How Heated Rivalry Took Over Romancelandia

Dissecting our obsession with the newest romance show taking the internet by storm

In January of this year, a friend of mine sent me an article from The Cinemaholic announcing a screen adaptation of Rachel Reid’s beloved queer hockey romance novel, Heated Rivalry, set to air on Canada’s streaming service, Crave. I was over the moon excited. I’ve been a romance reader since I was twelve and eighteen years later and thousands of books read (literally), it’s rare that we get a romance novel to screen adaptation, much less an adaptation based on one of my all time favorite romances. When it was announced that Jacob Tierney of Letterkenny and Shoresy directorial fame and his producing partner, Brendan Brady, would be producing the show, I was even more thrilled. But…I was also hesitant. This is a book that’s mostly told through sexual encounters. That’s actually the entire basis for the development of the main characters’ relationship arc: clandestine hook ups every few months over the span of 8 years while they both adjust to careers as professional hockey players in the NHL. I’m pretty used to adaptations at this point that water down the story or try to make it more palatable to a wider audience or are just…outright produced by someone that has no respect for the genre and audience they’re targeting. So I was excited, yes, but also wary.

Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov and Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander in episode 102

But! I loved Tierney’s other works. The cast announcement in June of this year looked great. The social media team at Crave did a fantastic job promoting and garnering hype for the show. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, who play main characters Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, respectively, literally looked like someone yanked the characters out of the book with a magic wand. And Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady talked about the show with respect in literally every interview I’d seen. So when the two episode premiere landed at 11 pm CT on November 27th, I gathered up the iPad, busted out my headphones, and sat down (at work, mind you) to watch both episodes as soon as they dropped.

And friends, my jaw was on the floor. I was speechless. It was like Jacob Tierney had thrown the book into a magic well and out popped the most perfect adaptation of a romance novel I had ever seen. It was faithful to the source material. It was sexy and emotional and tense. The very, very minute changes made sense and only elevated the story. Storrie and Williams both brought their A games when it came to portraying Ilya and Shane. I mean, you could feel the sexual tension as well as the longing and the frustration and the fear. Into the wee hours of Friday morning, I manically texted with one of my best friends on the west coast and it was like 15 year old Tori had been reborn out of the ashes of 2014 fandom Tumblr as we dissected scene blocking and lighting choices and music score choices. But as two massive fans of the books, I thought maybe it was our excitement that this show even existed that colored our view of it. How wrong I was.

And the Crowd Goes Wild

Friday night, after I had slumbered off the residual exhaustion of Thursday’s night shift and gotten cozy in my bed for a second watch of the show, I started scrolling on Threads and TikTok and, friends, it was going bananas over Heated Rivalry. Everyone I came across in Romanclandia (and even some folks outside of it) was watching and commenting and collectively losing their minds over the show. Twitter. TikTok. Threads. Instagram. All going crazy over the first two episodes. The show quickly shot up to number 1 on Crave and number 2 on HBO Max (which is IMPRESSIVE) and is still hanging out in HBO’s top ten at number 4 as of December 3rd. Lengthy dissections of scenes were being posted all over socials. Scene analysis at a level I hadn’t seen since ye olde Tumblr days were taking over. People were fighting over who fell first, Shane or Ilya. TikTok was crashing out making edits to everything from Jeff Buckley’s saddest hits to Troye Sivan club bangers. You couldn’t even buy the book at any major retailer or Indie bookshop, because it was backordered. Eternally curious to understand why things happen, I wanted to investigate what about this adaptation has the internet in a collective tizzy, even days after the initial premiere, in a way other adaptations haven’t quite inspired. And because I can never shut up about anything I love, I’ve got a lot of theories as to why this is sticking in people’s brains.

We Are Starved for Queer Media

I think it’s really important to set up some background for just how barren the entertainment landscape is when it comes to queer media. There’s been a lot of discussion this week about who gets to play queer characters and who gets to tell queer stories, which is an incredibly important conversation to have. But, I want us to look at how bleak the queer media landscape is right now.

Acccording to GLAAD’s 13th annual Studio Responsibility Report¹, which tracks LGBTQ+ character inclusion in movies across 10 major studios, showed a 5% decrease in representation for the 2024 season from the record high in 2022 (when studios pretended they actually gave a fuck for a hot little minute). Only 23% of films produced in 2024 were queer character inclusive. Only 27% of queer characters had more than 10 minutes of screen time. Trans characters on screen at all came in at less than 1% of total characters across all films. The decrease in representation was across the board, including an 11% decrease in racially diverse queer characters, down to 27% in 2024 compared to 2022’s 38%. In GLAAD’s 2023-2024 Summary of Broadcast Findings, which tracks LGBTQ representation in broadcast television, 8.6% of series regulars were queer, down from 10.6% for 2022-2023 and 11.9% for 2021-2022. The stats for the 2025 report are equivalent to 2018’s numbers, which is the last time we were in a Trump presidency. In a media landscape that continues to reward right wing grifters and caves in to the requests of a fascist administration, queer films and television shows are losing whatever small amount of ground they had made and it’s only going to get worse under a second round with an administration that continually attacks queer folks, especially trans folks, regularly. Sure this show is Canadian made, but Canada is not too far behind the United States in terms of conservatism, especially with a growing far right youth. I think people are glad to see positive queerness in media, especially when it’s rapidly declining with a staggering 41% of queer characters expected to not return to the screen next season per GLAAD. Positive queer representation in media is a net positive and will only become more so in a media ecosystem run by far right billionaires that want to erase us. And I think fans of the show are glad to see a show like this be unapologetic in its queerness.

Queer Adults Getting a Happy Ending

“The thing that we really don’t get as queer people is a happy fucking ending, where we’re allowed to exist, fuck, and smile at the same time. Usually it’s like, pick one,” he laments. “You get to have it all in this one.

Jacob Tierney for The Hollywood Reporter, interviewed by Nicole Fell

When it comes to adaptations, we’ve gotten a lot of really good YA romance in the last several years: The Summer I Turned Pretty, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Heartstopper, Love, Simon, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, The Sun is Also a Star. And those works are really important and there’s always, always room for more adaptations when it comes to YA media in terms of queerness and racial diversity. I did not have many shows or movies with positive queer representation as a closeted queer kid. I am thrilled that teens get to have more of these shows and movies than I did, even if it’s not as many as they deserve. But I’m just shy of 30 years old and there’s no doubt that Heated Rivalry is created for adults. I’ve been a consumer of queer media for a long time and I can’t name many shows that have a non-side character queer couple on screen getting a happy ending as the main plot point. Or don’t have someone dying or struggling with drug addiction or breaking up in the end and going back into the closet.

“I’m thrilled, as a queer person, to be putting out a romance into the world that is not punishing and that is not full of dead, miserable gay characters," Tierney says. As he likes to put it, "This is a gay story where no one dies of AIDS, and no one goes back to their wives.”

Jacob Tierney for Teen Vogue by Max Gao

Heated Rivalry delivers on exactly what Jacob says in the above quote from his interview with Nicole Fell. I’m so tired of critically acclaimed movies and shows that kill their gays because we’re a prop or a diversity quota or they just don’t know how to possibly let us be happy in the end. Heated Rivalry is a romance novel adaptation. No one dies. No one has to go back into the closet. No one has to spend the rest of their lives mourning the one that got away or worse, mourning a dead lover. At the end of all the angst and yearning that’s coming, the main characters are going to be happy. And along the way, they get to fuck and struggle with adult issues that I can relate to most as a 29 year old queer woman. Especially as someone that came out as an adult.

Of course I watch queer YA shows to support them (and because they’re great watches!) But there are very few adult queer romances in film that are strictly romances with a happy ending, never mind ones with actual consensual, healthy sex on screen. And I do think what people miss when they sum it all up as just “smut” (not that there’s anything wrong with smut), is that the sex scenes in Heated Rivalry are intimate. It’s not just insert and cum after two thrusts. There’s an intimacy to even the blowjob scenes that feels like we’re voyeurs on an actual couple, a testament to the actors and their intimacy coordinator. That has definitely been missing from romance adaptations as well, even when we do get sex scenes. And while we’re talking about the sex scenes, Tierney’s inclusion of condom use and emphasis on consent seen with Ilya’s constant checking in with Shane is so good and not something even most heterosexual sex scenes have a great track record of doing.

We want romance adaptations. We want adult romance adaptations. We want queer adult romance adaptations. And this show is so refreshing in being unapologetically adult and queer and a capital r Romance. It’s lovely to see in an entertainment media landscape starved for all of the above separately AND combined. I think that’s a huge part of what’s made viewers pay attention to this show, even outside of Romancelandia: queer adults getting to fuck and laugh and cry and knowing at the end of it all, they’re going to be happy with each other.

An Intimacy Wasteland

And part of the reason I think we’re so bananas for this show is because it’s intimacy and connection distilled into its best, purest form. We’ve reached a level of societal disconnection that’s been difficult to bridge. The pandemic changed a lot of the ways we connect as human beings, as friends, as lovers. Not only are we starved for connection in the real world, we’re starved for depictions that provide that kind of connection in the narrative without watering it down. There’s an assumption that readers are just into romance novels for the sex. While I think romance novels are a very valid way to explore sex and kink in a safe environment, I think what a lot of us are really hoping to get out of them is that intimacy and connectivity, experienced vicariously in open door and closed door romance alike. Other movies and shows have fulfilled that role to a certain extent. I think Red, White, and Royal Blue owed a lot of it’s success as an adaptation to the time period it was released in, despite removing key characters (Alex’s sister and stepdad) and the sometimes hollow feeling of watching Obama-era politics in a post Trump 1.0 world. But it was really the fact that it showed both a happy queer ending and that human connection we were all missing in adult media even when it seemed impossible for the main characters. It wasn’t the perfect adaptation of a beloved book, but I think it resonated with a population that needed to see that it was still possible to form those bonds in the most impossible of circumstances. And if you think that sounds silly, let me introduce you to the loneliness epidemic we’re facing in a world after COVID entered our lives.

No, I’m not talking about the “male loneliness epidemic” that the manosphere swears exists in a bid to lead cishet white men down the right wing rabbit hole. I’m talking about the actual loneliness epidemic discussed by Dr. Vivek Murthy, 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States. A post-COVID world where the ways we connect have been greatly changed, from the way we connect with friends, with family, with romantic partners can never go back to the way it was before COVID entered our lives. Folks are struggling in an increasingly online world with some of the more basic tenets of connection: human touch, communal gatherings, intimate relationships. And I don’t think the media has met us in the moment with depiction that soothe that loneliness.

In a bid to recoup financial loss seen during the closing of theaters during the height of lockdown measures, the entertainment industry has fallen back on a handful of things: adaptations of proven IP (remakes and spinoffs), reactionary horror, and fantasy and musical escapism. None of those genres are technically bad, but they’ve failed to meet a section of their audience where they are. These studios certainly haven’t been looking at adapting romance novels until recently. And even then it’s a particular kind of romance that’s being adapted: Elle Kennedy’s Briar U series, Emily Henry’s People We Meet On Vacation, and whatever barely a romance by definition book they poach from Colleen Hoover’s backlist next. Now, do I think a tv show is going to solve the loneliness issue we have in our society? Of course not. But I do believe the scarcity of media that explores intimacy, emotional and sexual, is absolutely part of the reason we’re so obsessed with Heated Rivalry after only 2 episodes. I believe that’s a good part of why romance reading has boomed in the years following lockdown: we are desperate for good depictions of love and intimacy.

I think we’re in a moment in time politically, at least in the United States, where a lot of us are tired of violence or tragedy or a looming dictatorial government in our entertainment. When I look back at the top shows of the past 5 years, since the pandemic started, it’s like…House of the Dragon, Succession, The Boys, Stranger Things, etc. It’s not that those aren’t good shows or (obviously) wildly popular ones. I see mass suffering on my phone screen everyday and it feels like we’re drowning in “cruelty as the point”. So I think to see a show that’s really just about that desire for connection and intimacy, to love and be loved is really what we’ve been missing in film over the last several years.

The film industry has never actually taken romance adaptations seriously, of course. That’s not new. But when most shows I’ve watched due to critical acclaim over the past five years feature gratuitous sexual assault or blood and gore or families that are trying take each other out or the machinations of bored rich people in search of more power, it’s nice to have an explicitly adult show that’s just about…falling in love, with healthy depictions of consensual sex (Outlander, I love you, but I’m tired of graphic sexual assault every season, thank you) as the plot line. And I think that resonates for a lot of viewers that have been wading through a sea of shows about really terrible people screwing each other over, umpteen superhero movies, and violent fantasy machinations.

It’s Smart

What I appreciate most about this adaptation is that it’s, for lack of a better term, smart production. I actually hate when people dub a romance novel as “smart” (looking at you, 2023 Emily Henry Vulture article) because I think that’s just a way for folks to try and reinvent the wheel to swoop in and claim romance has a new savior every six or so months. What I do like are shows that treat their viewers like they’re smart. Let me explain.

In fantastic reporting from n+1 magazine, Will Tavlin talks about the “dumbing down” of movies and shows by streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime so that viewers can multitask while casually watching, scrolling on Facebook while a show plays in the background. And that’s true. Netflix original scripts often resort to overt verbal explanation by the characters so you can stalk your high school nemesis’ social media without missing whatever’s happening on the show. Tavlin points out a scene in particular from the Netflix movie Irish Wish starring Lindsay Lohan that really highlights what the “dumbing down” phenomena means:

Lohan: “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my choices. Tomorrow, I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.”

This kind of screenwriting is all over films and shows now and it’s intentional. You never have to pay attention to what’s happening because the script tells you. I can absentmindedly scroll on Instagram and not miss what the folks onscreen in whichever Netflix original movie are thinking or feeling. Our current attention economy relies on the idea that these streaming services and the scripts they greenlight don’t have to do much to hold your attention. They just need enough of your attention to get a fair amount of streams from your account on a show you aren’t really paying attention to. I won’t say it isn’t a smart business model, as far as audience capture goes, but it sucks that this has converged so perfectly with the rise in anti-intellectualism in the United States.

That’s what has made Heated Rivalry so different, for me as a viewer. So much of the relationship development and characterization relies on the absence of speaking. Instead of changing Ilya and Shane into emotionally effusive characters that explain their every inner thought like some production teams would have done, Tierney lets the characters stay true to their emotionally closed off book iterations. It doesn’t treat the viewer like we’re scrolling on the phone. It treats us like we’re watching the television with our brains ready to digest what we’re viewing. If you are scrolling on your phone, you’re missing the text messages between Shane and Ilya, the stolen glances between the two whenever they find themselves in the same room, the way talking about Russia causes Ilya to shut down, Shane’s micro-expressions that show when he’s hurting or missing Ilya. Hell, you miss the translations for whole scenes where Ilya and other Russian characters are speaking in a different language. And I think that’s not something we’re used to seeing in adaptations recently, especially shows and movies made for streaming services, because they’re intentionally “dumbing down” scripts to make it where we don’t have to pay attention. And, quite honestly, whenever I’ve seen critiques that say Heated Rivalry didn’t explain this or that well enough, I really think we’ve just gotten used to screenwriting from giants like Netflix that don’t make us think all that hard.

With Heated Rivalry, the level of scene analysis has been insane to see online. There was a phenomenal scene breakdown of the ending scene in episode 2 in the Las Vegas Hotel room (linked here) which I have not seen since my Tumblr days circa 2011-2014. Everyone is paying attention to the show because it kind of…forces you to. Large segments are entirely in Russian, the nuances of touch and facial expression are utilized more than words in the sex scenes, and the way they connect as a couple is really not through speech. So it would have been a disservice to these characters if Tierney had decided to make them explain themselves out loud as they go for the sake of the viewer being able to scroll and “watch” at the same time. Tierney didn’t rely on attention economy and just produced a good show. I think that’s part of what has kept us so engaged with the show, trying to see if our fellow viewers interpreted this scene or that scene the same way. And that’s what’s made this so fun to experience with other viewers on social media. We’re tuned in. We’re locked in. We’re dissecting every hand touch and lingering glance. It’s made watching a TV show fun.

“What I said to [Reid] was, ‘I want to take this seriously. I don’t want to dumb this down. I don’t want to condense it,’” Tierney says.

Jacob Tierney for Teen Vogue by Max Gao

A Respectful Adaptation and A Fuck You

As to what’s at the heart of what’s attracted viewers to the show, I firmly believe you can tell when an adaptation, particularly a romance adaptation, is made my someone that respects the source material and by someone who doesn’t. Readers of Heated Rivalry and the series it belongs to, Game Changers, have been impressed with the accuracy of the show compared to the book. Even the changes that have happened, because changes are usually necessary, so far have made sense. Svetlana, Ilya’s most consistent hook-up outside of Shane, now has a little more of a backstory as Ilya’s childhood friend. Shane no longer has the fuck apartment he bought just for his and Ilya’s hookups. Scott Hunter seems to clock Shane as maybe a fellow closeted athlete whereas in the books he’s clueless (I don’t care if that was intentional or not. It came across that way and it really added something to the story for me as a viewer.). Minute changes in an adaptation are understandable and when they’re done right, they work well. But we’re so used to having adaptations that change entire book plots (hi, Bridgerton season 2) or completely remove characters that were important to the story (Red, White, and Royal Blue) that we lose our minds when an adaptation is this book accurate. Of course, we’re early into the season with only two episodes out, but at this rate, I implicitly trust whatever decisions Jacob Tierney has made in adapting the book into film.

“I’m a fan. I love these books. I’m not trying to fuck with them. I’m not trying to change them.”

Jacob Tierney for The Hollywood Reporter, interviewed by Nicole Fell

Romance has never been taken seriously by major studios. It’s not really taken seriously by most publishers that leave their authors, especially their queer and BIPOC authors, out to languish and do their own damn book promotion. It’s a stigmatized and heavily derided section of genre fiction, despite being the highest selling genre consistently. Mommy porn, low brow, cheap, anti-feminist, anti literature, poorly written slop. I’ve heard it all over the course of my years as a romance reader. But boy, do certain entities want to make money off of it, with its built in audience of voracious readers starved for adaptation. Those entities very rarely do the diligence of giving us a good adaptation, assuming we’ll be satisfied with what we’re given, condensed into a 90 minute run time. Tierney very well could have taken Heated Rivalry and made it into something entirely different. But he stuck by the fact that the audience that he would be developing this for wanted and expected one thing: it to be done faithfully. It feels like a bit of a fuck you to every producer and studio that thought romance novel adaptation were too silly to bother with. I mean, how else would they fund the next Tarantino masterpiece where he uses racial slurs 100 times for no reason? Money? To spare? For a romance novel adaptation? Ludicrous.

But the folks at Crave believed in this story and Jacob Tierney believed in this story and I think that’s so incredibly clear by how they approached this adaptation. Their faith in this paid off.

“Because this is based off a romance novel that was part of Harlequin, the big thing we kept coming back to we wanted to sell glam. We wanted this to feel like it was elevated, that the world we were creating was the luxury, romantic envisioning that you had in your own mind.”

Brendan Brady, co-producer for @heatedrivalrycrave instagram

And the chemistry between Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams is insane. Genuinely insane. It’s like someone yoinked Ilya and Shane from the pages of the book. The way they openly embrace the show in interviews and talk unashamedly about the sex in the show is really lovely and endearing (they both just seem like such sweethearts). That kind of chemistry is very hard to find in movies at all, much less in any of the adaptations we’ve gotten to date. Genuinely, Jonathan Bailey and Simone Ashley in season 2 of Bridgerton are the only comparable pairing I can think of in terms of chemistry.

You’d never know that the show is balling on a budget when it comes to sets and costumes. The show runners really did give us the manifestation of the luxury romantic adaptation. And their hard work has led to a deep obsession that’s taken the internet by storm and doesn’t seem like it’ll be letting up anytime soon. Rightfully so.

Enjoy Episode 3

Episode 3 will premier tonight on HBO Max here in the USA and I’ll be tuned in with the rest of you. Until then, you can find me on threads at @toriloves_heas where you can come hang out and be properly unhinged with me about the show if ya wanna!

1. Keep in mind, the 2025 report is data gathered from the 2024 film and television season.