the sketch) “sequels, prequels, requels, and spin-offs” lampooned another property that HBO’s corporate parent keeps reviving: Sex and the City. Jumping off from the actual ending of Stranger Things—in which Wolfhard’s character realizes his writerly ambitions—SNL dropped the actor and his co-stars Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin into ’90s New York City. Over cosmos, they traded the kind of cheeky banter that defined the interactions among Carrie Bradshaw and her friends across 94 episodes, two movies, a YA origin story adapted into a show on the CW network, and an HBO Max follow-up series.
Heated Rivalry could be destined for a similar drawn-out fate. The Canadian streaming platform Crave, which first aired the show in November, has ordered a second season. And the show’s source material, Reid’s Game Changers series, has included six novels thus far and features plenty of other couples who could take to the ice on-screen. A seventh Game Changers installment is due this fall. Seven books? That sounds like something a premium TV service and its subscribers could keep a good, heavily suggestive grip on for at least 10 years.