The Narrative Genius of Heated Rivalry

I don’t like hockey. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Pittsburgh Penguins were building their dynasty. It was arguably one of the greatest places and times to be alive as a hockey fan in the United States. The thing that hockey fans tell you if you tell them you don’t like hockey is that you can’t watch it on TV. The unique genius of the sport does not translate to the small screen. While basketball’s speed, muscle, and craft; football’s strategic gamesmanship and sudden violence; and baseball’s pastoral beauty are all apparent on television broadcasts, hockey looks like a bunch of faceless cubes gliding around chasing an object that’s only intermittently visible to the audience. For all that close-quarters slicing and grinding, you’d think they’d score more.

Hockey, its fans may tell you, is a sport you have to fall in love with live. Its physicality, its brutality, the virtuosity of its skaters, the precise and perilous movements of the sticks, the operatic anger, the balletic movement—these are all things that are visible only if you are in the audience, face pressed up against the glass. To really appreciate what’s going on on the ice, you have to be in that big refrigerator, shoulder to shoulder with the raucous crowd, bodies flying at you left and right. It’s exhilarating; it’s just not great TV.

This November, though, a little Canadian series called Heated Rivalry figured out how to make hockey work on television. It’s not necessarily a strategy ESPN can replicate.

Based on the popular Game Changer novels by Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry is maybe the most sexually explicit romance adaptation on TV since Outlander. The six-episode series tells the story of the forbidden queer love affair of two professional hockey players, and it does so by documenting each of its lovers’ dalliances at length and in languorous detail. It’s been working. Since its release in November, the show has become a huge word-of-mouth hit for HBO Max (which picked the show up from Canadian network Crave). While it isn’t ascending to Bluey levels of global streaming dominance, what’s unique about the show has been its growth. Between the week of its debut and the week of its season finale, on December 27, viewership grew tenfold—from 30 million to 324 million streaming minutes logged—with a growing and notable majority of viewers being women.

Heated Rivalry’s fans can’t stop posting about it on social media. It’s hard not to see why. The show feels unique. It’s physical and intimate, surprisingly quiet, and it moves strangely, telling its story in lurches and skids. It doesn’t feel like hockey, and it doesn’t feel like anything else on TV right now; it feels a little bit like falling in love.

Heated Rivalry is, almost exclusively, the story of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two high-level professional hockey prospects who fall in love. One’s Canadian, the other’s Russian; one is soft-spoken, the other is brazen and bombastic; one is a squeaky-clean national hero with a supportive family, and the other is a “bad boy” lothario with a family that despises him and bleeds him dry. And they are men. While Heated Rivalry is a romantic fantasy, it’s set in the real world of professional sports, where there is currently not a single out athlete in any of the major men’s professional leagues of North America. (This is not the case in women’s professional sports.) While the show’s effort to reproduce realistic gameplay on the ice is cursory at best, its dialogue can occasionally lapse into made-for-TV movie stiltedness, some of its contextualizing side plots can feel paint-by-numbers, and its choppy progression through time can feel like a 10-car narrative pileup, its depiction of the secret relationship between Shane and Ilya gives it unaccountable life.

The world of Heated Rivalry is radically narrow. In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry. There are intra-team dynamics, friends and former lovers, complex family situations, international political imbroglios, and social lives outside of the succession of hotel rooms in which these lovers meet. But the show rigorously abstains from too much investment in any of that other stuff. Trimming its plot of almost every bit of material that doesn’t directly impact Shane and Ilya’s affair, Heated Rivalry has a kind of ruthless narrative economy.

One of the most jarring features of the show, which becomes apparent quickly into the first episode, is its skimming-for-the-good-parts storytelling style. In the first 11 minutes of the show’s pilot, for instance, there are four separate time jumps—“One Week Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later.” While the pace slows a bit after that opening hopscotch, the time jump remains the show’s signature structuring device. I found myself laughing about it as the series began, but, as episodes unfolded, there started to be something almost hypnotic about the constant yada-yada’ing of everything that didn’t involve our two leads. This is a show about the slow, slow dawning of a love story between two people, but, from the jump, the show is already formally in love with them. Time-jumping and globe-trotting to show us every single time they hook up over the course of about a decade, the show’s immediate devotion to their affair starts to bleed out into the viewer’s perception and anticipation of it. Heated Rivalry almost literally can’t wait to get Ilya and Shane into a room together, almost before the characters themselves feel that way.

With a few notable exceptions, this is basically all the show does. It builds a narrative machine around the developing intimacy between Shane and Ilya. Championships are won and lost, peripheral friends and family members enter into frame and scurry out just as quickly, and neither Ilya nor Shane has recourse to the kind of voiceover narration or even open conversation with friends that might give us insight into their thoughts and feelings. But feel they do! Long stretches of the show are just two guys quietly having sex, with little dialogue save for heavy breathing. The degree to which they must “keep it quiet” in their lives is reflected in the show’s formal patience about saying anything out loud. The story is told, largely, through the performance of Shane and Ilya’s physical chemistry, as well as the loaded moments when that chemistry disappears, freezes up, or transforms into something else.

There is a momentary break in this dynamic in the third episode, when we return to an earlier moment at the Sochi Olympics and follow Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), a fellow hockey player who’d mostly only appeared at All-Star games and award ceremonies to this point. In this stand-alone episode, we watch Scott come to terms with his own sexuality, begin secretly dating a barista named Kip, and see that relationship run up against the wall of Scott’s inability to come out. This episode is counterprogramming to the Ilya-Shane romance. These men communicate with each other, they are demonstrative, and they have a lot of long sex scenes, but we also get to see the texture of them as a couple. It’s everything the show doesn’t give us of Shane and Ilya. For a moment, it seems as though the show is shifting gears, but it isn’t. While the narrative eye returns to our titular heated rivalry, and things begin to loosen up with their own communication, it eventually becomes clear that the Scott Hunter episode is mostly there to set up later plot developments between Ilya and Shane.

Though, for what it’s worth, the moment when that happens, when these two plotlines converge, is one of the most electrifying sequences I’ve seen on TV in the past couple of months.

It’s easy to write off this show as prestige Skinemax or a guilty pleasure, but there’s nothing to feel guilty about when a show can hold onto its viewers’ feelings with this kind of patience and confidence. Its unrelenting focus on the chemistry between its two protagonists turns out to be a generative constraint. Over time, and thanks to incredibly self-assured performances from newcomers Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie—an heir to the steamy charismatic legacy of Friday Night Lights’ Tim Riggins—we learn to follow a story told mostly through the intimate physicality, bodily expressiveness, and wordless intuition that develops between them. It’s a spectacle, but it’s a complex one. This is, I might guess, what good hockey is like.

I was catching up on Heated Rivalry this January, just as I was also beginning to blitz through new episodes of the second season of HBO Max’s other viral hit, The Pitt. These shows are very different. The Pitt has nearly a dozen series regulars in the main cast, another dozen recurring characters, and many dozens more who filter in and out of the E.R. for multi-episode arcs. The Pitt trains its focus on this one place and this one time (per season), but it cares about everyone who passes through. Heated Rivalry really only cares about two people.

But it’s the care that stands out. Both of these shows are shows with intense temporal constraints, big emotional swings, and an aesthetic taste for the graphic. In the terms of film theorist Linda Williams, they are both series within the realm of “body genres”—dramas built around showing the body in moments of distress and/or elation. And they have a corresponding effect on the bodies of viewers. The Pitt with its spectacular scenes of surgery and body horror has one effect on the viewer; Heated Rivalry causes quite another. It’s hard to watch either and not feel something. Perhaps that’s because both, even in their darkest moments, show a vision of humanity that is constrained by unjust systems but ultimately open, ready to love. They’re shows about what it means to care and be cared for. And they approach that topic with a radical, formal devotion to their characters. Blood and sex are both effects viewers register with their own bodies, but so too is time. You can feel the heartbeats.