Why Everyone Wants to Go to the Cottage This Winter
Heated Rivalry and the Hockey Players that Dominated the Internet
Over the past month, the internet has been ablaze with content surrounding Heated Rivalry, a gay romantic drama that’s equal parts saccharine and steamy. The series, originated by the Canadian streaming service Crave and released in the US by HBO, follows hockey players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) through their half-decade-long romantic/sexual entanglements, playing a game of will they/won’t they that spans cities, teams, and hotel rooms. While the series only has six episodes, it was an overnight success, creating a cultural phenomenon that penetrated past queer spaces and into some of mainstream media.
Heated Rivalry falls in a lineage of horny yet tasteful prestige television adaptations following AMC+’s Interview with the Vampire and Showtime’s Fellow Travelers. Much like both of those shows, Heated Rivalry has created an economy of memes, little references to moments that are sometimes plot driven and other times focused on risque content, with notable attention to the asses of both leads in the show (so much so that actor Connor Storrie was even asked about his squat routine by Vanity Fair). It becomes not only fan service but fodder for community, creating a shared lexicon that other prestige television like Sharp Objects or True Detective Season 1 would elicit at work the next morning.
The show’s fervor has spilled out to various outlets, including a New York Times profile, the cover of this week’s The Hollywood Reporter, and even has Sniffies dropping a limited edition Hockey Jersey for the occasion in addition to their Winter Collection. Every week, a new collection of memes, TikToks, and new press items drop.
This cycle of content is part of the show’s success. The Heated Rivalry instagram account currently has over three times the number of followers of its own network, Crave (353K vs. 105K, as of writing this article). This is partially because of its core demographic: the terminally online. Most content is user generated, relying on fans of the show to create and circulate their own promotional material rather than on Crave’s own marketing team to drive awareness for each episode. Based on the limited promotional materials and the late-breaking press moments in non-gay publications like GQ, it’s safe to assume the cultural phenomenon was unexpected. While fandoms usually take awhile to amass and stick to subreddits or fan accounts on X, Heated Rivalry struck a chord across more active posters.
It’s not just gay men who are obsessed—even straight women flock to the show, something that shouldn’t be much of a surprise given who wrote the source book series, Game Changers. Rachelle Goguen, whose pen name is Rachel Reid, started publishing chapters on a fanfiction site first, swapping in Marvel characters, before sending the manuscript to her publisher. Part of the unlikely broader appeal may be chalked up to the relatable infuriation at men. What remains unsaid is both romantic and aggravating, leaving so much to interpretation that both parties get lost in what the other might or might not want. In a time of digital dating, these mixed signals are common not just to gay men navigating their sexuality but anyone trying to figure out what the other person really means.
The harsh realities between both characters are often skipped over, with frequent large time jumps that diminish any pain that extended periods of ghosting may cause. What’s left is the best case, one where there’s just enough tension without making it seem like Ilya and Shane’s anxiety and patience are unbearable. It’s more on the side of “absence makes the heart grow fonder” rather than mutual emotional abuse. It acknowledges the hardships but shows that everything is worth it in the end.
It’s hard to not also think of Heated Rivalry as a counterpoint to Netflix’s Heartstoppers and Amazon Prime’s Red, White, and Royal Blue. Both are set in fantastical, even improbable versions of the real world, whereas Heated Rivalry is set within a slightly more optimistic facsimile of our current landscape. The show gestures towards real world politics such as LGBTQ rights within Russia, but most queer crises come from internal machinations from external judgments.
The show’s popularity might indicate that a story about desire and miscommunication in Obama’s America is what the girls and gays (and more) want. It’s a grounded sense of auspicious optimism where the answer isn’t to imagine alternative worlds but hope that the best can come in the current version. There may be no out NHL players currently, but the show posits a world where such things are not only possible but close at hand.
Heated Rivalry is available to stream on HBO Max now.
