Heated Rivalry and Escapist TV
Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) on ‘Heated Rivalry’. Credit: Sabrina Lantos
If you have HBO Max or made small talk this holiday season with someone who does, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the TV show Heated Rivalry. The Canadian teammate-on-teammate hockey romance is a word-of-mouth sensation. After starting with less than thirty million Nielsen streaming minutes during its debut week, the show’s viewership had grown eleven times over to 324 million by its finale, less than four weeks later. [1] Heated Rivalry didn’t quite crack Nielsen’s top-ten for streaming originals, but it came close. [2] And while its viewership started at roughly fifty-fifty men-women, by the finale, Heated Rivalry viewers were two-thirds female. [3]
The show is a slow-burn romance between two male hockey players on opposing teams in the fictional “Major Hockey League.” Throughout the six-episode season, the two players, Shane and Ilya, grapple with their relationship and their closeted homosexuality. In true HBO fashion, there is also lots and lots of sex. The show has drawn praise for giving a vibrant portrayal of gay relationships in the world of professional athletics [4], but also critiques from those who say it’s nothing but a raunchy romcom that trades in gay stereotypes. [5]
Heated Rivalry is an adaptation of a book with the same name, by Canadian author Rachel Ried. It joins a surprisingly rich tradition of same-sex ice-sport romance stories from books and TV alike. Fans compare the show to Yuri On Ice (a 2016 Anime) and Check, Please! (a 2013 web comic) among others. Much like how Fifty Shades of Grey is based on Twilight, Heated Rivalry itself is allegedly based on a well-read fan fiction where Marvel’s Captain America and Winter Soldier, instead of being enmeshed in an ever-compounding cinematic universe, are transported to an alternate world where they are both hockey rivals and lovers. Although there isn’t precise data, one could reasonably conclude that the main consumers of this content are women, although perhaps gay men have good per-capita representation as well, as one Reddit comment suggested: “Every gay man I know is deeply obsessed [with Heated Rivalry] lol.” [6]
The longtime persistence of this microgenre suggests that there is something people find really compelling about this story. Most apparent is the familiar element of a romance at odds with a hostile world (think Romeo and Juliet as star-crossed lovers). Then there’s this “enemies to lovers” trope, which seems to be especially popular in the fan fiction world (and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). And I’ve also seen that people like the lack of a power imbalance—which is often present in male-female relationships—that can more easily be absent in a gay one.
As for specific praise, I’ve received a bevy of quotes from watchers who adore Heated Rivalry specifically. “The greatest slow burn love story”; “such a masculine sport”; “it’s made straight men sympathetic to gay men”; and “I can’t believe I’ve only watched it twice.”
On the other hand, some straight men I’ve talked to, especially straight men who play hockey, really don’t like Heated Rivalry. They also usually haven’t seen Heated Rivalry. Neither of these facts are very surprising. And it isn’t a terribly challenging exercise in theory of mind to understand why straight men don’t want to watch a romance TV show intercut with gay porn about a sport they played in high school. But it can still be frustrating to have a bunch of people tell you they hate the TV show you like, and that they refuse to watch it.
It’s a similarly tough pill to swallow that the men who don’t like Heated Rivalry have this reaction exactly because it’s a TV show about a gay romance and sports. Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, Euphoria, and even Bridgerton occupy similar niches of fanfic-y escapist romance media, and though they’ve gotten their share of mockery from men, haven’t received quite as cool a reception as Heated Rivalry. It also underscores how Heated Rivalry is unique. It may be the first fully tumblr-native escapist fantasy to breach containment and hit the mainstream. It can be viewed as both an important step in representation or one more complicated piece of media filling the growing divide between men and women. And, then again, it may just be a TV show.
And how is the TV show? Well, I wouldn’t know. I haven’t watched it. My free time has been spent consuming EthosLab Minecraft videos (its own kind of escapist fantasy) and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s new TV show Pluribus, which is sort of about everyone in the world all suddenly agreeing with each other. [7]
Interestingly, the lead of that show, Carol Sturka, as played by Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn, is a successful but depressed lesbian author. Carol writes a straight fantasy romance series about a rakish Pirate, Raban. She calls her work “mindless crap,” and she disparages the very women who buy and enjoy her books. It’s later revealed that Carol initially wrote her stories as lesbian romances, and Raban as a woman, but later swapped the gender because a lesbian romance wouldn’t sell—not in the same way that a straight (or perhaps gay) one would. One wonders if Carol considers her original story to be “mindless crap.” And perhaps, if straight men would like Heated Rivalry more if you made it about a man and a woman, or two women. And maybe if you removed the romance.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/business/media/heated-rivalry-hbo-max-popularity.html.
[2] https://perma.cc/63MH-PRDZ. In Heated Rivalry’s finale week of December 22-28, the top three spots were occupied by Stranger Things (6,887 million minutes), Landman (1,643 million minutes), and Fallout (918 million minutes). The rear was brought up by The End of an Era (377 million minutes).
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/business/media/heated-rivalry-hbo-max-popularity.html.
[4] https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/heated-rivalry-tv-review.
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/dec/08/heated-rivalry-ice-hockey-tv-show-review.
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/heatedrivalry/comments/1qm70dm/comment/o1jvlvj/?context=3.
[7] https://perma.cc/63MH-PRDZ. Pluribus also wrapped up the week of December 22-28—the same as Heated Rivalry—and garnered 483 million Nielsen minutes, coming in sixth of ten.
