Real Men Watch 'Heated Rivalry'

The television adaptation of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance series dropped late last year on the Canadian streaming service Crave, which produced it, and picked up by HBO Max, taking the world by storm. Heated Rivalry is a short six-episode series, but it’s already been greenlit for a second season. The story of two competing hockey players, the Asian-Canadian phenom Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Moscow-born Russian powerhouse Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), spans several years across multiple cities, beginning from their initial meeting as potential draft picks to their professional career playing for rival teams.

The two leads have tremendous chemistry from the get-go, and there’s uncontainable sexual tension between Hollander and Rozanov — dubbed Hollanov by the show’s (and books’) growing fandom — every time they’re on screen together. And where else does all that sexual tension go but to supercharging the hottest sex scenes on television? Heated Rivalry showcases some of the most intense sex to ever stream outside of actual adult sites, but also some of the most tender and romantic. Yes, it’s a gay romance. So why should straight men watch it?

To begin with, whether a story is gay or straight shouldn’t really matter. The LGBTQ watch straight relationships on screen all the time and enjoy them because it’s the story that matters, anyway. Representation helps, for sure, and being able to identify with characters in the story is good, but it isn’t always necessary. The LGBTQ community is certainly tuned in to Heated Rivalry, but the show has exploded far beyond that relatively niche market, making it the number one show on HBO Max ever since it aired. So who’s really watching? It turns out, straight women.

A large portion of Heated Rivalry’s viewership consists of straight women who come for the romance and stay for Connor Storrie’s glorious bubble butt. At the very least, straight men should watch the show simply to marvel at Ilya’s perfectly sculpted glutes and figure out a workout plan that includes more back squats and hip thrusts. All the men on the show, including the secondary pair of Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Kip (Robbie G.K.), whose love story parallels Shane and Ilya’s, are jacked and have washboard abs, but Connor Storrie has a god-tier backside that should be every man’s fitness goal for 2026. It’s still early enough in January to make that resolution.

Physique goals aside, what else is there for straight men to watch in Heated Rivalry? Well, the story is actually really, really good. Shane and Ilya’s relationship is an enemies-to-lovers trope that finds the pair hooking up in cities where both their teams play, complicated by the fact that both men are in the closet because hockey is considered such a masculine sport that homophobia runs deep. Throw in the fact that being openly gay in Russia is borderline illegal, and you’ve got a powder keg of a love story. One episode is dedicated to Scott and Kip, the stars of Reid’s first novel in the Game Changers series, Game Changer, and it’s almost as stellar as the standout episode from the first season of HBO Max’s The Last of Us featuring the gay couple Frank and Bill.

Heated Rivalry is loaded with genuinely kilig moments—"kilig" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, and every Filipino knows there’s just no other word to describe what it means. Heated Rivalry is overflowing with kilig, and it’s because showrunner Jacob Tierney has done a phenomenal job of adapting Reid’s story to film. Scott and Kip’s relationship explores the challenge of a closeted professional athlete trying to make it work with an out and proud barista and the harsh reality many gay men deal with on a daily basis. Williams mentioned in an interview that professional athletes from various sports, from hockey to football to basketball, have reached out to him to share their own struggles of having to stay in the closet because of their sports careers. It’s 2026, and yet gay men still have to deal with discrimination from their straight peers. 

Then there’s the sex. Oh, there’s so. much. sex. From an objective viewpoint, the sex scenes in the series are just really well done. Heated Rivalry shows pretty much everything except actual man parts, and seeing two beautiful creatures go at it is certainly an experience. Some straight men might find these scenes uncomfortable, but the women are lapping it up. And why wouldn’t they? The sex on Heated Rivalry is literally smut romance come to life, and the dashing good looks of Williams and Storrie are making women (and all the gay men, of course) swoon. Plus, just like literary smut, there’s the added bonus of possibly turning them on, so straight men planning to watch the show should definitely watch it with their partners. You never know.

The point is that Heated Rivalry is an excellent sports romance drama that just happens to feature gay men. Straight women tune in to the show because of the romance and because the men display healthy and safe masculinity. Except for Ilya, that is, but even then, his dour demeanor and somewhat toxic attitude are directly attributable to an unhealthy relationship with his father and the oppressive, homophobic patriarchy of ‘Mother Russia’. But in one of the best moments of the show, Ilya lets his guard down in a full monologue in Russian—the Texas-born and raised Storrie has been widely praised for his flawless Russian—and it’s one of the most tender and romantic on-screen moments, and the lovers aren’t even in the same place. Sure, there’s not enough hockey to justify it as a sports series, but what little hockey is shown is pretty spot on that hardcore hockey fans have tuned in, too.

Heated Rivalry achieves a lot with very little. With just six episodes, the show manages to showcase two queer relationships in full, comprehensive ways that lend so much insight to the state of gay male relationships. As an added bonus, the supporting female characters are all amazing, too. From Ilya’s FWB Svetlana (Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova) to Shane’s celebrity girlfriend Rose Landry (Sophie Nélisse) to Kip’s BFF Elena (Nadine Bhabha), the women in Heated Rivalry all demonstrate an extremely healthy and supportive attitude towards their men. These are what healthy male and female relationships look like, and all the straight men should take note. Men can pick up a lot from the show, and if you can sit through all the episodes with all the sex and romantic moments without getting squeamish, well, that’s just what real men do.

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