Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin entered the NHL in 2005. Over 20 years, the Canadian star and his Russian counterpart have engaged in one of the great rivalries in all of sports. They’ve won titles and medals and scoring crowns, and they’re both still playing (with the same franchises that drafted them), having claimed positions among hockey’s all-time elite.
But what if they were also having an intense, sweaty love affair?
Heated Rivary
The Bottom Line
Queer as Puck.
Airdate: Friday, November 28 (HBO Max)
Cast: Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie, Francois Arnaud, Dylan Walsh. Christina Chang
Creator: Jacob Tierney
That’s the veiled hypothetical at the heart of HBO Max and Crave‘s new six-part romantic drama, Heated Rivalry, based on the book by Rachel Reid and written and directed by Letterkenny co-creator Jacob Tierney — though don’t go in expecting all that many direct similarities to Letterkenny. Heated Rivalry may have some comic elements, because blustery male bonding is often funny, but it’s a sincere, steamy love story for grown-ups — less The Cutting Edge and more Challengers, without the pesky “Zendaya” point of the triangle.
Think Queer as Puck.
Critics have only been sent the season’s first two episodes, which makes it hard to tell how some of my reservations with the storytelling will play out. But so far Heated Rivalry is swoony, raunchy, very Canadian and will satisfying viewers looking for seasonal flirtation (and more) without a trace of Christmas content. And while it isn’t quite Crosby/Ovechkin slash fiction, it absolutely could be interpreted that way.
Our young protagonists — introduced at semi-regular intervals as they hop from amateur hockey showdowns to the fictional MLH (Major League Hockey) draft and competitive calendar — are up-and-coming prospects Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie).
Shane, a wholesome Canadian, anchors his national team and is drafted by the Montreal Metros, while Russian team anchor Ilya is a seemingly sullen bad boy drafted by the Boston Raiders.
In addition to being the two biggest up-and-coming stars in the sport, both Shane and Ilya face ample outside pressures.
Shane has an ultra hands-on mother (Christina Chang), who is eager to help market and monetize his boundary-breaking biracial celebrity, as well as a less aggressively intrusive father (Dylan Walsh).
Meanwhile, back in Russia, Ilya’s family has various nebulous financial difficulties and high expectations tied to celebrating the Motherland and whatnot.
The league wants to build a rivalry between them, as the young faces of the game. They’re expected to hate each other, but they very quickly discover that the chemistry between them isn’t based on animosity.
Very quickly.
There’s a way of spacing out the storytelling here that could have pushed Heated Rivalry forward as a will-they-or-won’t-they relationship drama stretching at least through the first season, building up to perhaps a chaste kiss in the first season finale.
That is NOT the approach taken by Tierney. Within 10 minutes, Ilya and Shane are sharing late-night workout sessions — exercise bikes, etc., at least in the beginning — that leave them sitting across from each other sweaty and breathless, sharing a water bottle with initially tentative hand-touching as they size each other up with their words and eyes. Very little time passes before they’re engaging in sweaty, breathless clandestine meet-ups.
Yes, Heated Rivalry is a sweaty show.
The relationship is able to accelerate because the show jumps aggressively through time, occasionally by months and sometimes by calendar seasons, as they exchange dirty texts — the names “Jane” and “Lily” are utilized as subterfuge — and await the next time the schedule will put them in the same location for an All-Star Game or the Olympics or an on-ice showdown between the Metros and Raiders. We don’t spend enough time with the characters separately for us to necessarily hunger to have them together. But we know that they both think this is a budding relationship — not that either of them has yet to use the word “relationship” in the episodes I’ve seen. The time-jumping also allows for comparisons to Love & Basketball, which thus far Heated Rivalry hasn’t quite earned, but that’s pretty good as upside goes.
Hockey, in the world of Heated Rivalry, is just foreplay. It’s the forum in which Shane and Ilya face off for annual awards, medals and in the quest for The Cup, but the series spends very little time on the ice. More time is spent with the characters in locker rooms and on benches with players bantering in a vernacular that Tierney is determined to emphasize blurs the line between homosocial and homosexual. Everything is couched in jokes about sucking and penetrating, mostly delivered by men confident that theirs is a wholly heterosexual world.
On Letterkenny and Shoresy, Tierney and Jared Keeso used the profanities of locker room talk as a proxy for sex, an escalating verbal game of oneupmanship without actual consummation.
In Heated Rivalry, there is consummation aplenty, but the copulation escalates in its own competitive terms. The sex scenes are lengthy and intimate, and although they’re more insinuating than directly graphic, they’re very graphically insinuating, which I mention not to suggest this is “extreme” as content goes — I’d compare it to Bridgerton — just to warn viewers looking for post-Thanksgiving content with hockey-loving family members. Orgasms, shared and otherwise, represent wins as coveted as anything on the ice, and these are two men who love to win. The locker room banter extends into the bedroom, where their pillow talk becomes so thoroughly interchangeable with the motivational tactics of a teammate that they call each other by their last names, which is both sweet and funny.
I could chart out the character details that the sex scenes are meant to delineate, but there’s a visual sameness to those set pieces that causes them to drag, no matter how steamy they are. So many tight-close-ups. So many carefully framed blow jobs, with no visible genitals, but little else left to the imagination. So many pieces of half-lit teasing. It’s my hunch that Tierney is attempting to mirror the insatiable appetites of a new relationship, and that the balance will eventually tip in the direction of plot and plot-driven character development rather than sex as plot and character development.
Whether the latter approach would be better or worse for Williams is unclear, because while he and Storrie have ample chemistry, he’s pretty bland when he’s going through the paces of more conventional hockey expectations. It doesn’t help that recognizable secondary performers Change and Walsh are wasted in parts that offer a whiff of standard overbearing sports parenting but few specifics. Storrie has the more traditionally compelling character, however awash in Russian shorthand/stereotyping, and he broods convincingly and generates some laughs within his sexually dominant role in the relationship, cajoling his less experienced partner.
Because the show leaps so quickly into bed with the characters, while still covering multiple years within the first two episodes, it’s hard to anticipate where exactly it’s going. Presumably, remaining episodes will feature milestone revelations as their families, teammates and the world learn that they’re together. But I can’t tell if the negotiation of the complicated relationship in public is a thing the show will actually deal with, or if it’s something else to be handled with bodies intertwined in a half-lit luxury hotel room.
It’s the elongation of the story that will determine whether Heated Rivalry works as a six-episode limited series or an ongoing drama — or whether I might have preferred to see it as a two-hour movie. It’s certain, though, that I won’t watch the next Crosby/Ovechkin showdown (or the next season of Shoresy) the same way.