{"id":199633,"date":"2025-12-19T05:50:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T05:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199633\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T05:50:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T05:50:12","slug":"heated-rivalry-lands-at-sky-in-u-k-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199633\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Heated Rivalry\u2019 Lands at Sky in U.K., Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHeated Rivalry<\/a> has finally scored a home in the U.K. and Ireland. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe gay hockey romance series is heading to Sky and its streaming service Now in January, Sky and Bell Media announced Wednesday. The series is airing on streamer Crave in Canada. HBO Max is the show\u2019s U.S. home, while it\u2019s airing on Sky in New Zealand. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe\u00a0show, created for television by\u00a0Letterkenny\u00a0alum Jacob Tierney<\/a>\u00a0and adapted from Rachel Reid\u2019s novel of the same name, centers around a fictional hockey universe.\u00a0Heated Rivalry\u00a0focuses on two rival professional hockey players\u00a0\u2014 Canada-born Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams)<\/a> of the fictitious Montreal Metros and Russia-born Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie)<\/a> of the fictitious Boston Raiders \u2014 as they navigate a years-long secret fling. Tierney and Brendan Brady are showrunning the series from Accent Aigu Entertainment.<\/p>\n

\n\tHeated Rivalry is produced by Accent Aigu Entertainment in association with Bell Media\u2019s Crave and distributed internationally by Sphere Abacus. Lucy Criddle, director of acquisitions and strategic projects, and Alexander Wright, acquisitions manager, handled the acquisition for Sky. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show\u2019s source material is the second in a string of gay hockey romance novels by Reid that are all set in the same universe. A synopsis from\u00a0Heated Rivalry\u2019s producers reads: \u201cShane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are two of the biggest stars in Major League Hockey, bound by ambition, rivalry and a magnetic pull neither of them fully understands. What begins as a secret fling between two confused teenagers at 17 evolves into a years-long journey of love, denial, and self-discovery. Over the next eight years, as they chase glory on the ice, they struggle to navigate their feelings off of it. Torn between the sport they live for and the love they can\u2019t ignore, Shane and Ilya must decide if there\u2019s room in their fiercely competitive world for something as fragile \u2014 and powerful \u2014 as real love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHeated Rivalry was already gaining traction online ahead of its premiere, but it\u2019s become increasingly popular in the nearly four weeks since its debut. The show\u2019s fifth episode will air on Crave and HBO Max Thursday (Dec. 18). It premieres on Sky in the U.K. and Ireland on Jan. 10. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heated Rivalry has finally scored a home in the U.K. and Ireland. The gay hockey romance series is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,105687,61,1042,60],"class_list":["post-199633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-heated-rivalry","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}