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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 was arguably one of the greatest places and times to be alive as a hockey fan in the United States. By January 21, 2026, episodes were averaging 8 million viewers and the show hit a series high for weekly viewership the week prior. Alongside the announcement of its second season renewal, Deadline Hollywood reported that the series had become Crave’s most-watched original series to date, with viewership increasing by nearly 400% in its initial seven-day streaming window following its debut on November 28.
Live Sports available only on select plans. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are hockey stars drawn together by rivalry and desire. A hockey player’s high-stakes career collides with love when a chance meeting ig… Shane and Ilya keep their secret fling alive while their growing connection is t… Blood and sex are both effects viewers register with their own bodies, but so too is time. And they approach that topic with a radical, formal devotion to their characters.
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Although HBO Max later acquired the series, it became involved only after the first season had been completed, meaning the show was not developed as a U.S. co-production from the outset. Despite a minimal marketing campaign and a low-cost licensing fee of approximately $600,000 per episode, it experienced a rapid surge in popularity following its late-November premiere. According to data shared by Crave’s social media accounts, the show exhibited unusually high “stickiness”, with a rewatch rate where approximately one-third (33%) of the total audience watched the entire season more than once. According to JustWatch, Heated Rivalry ranked fourth on its television streaming chart during the week of December 7, 2025, while Whip Media, based on data from its TV Time viewership tracking platform of more than 25 million users, reported the series placed sixth during the weeks of December 7 and 14. Following the episode’s reception, the series itself also entered IMDb Top 250 TV shows chart.
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Ads served on select live and linear content on Standard and Premium Plans. Ads served on select live & linear content in No Ads plan. 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. 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. 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.
A queer sports drama based on Rachel Reid’s novel series Game Changers
The series has been described as a slow-burn story that’s emotional and filled with sexual tension. “Heated Rivalry” follows the story of two competitive hockey players, Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander — played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. If you want know when it is streaming for free, click ‘Free’ in the filters above and hit the notification bell.
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A cast of real-life hockey players were used to fill out the team, while body doubles were cast for close-up shots of the lead actors in action on the ice. All hockey sequences, including locker rooms, ice surface, and stands were filmed at the Sleeman Centre https://www.boombetonline.nl/ in Guelph. The first day of shooting included Shane and Ilya’s Las Vegas hotel room encounter, while the hockey rink scenes were completed over a stretch of just over a week of filming near the end of the shoot. Principal photography for the first season commenced in April 2025, with filming taking place across two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, for 36 days, according to Tierney. He also wanted to find them together since “the show lives and dies on their relationship”. Tierney said it was essential to him that he found two actors who had the “physicality of hockey players” who were also comfortable with nudity and intimacy.
- 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.
- According to Storrie and Chang, filming of the second season is presumed to begin in the summer or fall of 2026.
- According to Billboard, the songs’ appearance in the series resulted in increased official on-demand streaming activity.
- Heated Rivalry is ineligible for consideration at the Primetime Emmy Awards because it does not meet the Television Academy’s eligibility requirements for the U.S. co-productions.
- In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry.
- Based on the Game Changers novel series by Rachel Reid, it follows two rival professional hockey players, Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), whose on-ice animosity conceals a passionate, secret romance.
He had listened to the Game Changers series on audio book and wanted to discuss the possibility of adapting them to a limited television series. Jacob Tierney first reached out to Reid on August 7, 2023, a day after The Washington Post ran an article about hockey romance novels. Heated Rivalry is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novel series (2018–2026), with the second novel, Heated Rivalry (2019), providing the series’ title. Although their on-ice rivalry is amplified by media coverage and public perception, the two develop a private, initially casual sexual relationship that continues intermittently over several years as they pursue their hockey careers. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are two professional ice hockey players who compete on rival teams, the Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders, respectively.
By the end of the year, the series ranked among the best TV shows of 2025 on the lists by Cosmopolitan, the New York Post, Refinery29, The Seattle Times, and the Toronto Star. Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com described the series as “revolutionary” and called it “one of the most entertaining shows of the year” as well as “the most significant queer show of the year”. For their performances in the first season finale, TVLine named both Williams and Storrie as “Performers of the Week”, while /Film described them as the strongest break-out performances of the year. On December 10, 2025, the trailer for the series was aired at the Pride Night game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Tampa Bay Lightning. In advance of the program’s television premiere, the first episode received a preview screening in Montreal at the 2025 Image+Nation festival on November 23, 2025. On November 19, 2025, nine days before the series premiere on Crave, it was announced that HBO Max had acquired US and Australian rights to the show for a day-and-date global release.
Hockey, its fans may tell you, is a sport you have to fall in love with live. 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. Heated Rivalry is ineligible for consideration at the Primetime Emmy Awards because it does not meet the Television Academy’s eligibility requirements for the U.S. co-productions. However, by the release of the season finale on December 26, weekly viewership had increased more than tenfold to 324 million minutes. According to data from the research group Luminate, the show debuted with 30 million streaming minutes in its first week, failing to break into the top 50 streaming programs.
- The series became a significant word-of-mouth success, characterized by an “unusual” growth pattern in its viewership.
- There aren’t any free streaming options for Heated Rivalry right now.
- 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.
- With ESPN Unlimited you can stream over 47,000 live events from the best leagues and tournaments in the world, making it your home for the most and best live sports.
- Although their on-ice rivalry is amplified by media coverage and public perception, the two develop a private, initially casual sexual relationship that continues intermittently over several years as they pursue their hockey careers.
- 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.
However, in late September, Tierney and the executives decided to push the release forward to take advantage of increased audience interest in new series during the holiday season. HBO Max’s acquisition of the series, which was spearheaded by the company’s content chairman and CEO Casey Bloys and the SVP content planning and programming Jason Butler, was attributed in part to online social media buzz generated by the Game Changers fanbase who campaigned for global distribution. Miley Cyrus also expressed interest in contributing music for the second season, as did rapper Bbno$.better source needed He eventually disposed of those songs when he received footage from the episodes, and re-wrote the music to the images over about seven weeks. The former serves as the series’ theme song, while the latter accompanies the scene in the episode “Olympians” depicting Shane and Ilya’s first instance of anal intercourse. The episode also features Storrie delivering a four-page monologue in Russian; after a particularly strong take, Tierney asked Storrie’s dialect coach, Kate Yablunovsky, how much of it could be used, to which she replied, “All of it. He humbles me”.
Once you click on this new option, you will be able to select from a list of available languages to switch the language of your Reddit interface. Starting today, Android, iOS, and Desktop users will be able to access the first phase of our product translation in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. When hockey rivals Shane and Ilya meet each other as rookies, sparks fly. “Heated Rivalry” was originally created for the Canadian streaming service Crave.
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You can use the Hulu hub on the Disney+ homepage to jump right into streaming some of your favorite Hulu Originals, series, and more. The Hulu + Live TV plans include 95+ live TV channels and additional on-demand content from your favorite sports, entertainment, and news channels you can watch at home or on-the-go. Access to ESPN content in the Disney+ app Tierney is also behind “Letterkenney,” the hugely popular hockey-adjacent TV series. The Canadian sports and romance series was produced on a limited budget for a Canadian streaming service. Download limits apply to certain content categories.
