A new kind of queer love story is arriving on TV screens this fall, one that trades coming-out tropes for smoldering looks across the rink boards, secret hotel-room rendezvous, and the high-stakes pressure of professional sports. Heated Rivalry, the hotly anticipated adaptation of Rachel Reid’s beloved gay hockey romance novel, is gearing up to bring unapologetic queer desire to mainstream audiences through a lens rarely shown on television.
The six-episode series premieres Nov. 28 on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the United States and Australia. Behind the camera is Canadian writer, director, and producer Jacob Tierney, best known for the hit comedy Letterkenny and its hockey spinoff Shoresy. Tierney says he never set out to make a gay hockey romance, but once he spotted Heated Rivalry mentioned in a 2023 Washington Post article on the rise of hockey romance novels, something clicked.
Tierney, who had devoured the audiobooks during the pandemic, quickly reached out to author Rachel Reid on Instagram. Within days, he had secured the rights.
The series follows Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a principled Canadian hockey prodigy, and his swaggering Russian rival, Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). Drafted first and second into the league, their professional rivalry quickly evolves into a years-long clandestine romance that unfolds behind locked hotel doors, at international tournaments, and during rare windows between away games.
Told across nearly a decade, Heated Rivalry dives deep into the characters’ inner lives: Hollander’s anxiety about perfection and identity, Rozanov’s desire for power after a turbulent upbringing, and the intense magnetism that brings them back to each other, even when circumstances keep them apart.
Tierney fought to keep the adaptation faithful to the novel’s emotional honesty and sexual frankness.
Casting the leads proved challenging. Tierney needed actors who looked like athletes and were also willing to embrace the story’s vulnerability, including frequent nudity and highly choreographed intimacy. Many actors declined to audition. But when Williams and Storrie met for a chemistry read, Tierney said the dynamic was undeniable.
In an interview with Teen Vogue, Tierney told his team to “show them everything,” and for anyone who was not comfortable to not partake in the series.
“These are books written by women, consumed largely by women,” Tierney told the outlet. “I always said, ‘Once you film this, gay men will watch it, but we’ll watch anything with gay men in it. We’re not wildly discerning in that way, and we’re starved for stories. But the secret fan base of this is women, and that is a much bigger target than just queer people or queer men, or whatever the assumption was.’”
He also went on to add, “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. That meant making a series rather than a 90-minute, Hallmark-y film that would have inevitably watered down the story. To his surprise, he received little pushback from Crave. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for them to be like, ‘So I know we said sex, but … does it have to be that long? Does it have to happen in real time?’ And it did. [But] we did not get that note.”
Both actors said the trust between them was essential, especially when filming explicit scenes. On their first day on set, they jumped directly into a major sex scene.
The production also made deliberate decisions to highlight the diversity of its characters, including retaining Hollander’s identity as a biracial Japanese-Canadian man, which is discussed on-screen.
The fandom for Heated Rivalry is already swelling. The trailer has amassed more than a million views across social media platforms, with fans, many of them queer women and nonbinary viewers, celebrating a story that captures the gray areas of love, sexuality, and ambition.
For Tierney, delivering this story feels like giving audiences something they were never sure they’d see. “Fans of this genre don’t expect their favorite books to be adapted, especially not faithfully,” he said. “I’m thrilled to bring them something they never thought would make it to TV.”
Heated Rivalry premieres Nov. 28, and if early buzz is any indication, TV might never be the same.
