‘Heated Rivalry’ is everything you love about rom-coms but with less pants

By Sandra Gonzalez, CNN

(CNN) — If your social media algorithm hasn’t yet been overrun with memes and hot takes on HBO Max’s TV series about two rival male hockey players embroiled in a romance, we’re just very different people.

But that’s okay. Because the premise of “Heated Rivalry” tells us that even two people from extremely different backgrounds who have two very different ways of navigating the world can find common ground. In the series, adapted from novels by Rachel Reid, that common ground happens to be very good sex.

The people having that sex are fictional Major League Hockey players Shane Hollander (played by Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (played by Connor Storrie). On the show, they’re both big stars who are often compared in the media because they are early in their careers and similarly successful on the ice. What the pundits and their teammates don’t know is that they also play other games together – no pucks involved.

Over a period of time that remains fuzzy because the show treats time jumps like other shows treat costume changes, the two engage in steamy sexcapades whenever their paths cross. Their relationship, however, is complicated and ill-defined. Some of the tension comes from the fact that they are very different people. Canadian Shane is mild-mannered, sheltered and bred for his success by his hockey helicopter parents. Ilya, who is from Russia, displays a hardened exterior in public and revels in being a bit of an instigator.

Mister well-behaved and the misbehaver. Mr. Prude meets Mr. Crude. You get it. You’ve seen the basics of this plot before, hundreds – maybe thousands – of times across movies and television.

Opposites, pop culture would have us believe, are meant to attract over and over again, whether they’re competitive ice skaters, high school students or business professionals.

The reason this show seems to have attracted more attention than some boils down to one major element: Omg gay sex.

The screen does not fade to black when they enter the bedroom and tasteful peeks of skin do not sneak out from under duvet covers. Viewers intimately – and rather quickly in the pilot itself – see them navigate their sexual encounters and their sex life at large.

They sext (even though Shane is bad at it). They tease each other during foreplay. They obtain consent in casual ways that don’t come across like they’re pulled from high school sex-ed videos. They talk dirty. And, yes, it’s rated whoa.

Enter the memes. Hashtag “gay hockey show.”

It’s fine if the first three episodes of the six-episode first season have inspired questions like Wow, should I read the books this show was based on? and Wait, why do shows with heterosexual couples suddenly seem a lil boring? and Holy cow, do I want to learn more about hockey?

All acceptable. All fair. But what’s not is letting the buzz veer into reductive rhetoric.

Did anyone call “The Summer I Turned Pretty” the “pseudo-incestuous WASPy brothers show”? Or “Bridgerton” the “lots of horny straights in costumes show.” No. Should we have? That’s a different conversation.

Those who have actually watched the episodes – including the second hour, during which closeted Shane has to temper his excitement and pride while watching Ilya win the Stanley Cup in a really heartwarming scene – will get that it deserves a little better than a three-word synopsis so reductive that it can carry an air of disrespect when used by those with unkind hearts.

Also, spoiler alert: Ilya is bisexual. So the internet’s attempt to reduce “Heated Rivalry” to a few buzz words is just inaccurate. And some might argue “hockey” is not exactly a buzzy word. Zing.

If you’re coming to the show thinking it’ll teach you a little bit about football like “Friday Night Lights” did, retreat. That is not on this show’s syllabus.

But, some say, it will teach the entertainment industry some things.

“Heated Rivalry is breaking barriers for both the romance genre and the LGBTQ+ community,” author Vee Taylor wrote on Threads. “It’s proving (again) that romance readers show up. We want adaptations that keep the spice, tension, heat & the emotional punch from the books… not watered down versions.”

She added that while it wasn’t “the first show to bring queer love to the forefront, it’s showing loudly that LGBTQ+ sexual tension, intimacy & romance are stories we want to see on screen, too.”

A reviewer for Philly Gay Calendar, meanwhile, praised the show’s acknowledgment of the stakes for two characters who exist in the “hyper-masculine world of professional hockey.”

“This is a sport where open queerness is still rare — and the show doesn’t ignore that reality,” Steve McCann wrote. “And while the show leans into passion and heat, it also gives time to character growth, internal conflict, and emotional healing…Their eventual emotional honesty is just as satisfying as their physical intimacy.”

Episode 3, which veered off from the show’s main couple and focused on a different hockey player’s romance with a man he meets at a smoothie shop, struck this balance particularly well, with a heartbreaker of an ending that served as a reminder that “Heated Rivalry” carries a lot on its shoulders, like most queer fiction is too often asked to. But at it’s core, it is to be enjoyed, meme’d, marveled at, not overthought, and, maybe even rouse your respectful curiosity about the romance genre, in all its glorious forms.

At least, that’d be a nice goal.

New episodes of “Heated Rivalry” drop on Thursday nights on HBO Max, which is owned by CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

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