Hudson Williams, left, and Connor Storrie star as hockey stars who share an intimate off-ice escapade.Sabrina Lantos/Crave
Heated Rivalry, the steamy new show created by Jacob Tierney and premiering Friday on Crave, is hot as h-e-double-hockey-sticks.
Based on a novel by self-proclaimed writer of “cute smut” Rachel Reid, the six-episode series is about a sporadic sexual relationship between two professional male hockey players.
The relationship may turn into more than that. I only got to see the first two episodes – and will hold off on a full verdict until I see how the final periods play out.
But before Heated Rivalry even faces off with audiences, this hornier-than-Hallmark holiday romance programming has already become a notable story in Canadian TV.
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Crave, Bell Media’s streaming service, has long attracted subscribers by acquiring American HBO content – but that cross-border relationship has not been particularly reciprocal.
Now, HBO Max has not only picked up Heated Rivalry – the rare major Canadian show to hit the prestige streamer since CBC’s dramedy Sort Of – it’s releasing it on the same timeline in its U.S. and Australian version.
The sex-suffused story concerns Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) – two young star puck passers from Canada and Russia, respectively – who first meet at an international tournament for young prospects.
Hudson Williams as Canadian pro hockey player Shane Hollander.Crave
Shane’s impressed by Ilya’s on-ice performance and tells him so when he sees him outside the arena; Ilya, amused and skeptical, stubs out his cigarette and tells Shane that he won’t be so nice after he beats him on the ice.
It feels like 1972 all over again.
Soon enough, Shane and Ilya are rookies on major league hockey teams with a long-time rivalry: Montreal and Boston. The Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders, to be precise.
No, the series is not officially Gary Bettman-approved. All the better.
Shane, who is Japanese-Canadian, feels the pressure to be a role model as he’s already breaking boundaries in hockey. His mother-manager reminds him of the importance of representation almost as often as she reminds him to wear Reebok and Rolex in public, per his sponsorships.
Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov, a Russian hockey pro playing in North America.Crave
Ilya, on the other hand, plays into Russian stereotypes on and off the ice with his brusque and jerky attitude. He comes by his edginess honestly based on glimpses back home in Moscow of his brother, who hounds him for money, and father, who criticizes him relentlessly.
When Shane and Ilya reach the bedroom, however, there is some upending of cultural expectations.
The Canadian, despite growing up in a more queer-positive society, has never been intimate with a guy before, while the Russian has experience gleaned back home with the son of a hockey coach.
Tierney’s adaptation will definitely please the book’s fans – women are its primary audience but it has a gay readership, too – who enjoyed it for its abundance of explicit sex scenes. It takes only 17 minutes and 55 seconds for viewers to get one.
But though Heated Rivalry’s central relationship is largely elucidated through sex scenes in hotel rooms and pseudonymous sexting twixt Montreal and Moscow, the TV show is about more than just soft-lit sculpted buttocks and the occasional hockey-stick pic.
Tierney, best known of late as Jared Keeso’s collaborator on Letterkenny and director of the first two seasons of Shoresy, has written crisp and elegant scenes to surround all that.
He teases out the nuances of homophobia in hockey in the time period depicted – the first two episodes careen from 2008 to 2014 – and the cultural challenges of being queer and closeted in Canada versus Russia without ever skating too close to the zone of social-issue drama.
It’s always complex: There’s a superb scene at the Sochi Olympics in 2014 when Shane runs into a couple of the macho American players from his team – one of whom remarks that an out Canadian figure skater there has “balls of steel” to compete in Russia.
The elements of performance that go with being a professional hockey player – from crafting those meaningless rinkside sound bites to posing for hypermasculine photos shoots – are the subject of mild satire.
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The first episode has a constant forward motion from season to season, year to year – with a pulsing electro soundtrack giving it a Challengers vibe.
By the end of the second episode, I was hoping that the action might slow down a bit.
But Heated Rivalry’s strong central performances do tie together the telescoped storytelling. Storrie is superb as the swaggering tough guy – and has a pouty mouth for the ages.
Williams gives a more subtle performance – half-showing his emotions in guarded expressions, as when only semi-successfully swallowing his happiness for an accomplishment of Ilya’s in front of his team.
Tierney’s direction and the overall production score one of those Canadian miracles of making a show on a budget that doesn’t look like it. It’ll look fine on HBO Max.