When Rachel Reid sat at her dining room table in Nova Scotia writing the book that would become “Heated Rivalry,” it never crossed her mind that the smutty romance between adversarial pro hockey players would one day become Canada’s primary cultural export.
And while writer, actor and director Jacob Tierney loved “Heated Rivalry” when he listened to the audio version during the pandemic, he didn’t see it as an obvious candidate for a television adaptation. Aside from the hockey, most of the plot and character development either occurs during charged, urgent sex scenes or self-deluded interior monologues. Not exactly easy to translate to TV.
And yet! Hasn’t the romance genre taught us that the least expected affairs are often the most scorching?
The first two episodes of “Heated Rivalry,” from Canadian streaming service Crave, dropped on November 28. At the last minute, HBO Max announced it would distribute the show stateside on the same day. By the end of the weekend, the series catapulted to a top spot on the viewing charts and the book to the number one bestseller on Kindle.
Much of North America (and Australia!) has plunged into a fervor over hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, as portrayed by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, respectively: their gravity-defying butts, the near-instant consummation of their relationship (“I’ve waited longer on Pornhub to see sex,” Tierney says), followed by intimate scenes that capture a cornucopia of sex acts and emotion, and the rare moments their masks of bravado slip in favor of doe-eyed vulnerability.
“It’s like I opened a door and there was on the other side a million people screaming about Ilya and Shane,” Reid says. “Oh my God. It’s been really cool, but also it doesn’t feel real at all.”
For Tierney, the showrunner, director and writer, the debut weekend “has just been completely insane. … I don’t feel like I’ve ever been studied this closely.” With a previous show, “Letterkenny,” he says, it took more than four seasons for it to build up steam and get the kind of media coverage that “Heated Rivalry” netted after its first episodes. “This is the kind of thing that you don’t allow yourself to dream about,” he says.
Because while characters Shane and Ilya are the dominant hockey players of their time, the book and the show are underdogs.
“It’s so unlikely that the number one book in the Kindle store in America would be this queer hockey romance. It’s like seven years old and very Canadian,” Reid says. “It’s as unlikely as this show being a hit — that the show everyone’s talking about is this sexually explicit queer hockey show.”
“Heated Rivalry,” published in 2019, is the second book in the “Game Changers” series, all six of which focus on queer male relationships in the hockey world. Reid (real name Rachelle Goguen) is a die-hard hockey fan who began writing the series as a way to reckon with the homophobia and other issues she abhorred in the sport’s culture.
Tierney is also a huge hockey fan (his shows “Letterkenny” and especially “Shoresy” foreground the sport). But “Heated Rivalry” drew him in because of its portrayal of Shane and Ilya’s dynamic, which is less common for a romance novel: the will-they, won’t-they isn’t about whether they’ll be physically intimate, but instead whether they’ll admit to each other (or themselves) that they’ve fallen in love after nearly a decade of ecstatic sex.
“As a gay man, I’m like, no, that’s real. In the land of people who are like, ‘Well, you know, you catch feelings and then eventually you make love,’ I’m like, ‘Okay Mother Superior, not us,’” Tierney says. “That’s not how we do it.”
Still, he didn’t necessarily see a path to television adaptation. “Everything in TV is hard right now,” Tierney says, and “Heated Rivalry” didn’t necessarily have the key ingredients for a green light.
What was, in romance parlance, Tierney’s feelings realization? He saw that “Heated Rivalry” got a special mention in a Washington Post story about the surprising popularity of hockey romances. In a pique of FOMO, afraid someone else might beat him to the punch, he reached out to Reid over Instagram in August 2023. (And it turns out, his urgency was necessary — Reid says shortly after she and Tierney’s production company, Accent Aigu Entertainment, inked a deal, Warner Bros. came calling.)
When Tierney and Reid first spoke about his vision for adapting her work, “everything he said was amazing and I knew right away that he was going to, you know, take it seriously, that he really got the books, got the characters,” Reid says. But the entire conversation felt surreal: “I just never expected to hear somebody talk about my characters that way.”
Despite her implicit trust in Tierney, she remembers feeling a peculiar melancholy the night before the announcement of the TV show. “I got a little emotional ’cause I said, like, this is the last night the characters are just mine,” Reid says.
And, of course, they are her characters. Her glorious brain whipped up the neurotic, fussy yet deeply endearing Canadian Shane and braggadocious Russian, Ilya, whose swagger disguises his keen care. She created an interplay whereby these singular, imperfect men could reveal parts of their hidden selves only to each other.
But to fans of the book, like myself, they felt like ours, too. We’ve worn our books through with constant rereads and entreated friends and strangers alike to join us in kvelling over their oddly romantic tuna melt. I can think of multiple friendships that grew closer once I persuaded someone to read “Heated Rivalry” and they got it.
There’s a mix of validation and trepidation that comes with your niche interest going mainstream. A nervousness that it will be subject to ridicule or sanded down to something unrecognizable.
Tierney credits Crave and its parent company, Bell Media, with funding the entirety of the show, which ensured it wouldn’t fall victim to death by a thousand studio notes. (This ended up paying off big time for Bell Media, which then got to successfully sell the show to distributors across the world. “Heated Rivalry” is the first Crave show purchased by HBO.)
When Tierney and Crave sought additional funding sources, “We had a lot of people telling us why this wouldn’t work. And they were titillated and interested in the idea, but they were like, ‘Well no, you have to do this, you have to do that’ and it’s like ‘No, you’re wrong.’” Tierney says. “What you fundamentally don’t understand is that the people that love this love it the way it is. … What is the point of IP if you’re not respecting the people that made the IP valuable, which is the fans?”
That attitude surely endeared him to the book’s fans. But then, of course, there’s the biggest fear of all. What if, despite everyone’s best intentions, the adaptation falls flat?
This is where, I’m delighted to say, fans needn’t worry. Perhaps the most important decision Tierney made took place long before the cameras started rolling: “Heated Rivalry” rises or falls on the well-muscled backs of Shane and Ilya.
“As soon as somebody auditioned that I liked, I’d be like, ‘Send them the scripts.’ Because I need to weed out the people that don’t want to do this right now,” he says. “And believe me, there were a lot of people that didn’t want to do this.” After all, these are physically grueling roles, in terms of both the hockey and the sex, and vulnerable ones, too.
Williams and Storrie are revelatory. Their faces capture a complex cocktail of feelings, their chemistry is bonkers and Storrie, a Texan, pulls off an impressive Russian accent.
Plus, all the hallmarks of great television are present: thoughtful cinematography, lush set dressings and emotive music scoring. Peter Peter, the composer, recently posted in amazement at the outpouring of affection for the music, and said he was in talks over the release of an original soundtrack.
When a show reaches this kind of fever pitch, it becomes fodder for the ever-hungry discourse machine. This is what it means to be successful in the year of our Lord 2025 — endless screenshots, GIFs and videos analyzing the show and its press tour with an intensity once reserved for the Zapruder film.
Reid is mostly amused by seeing so many interpretations of the characters, though she doesn’t love the anti-Ilya ones. “The takes where he’s abusive or a red flag — they hurt but I get it, because you haven’t seen the rest of the story yet.”
Tierney is “kind of thrilled they think Ilya’s a red flag right now. If you’re not going on a journey with them, what are we doing here?”
He just wants everyone to focus whatever ire they have on the characters and leave his cast members alone. Williams and Storrie quickly went from a few thousand Instagram followers apiece to hundreds of thousands, and have seen their profiles — and interest in their personal lives — surge.
The rush to get “Heated Rivalry” on screens has led to a few logistical hiccups. For example, Reid’s publisher, Harlequin, so far hasn’t met the voracious demand for paperbacks of “Heated Rivalry,” much to the consternation of independent booksellers, and there’s currently no special edition tied to the TV adaptation. Harlequin says it’s actively shipping books and “availability varies by retailer.”
It’s precisely this kind of fan-led zeal that leads to a series renewal. While there hasn’t been an official announcement, season two of “Heated Rivalry” is basically in the bag. “I feel pretty confident that if Jacob wanted to do 50 seasons he’d be allowed to do ’em,” Reid says.
And they’re not going to run out of source material anytime soon. Tierney’s production company optioned the entire six-book series (the third episode of the season draws upon “Game Changer,” the first book). “The Long Game,” the final book in the series, also focuses specifically on Shane and Ilya.
Plus, Reid plans to write more about the pair. “I can’t shake them,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any characters I love writing that much. And it’s usually quite easy to write them. They really are quite loud in my head.”
Though that will have to wait until the ardor dies down a bit. Since the show debuted, she hasn’t had much time to write.
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