Having lived in Canada and Russia, I know that for our cold-weather friends (and, um, our at-the-moment not-such-great friends), hockey is life. Not the sad little game we Brits play on astroturf at school (I have bad memories because I’m left-handed), but the one where a dozen 90kg athletes on razor sharp blades hurtle towards each other at 25mph in a choreographed battle on ice. The show they put on is larger than life. You can’t put a Jumbotron on astroturf.
All this is to say, I thought I was uniquely qualified to review the steamy new hockey show, Heated Rivalry. But it turns out there’s no need for a sporting expert here. In Heated Rivalry, hockey is merely a conduit for hot men, hotel rooms and hook-ups.
Based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, the Canadian TV show has been taking North America by storm since November. It finally landed on our damp shores this weekend (10 January). Perhaps distribution platforms thought all the hockey talk might not land here. But if there’s one thing that does land well in the land of Jilly Cooper, it’s a romp!
We observe a budding rivalry turned romance between the young Canadian champion, Shane Hollander (played by Hudson Williams), and the Russian enfant terrible of the rink, Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). In 2008, when the show kicks off, Russia and Canada are friends, and so – tentatively – are our boys on the ice. They’re snarling at each other from the benches, there’s some non-committal dialogue about goals and tournaments, they’re snarling at each other in bed. Suddenly, we’ve jumped forward to 2014, Russia has annexed Crimea, and we’re in Sochi for the Winter Olympics. Shane approaches Ilya while watching the games. Although they’ve been sexting and sometimes having sex for some years now, it’s suddenly ice cold. Not here.
This game of sexual cat and mouse carries on over the following episodes. You wouldn’t call it a will-they, won’t-they, because they do, almost immediately – 17 minutes into episode one to be precise. Rather, the tension revolves around the question of whether sex will turn to love. And whether you can be gay and the nation’s number-one hockey player.
The show does occasionally land somewhere more serious than sex and six packs. “Here in Canada,” explained Reid, “[hockey] is very much the blueprint for masculinity.” There are currently no openly gay players in the National Hockey League (NHL) in North America, but stars of the show have said that since it aired, closeted pro-athletes from the NHL, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association have reached out to them.
And what about Russia? Unsurprisingly, Heated Rivalry hasn’t been given a prime-time slot on Rossiya 1. Yet the show is reportedly a hit. More than 30,000 people have reviewed it on the Russian version of IMDB, Kinopoisk. Just over 65,000 have reviewed the series on IMDB itself. In 2013, months before the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Duma unanimously passed an anti-gay law “for the purpose of protecting children from information advocating a denial of traditional family values”. That legislation was expanded after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Today, being openly gay in Russia today can land you in prison. Against that backdrop, for gay people in Russia, watching the world cheer for a character like Ilya Rozanov is not nothing.
There’s been a bit of head-scratching about the wide appeal of this show. As the director Jacob Tierney said, “Gay men will watch it, but we’ll watch anything with gay men in it.” But why do women love it so much? Simply put, a queer romance hits every note of a good love story.
In gay literature, the modern canon was forged by gay men – Maurice (1971), Giovanni’s Room (1956). More recently, women have expanded the form: A Little Life (2015), The Great Believers (2018), The Song of Achilles (2011). In a queer romance, the stakes are higher, the love often forbidden. Desire is intensified by denial; vulnerability becomes unavoidable. However successful the protagonists appear, they become underdogs by the simple fact of who they love.
Romance remains a genre overwhelmingly consumed by women, a fact that critics continue to treat as a sociological mystery. Why do women like romance? Why is the Pope Catholic?
It would be a mistake – nay, a disservice – to try and over-intellectualise this icy romp. Sometimes the riddle really is as straightforward as: what’s better than one hot man? Two.
[Further reading: The best film & TV to watch in 2026]
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