Awards season for movies means that I am late to watching Heated Rivalry, but I’m not late to it becoming a bona fide cultural phenomenon, with the TV show’s lead actors carrying the Olympic torch in Italy and the mayor of New York City telling citizens to stay inside during the recent winter storms and read the Rachel Reid novel on which the show is based. (The New Yorkers took his advice, too.)
TV dramas and sports have historically not mixed well, Friday Night Lights and Ted Lasso notwithstanding. This series was created by the Canadian streaming service Crave and became available to Americans via HBO Max, and its groundbreaking gay romance only works because it takes place against the backdrop of hockey.
The story begins in 2008 in Regina, Saskatchewan, where Team Canada’s Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) meets Team Russia’s Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) at a world junior hockey championship. They are subsequently thrown together often as they become the biggest stars of the sport for teams in Montreal and Boston, respectively. They start having sex after they film a TV commercial together and Ilya sees Shane get aroused in the shower. Their relationship becomes more complicated as seasons go by and they trade off accomplishments on the ice: While Ilya is drafted first by the professional league, Shane is named rookie of the year. Ilya is the first to win the trophy that is pointedly not the Stanley Cup, but then Shane wins it twice in a row.
Hockey fans will recognize where Reid took inspiration from the real-life Sidney Crosby-Alexander Ovechkin rivalry. Speaking of real life, there is a certain amount of macho crap around most men’s sports (possibly not figure skating), and it is particularly heavy around hockey. Poisonous notions about manhood and how male players should behave have resulted in such sordid episodes as the Graham James pedophilia scandal and Todd Bertuzzi breaking Steve Moore’s neck. No doubt this is why there have been openly gay players in the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball but not in the NHL. The gay hockey player is an even more mythical being than the gay football player, which is what makes Heated Rivalry groundbreaking.
And so it is that Shane can’t date a man without it becoming global news after he’s positioned as the sport’s wholesome face. Ilya can’t date one if he ever wants to go back to his homeland. They both go out with women in the fourth of the first season’s six episodes, and the montage of them doing so is set to t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said,” which couldn’t be more on point. Shane is lucky to pair up with a Hollywood movie star (Yellowjackets’ Sophie Nélisse), who turns out to be the best abortive hetero girlfriend that a gay man could ask for. The most unexpectedly moving moment comes when an American player (François Arnaud) who has been repeatedly denied a championship by either Shane or Ilya finally wins the not-Stanley Cup and celebrates by beating both of them out of the closet and kissing his boyfriend (Robbie G.K.) on the ice.
All this helps to make up for the show’s deficiencies in other areas. No doubt budget constraints are why the show’s locations in L.A., Tampa, and Moscow are all clearly filmed in either Toronto or Montreal. Someone other than the lead actors is doing the fancy stickhandling moves to make them look like world-class hockey players. Those perhaps couldn’t be helped, but series creator Jacob Tierney (who co-created Letterkenny, if you follow Canadian TV) makes a more avoidable misstep by not including more of the homophobic language that gets casually tossed around by hockey players.
While we’re on the subject of language, we should be hearing much more French spoken around Shane given his life in Montreal. We miss the book’s commentary on how Shane’s careful and correct public persona jars with his Quebecois fans, who tend to love their hockey players loud and boisterous and appreciative of art and good food.
Oh, well. Maybe an upcoming season, boosted by the first’s popularity, can address some of those things. For now, the show’s gay sex scenes (which are almost as numerous as Normal People’s straight sex scenes) not only showcase the chemistry between the two lead actors but also drive the plot forward, with Shane freaking out at one point when Ilya finally calls him by his first name. (It appears that a fair portion of the show’s fans are women who are turned on by watching two hot men get it on. I can’t begrudge them that, given the long and well-documented history of men enjoying watching lesbians do it.)
The men’s growing realization that they might be in love and not just sexually attracted to each other leads to a great scene when Ilya goes back to Russia for his father’s funeral. Over the phone, Shane encourages Ilya to say what’s on his mind in Russian (which Shane does not speak), and Ilya spills everything about his mother’s suicide during his childhood and how his only family left now is a cokehead brother who’s financially dependent on him and hates him for it. Stuff like that makes this season of Heated Rivalry worth hanging a banner for.
