Furthermore, 15% of viewers were reported to have completed the series five or more times and episode 5 was the most rewatch among the six episodes. After only two episodes had aired, Harper’s Bazaar listed it among the best queer television series of all time. Classical music also makes a number of appearances in the series, including Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata which feature during the episodes «Olympians» and «I’ll Believe in Anything», respectively. Additional episodes of the series will premiere each week through Dec. 26, 2025, when the finale airs. The TV series follows two rival hockey players, Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), as they navigate their professional lives and mix business with pleasure.
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- The former serves as the series’ theme song, while the latter accompanies the scene in the episode «Olympians» depicting Shane and Ilya’s first instance of anal intercourse.
- Tierney’s creative executive at Crave, Rachel Goldstein, discouraged him from adapting Heated Rivalry’s epilogue into the series, as it could have been perceived as setting up a second season that had not been confirmed at the time.
- It is set to adapt The Long Game (2022), the sixth book of the Game Changers series, which serves as a sequel to Heated Rivalry.
- HBO Max’s newest series has viewers buzzing.
- One of the most jarring features of the show, which becomes apparent quickly into the first episode, is its skimming-for-the-good-parts storytelling style.
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The story is told, largely, through the performance of Shane and Ilya’s physical chemistry, as well as the loaded moments when that chemistry disappears, freezes up, or transforms into something else. The degree to which they must “keep it quiet” in their lives is reflected in the show’s formal patience about saying anything out loud. Time-jumping and globe-trotting to show us every single time they hook up over the course of about a decade, the show’s immediate devotion to their affair starts to bleed out into the viewer’s perception and anticipation of it. In the first 11 minutes of the show’s pilot, for instance, there are four separate time jumps—“One Week Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later.” While the pace slows a bit after that opening hopscotch, the time jump remains the show’s signature structuring device. There are intra-team dynamics, friends and former lovers, complex family situations, international political imbroglios, and social lives outside of the succession of hotel rooms in which these lovers meet.
- Tierney initially had doubts about whether the story could be adapted while retaining the books’ sexually explicit content.
- While the narrative eye returns to our titular heated rivalry, and things begin to loosen up with their own communication, it eventually becomes clear that the Scott Hunter episode is mostly there to set up later plot developments between Ilya and Shane.
- A trailer for the series alludes to the covert nature of the hockey players’ tryst as a woman asks Shane if there are “any gay hockey players.”
- Despite a minimal marketing campaign and a low-cost licensing fee of approximately $600,000 per episode, it experienced a rapid surge in popularity following its late-November premiere.
- He eventually disposed of those songs when he received footage from the episodes, and re-wrote the music to the images over about seven weeks.
- Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are two professional ice hockey players who compete on rival teams, the Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders, respectively.
- Tom Smyth of Vulture and Mads Misasi of Tell-Tale TV both gave the episode perfect five star ratings, while Cody Schultz of Show Snob described it as «a masterclass in storytelling» and one of the greatest television episodes of the year and of all time.
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Although HBO Max later acquired the series, it became involved only after the first season had been completed, meaning the show was not developed as a U.S. co-production from the outset. Despite a minimal marketing campaign and a low-cost licensing fee of approximately $600,000 per episode, it experienced a rapid surge in popularity following its late-November premiere. According to data shared by Crave’s social media accounts, the show exhibited unusually high «stickiness», with a rewatch rate where approximately one-third (33%) of the total audience watched the entire season more than once. According to JustWatch, Heated Rivalry ranked fourth on its television streaming chart during the week of December 7, 2025, while Whip Media, based on data from its TV Time viewership tracking platform of more than 25 million users, reported the series placed sixth during the weeks of December 7 and 14. Following the episode’s reception, the series itself also entered IMDb Top 250 TV shows chart.
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By the end of the year, the series ranked among the best TV shows of 2025 on the lists by Cosmopolitan, the New York Post, Refinery29, The Seattle Times, and the Toronto Star. Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com described the series as «revolutionary» and called it «one of the most entertaining shows of the year» as well as «the most significant queer show of the year». For their performances in the first season finale, TVLine named both Williams and Storrie as «Performers of the Week», while /Film described them as the strongest break-out performances of the year. On December 10, 2025, the trailer for the series was aired at the Pride Night game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Tampa Bay Lightning. In advance of the program’s television premiere, the first episode received a preview screening in Montreal at the 2025 Image+Nation festival on November 23, 2025. On November 19, 2025, nine days before the series premiere on Crave, it was announced that HBO Max had acquired US and Australian rights to the show for a day-and-date global release.
In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry. Between the week of its debut and the week of its season finale, on December 27, viewership grew tenfold—from 30 million to 324 million streaming minutes logged—with a growing and notable majority of viewers being women. This November, though, a little Canadian series called Heated Rivalry figured out how to make hockey work on television.
For a time, which started on December 20, 2025, it tied with Breaking Bad’s «Ozymandias» (2013) as the only television episodes to receive a perfect rating on the platform, and ranked among the highest-rated episodes of all time. Tom Smyth of Vulture and Mads Misasi of Tell-Tale TV both gave the episode perfect five star ratings, while Cody Schultz of Show Snob described it as «a masterclass in storytelling» and one of the greatest television episodes of the year and of all time. David Caballero of Collider gave the series an 8 out of 10, noting the effective early development of their characters both individually and as a potential couple, and the prominent yet accessible use of hockey in the story.
Download limits apply to certain content categories on HBO Max. The Pitt trains its focus on this one place and this one time (per season), but it cares about everyone who passes through. While the narrative eye returns to our titular heated rivalry, and things begin to loosen up with their own communication, it eventually becomes clear that the Scott Hunter episode is mostly there to set up later plot developments between Ilya and Shane. One of the most jarring features of the show, which becomes apparent quickly into the first episode, is its skimming-for-the-good-parts storytelling style.
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Heated Rivalry is, almost exclusively, the story of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two high-level professional hockey prospects who fall in love. It doesn’t feel like hockey, and it doesn’t feel like anything else on TV right now; it feels a little bit like falling in love. While it isn’t ascending to Bluey levels of global streaming dominance, what’s unique about the show has been its growth. To really appreciate what’s going on on the ice, you have to be in that big refrigerator, shoulder to shoulder with the raucous crowd, bodies flying at you left and right.