Here's why women are so obsessed with Heated Rivalry

Yes, I'm going there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Heated Rivalry¹. ‘Getting obsessed with a queer hockey romance series’ wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card, and yet here I am midway through my first rewatch.

I’m high on the fumes given off by the scorching-hot relationship between two fictional ice hockey players, despite being on the record as ‘not being into sports’. (This is partly a ‘bit’ by me and partly, unfortunately, a reflection of growing up in the 80s/90s and internalising sexism around women and sports, I fear.)

Now, Heated Rivalry is to ice hockey what Baywatch is to beach rescues, but that’s fine. Both shows know exactly what they are, and that’s why we love them.

When I say I’ve been thinking a lot about Heated Rivalry, I’ve been thinking in particular about why women like me are obsessed with it. I’m approaching this as a cis woman, but I don’t want to get too binary about gender here as I think the show appeals to people across the gender (and sexuality) spectrum for some very similar reasons.

That said, different gender/sexual identities will bring their own deliciously different angles to why people love the show, so please do let me know in the comments what your own take is.

Here are my personal theories on why this Canadian little-series-that-could has become 2026’s most unexpected cultural phenomenon, most notably among (by many accounts mostly straight) women.

I’ll start with the obvious one:

It’s hot

Listen. Heated Rivalry is turning people on, and that’s an integral part of its appeal. It is a horny show based on a horny, queer hockey romance series. Its creator, author Rachel Reid, knows that readers want both a yearning-filled love story and enough spicy scenes to light up their dopamine receptors. So too does the series director, Jacob Tierney (who, notably, is gay).

The lead roles of the rival players - Russian bad boy Ilya Rozanov and taciturn Canadian jock Shane Hollander - are played by two men in their mid-twenties, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. Both are replete with all the juicy collagen youth can offer, socially-approved six-packs, and share just a wisp of body hair between them.

There is no back hair, ‘dad-bods’ or post-prandial bloating in this world. Just two men for whom a daily gym session is as necessary as breathing. Just two men whose broad shoulders… oh, sorry, I got distracted there for a moment.

Anyway. The show leans right into admittedly discomfiting body ideals (I would love to read/hear more from men about this aspect). It leans into this because those who have eyes have been socialised into finding these bodies more than a little tantalising. Of course, it’s all a matter of taste. Not everyone will fancy a man whose body is as smooth as a dolphin’s. (The fact that Storrie has moles makes him seem almost alternative, which is well… lol. But also: deep sigh)

It is, of course, total fantasy. One does not have to have a six-pack to be attractive, or to be worthy of a hot bit o’ lovin’. The show knows this, and viewers do too. We turn to Heated Rivalry not to witness two ordinary people going at it, but to admire socially-approved specimens of attractiveness admiring each other’s attractiveness. We want the fantasy. We want the lack of friction.

We might feel a little uncomfortable about what this says about us. I think we have to admit that both Storrie and Williams are, as a consequence of spending most of their time on screen topless, being objectified by us viewers and in the media. Witness the fact that most of their photoshoots play right into their on-screen relationship and the way their bodies look. From them we continue to demand the fantasy of eternal beauty. We are free to speculate over their real-life connection, which they themselves ham up in tactile interviews. Our obsession is not without its complications.

I would also hazard a guess that a chunk of Heated Rivalry fans don’t regularly watch p*rn, and this show feels a safer and less toxic way of consuming sexual content. But are we ready for that conversation?

To say that people are obsessed with Heated Rivalry and not to explain it’s because it is a sexy show and its two stars are hot is to ignore its reason for existing.

Yet while Storrie and Williams can, and do, make people feral simply by dint of their looks, the show cannot exist on hotness alone. So what else does it offer that is so appealing?

For starters:

It offers respect

It might seem like the bare minimum that two characters in a romance should respect each other. But as a woman I’m particularly attuned to the fact that in male-female relationships on screen, the woman is not always offered even a scrap of that.

In my last newsletter I wrote about Marty Supreme, and how the lead character (played by Timothée Chalamet) has troubling relationships with two women. What bothered me about both relationships - one with a young woman his age (Odessa A’zion), the other with an older glamourpuss actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) - is that he respected neither of them. He would step on them in order to get something from them. They were just dirt he could scrape off his shoe.

Marty Supreme is in no way unique in this respect. On screen I have encountered countless stories where men showing a lack of respect towards women is presented as completely normal or even desired by the women themselves.

This is because while the screen isn’t a depiction of reality, visual storytelling is where the most basic, unquestioned gender tropes can be utilised for narrative purposes. On screen, the quiet part about how men see women can be made loud.

‘Sexual politics’ have changed over the years. It’s now less acceptable to celebrate egregiously sexist narratives. More women (though not enough) are making TV and film. But still, society’s most base and sexist impulses often leak onto the screen.

This is particularly the case with romantic/sexual relationships, which can betray unquestioned power dynamics between men and women. As feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey put it in her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (which coined the phrase ‘the male gaze’ - you can read it here): ‘Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.’ (My emphasis.)

Viewers go into watching a show understanding gender’s inherent power imbalances as they stand at that moment in time. In 2026, we know that women are more likely to be sexually abused, assaulted, coerced and disrespected purely based on their gender, by the opposite gender. We also know that often, people who are misogynists think they are anything but. It’s through their work that they tell on themselves.

When I see a male-female relationship on screen, my beady eyes start scanning for evidence of whether the man respects the woman. When it comes to a male-male romance like Heated Rivalry, female viewers can let out a sigh of relief: they don’t have to do such scanning. Society has shown us that men have an integral level of respect for each other.

In Heated Rivalry, Shane and Ilya are sporting rivals and still we understand that they respect each other. In fact, we might understand this a bit too much. It took me a few episodes before I realised that ‘rivals’ meant they were literally supposed to hate each other.

Again, this is partly to do with the fantasy world Heated Rivalry exists in. But regardless, it doesn’t have to be explained to us that the respect between Ilya and Shane is shared and mutual, because they are both men. How tragic. But is it a coincidence that this relationship was dreamed up by a female author and brought to life by a gay man? I think not. Sorry to straight men, but I think the gender and sexuality of Heated Rivalry’s creator and showrunner feed directly into how they in turn depicted this queer romance.

Yet the respect in Heated Rivalry goes deeper than gender. Another way it shows it is through:

Consent

In the 2010s, the subject of sexual consent became a huge talking point in popular culture. If you’re in your 20s, you’re living in a post-MeToo world where active steps were made to address issues around consent — universities here in Ireland began, for example, introducing consent classes. All of this was well overdue.

But there can still be a sniffiness around consent. Some people act as if it requires taking a clipboard and checklist into the bedroom and pausing, mid-coitus, to ask your glistening lover: ‘Do you mind if I X or Y?’.

In Heated Rivalry (as in Normal People, another show that got us all a-fluster during the boring early days of Covid), consent is shown to be sexy.

As the more experienced in the couple, Ilya checks in with Shane about how he is feeling and whether he’s happy to be doing X, Y or Z. This is depicted how consent should be depicted: as coming from a place of respecting your partner and, crucially, wanting them to have a good time. What a thought!

This is what consent pooh-poohers completely miss, which says a lot about them. Consent is about both parties wanting to ensure everyone is enjoying themselves. It comes from a place of care, not coercion. Giving a shit about someone else is not the enemy of the orgasm.

Additionally, the direction/acting in Heated Rivalry doesn’t allow the sex scenes to become one-dimensional. In particular, Williams’ facial expressions are not p*rnified. They show Shane’s emotions running the gamut from turned on to mortified to surprised when he’s intimate with Ilya. Ilya, while in the more dominant position, is portrayed as enjoying the partnership and his connection with Shane, rather than seeing the other man purely as a conduit to pleasure.

It’s the tenderness to their intimate scenes - the gentle grip of hand to jaw, a lingering kiss - that says arguably more than the explicit moments. Why not desire such tenderness between men on screen? It puts the lie to gender stereotypes that maintain men don’t deserve to be treated softly. Us gals cheer these two lads on as they alternate between intense action and a smouldering glance that says ‘I want to be with you’. Shiver me timbers.

Given that Heated Rivalry was made for a streamer, its intimate scenes are more suggestive than explicit. There’s a lot of thighs-blocking-genitals going on, tasteful cutaways and deliberate shadows. Director Jacob Tierney (a former actor himself) knows that into that gap of knowledge goes suggestion. The potent combination of suggestion and its bedfellow imagination makes people weak at the knees.

There have been some online discussions in recent years about whether Gen Z is a generation opposed to sex on screen. I’ve always found that strange. I don’t think Gen Z is opposed to sex on screen. I think that compared to us older generations, younger people are more outspoken about not wanting to see one-sided, sexist, misogynistic depictions of sex on screen.

Heated Rivalry is - and we have to keep going back to this crucial word - fantasy. It’s a scrubbed-clean love story taking place in a consequences-free dreamworld. But it nonetheless depicts a relationship free from prejudice. Gen Z viewers recognise the appeal lies in both men wanting to be with each other, without the subtext of grimy gender politics. Paris Hilton voice: That’s hot.

How I’ve gotten to this point without mentioning the frankly flammable chemistry between Williams and Storrie I don’t know. Now, what we viewers might call ‘chemistry’ can also be a combination of editing, script, lighting, score and what have you. But it takes one second of seeing this pair on screen together before you realise that yes, film critics are correct that chemistry CAN make or break your belief in an on-screen couple. That both actors say they were game for the intimate scenes punctures any fear of coercion (they worked with a female intimacy coordinator too).

In addition, many viewers are hungry for coming out stories, and see in the pair’s trajectory a reflection of what they’ve experienced. (For more on this particular angle, try Richard Lawson’s lovely piece.) For a show about two sexy lads, Heated Rivalry really does contain multitudes.

One of the multitudes, though, is the murky conversation around the stars’ own sexuality, and whether the omerta is because it a) benefits the show if people don’t know or b) reflects the ongoing fear of young actors over being ‘out’ in Hollywood. Either way, a minefield lies. Heated Rivalry and its ‘acceptance against all odds’ storyline may be a fantasy in more ways than one.

Interiority be damned?

To stick with the fantasy element: It did, admittedly, make me laugh to note that in Heated Rivalry the conversations between Shane and Ilya are kept to a bare minimum. Their decade-long situationship survives on the flames of their sexual frisson, which are in turn fanned by the occasional emotional fallout or misunderstanding. Their conversations are those of the repressed: stilted and elliptical.

There are several montages that are just the men working out in the gym and texting each other. These function so that we can skip to the good part, and you know what part I’m referring to here.

The book, thankfully, gives them full interiority. But on screen, the actors use micro-expressions and body language - the arch of an eyebrow, the squeeze of a thigh, tears that threaten to overspill - to reveal hidden depths to their discourse-light relationship. Their intimate scenes become moments of revelation that in turn lead to tension. In other words, they catch feelings and this makes things complicated.

In lesser hands, this relationship would be a lot less interesting, as the actors/director might deduce they could coast along on hotness alone.

But you can tell that the team who made this lower-budget show treated the characters not as horny toads but as fully-fleshed out men with their own internal struggles. Does this make us feel better about watching a show that knows its purpose (horniness)? Yes, of course.

Still, it offers all of that and it offers:

Genuine yearning

To live is to yearn. Whether it’s for a material thing, a change in circumstance, the love of another person, a better life… we have all experienced the twist in the gut that is to yearn.

Typically we yearn because we know we will not get what we want. Gah! But in romance we find succour, because yearning usually results in the character grasping hold of what they desire. Phew!

In Heated Rivalry, yearning is complicated and messy. Both men yearn for each other, yes, but they also yearn for a different life than the one they were born into. Shane yearns for a life where his sexuality isn’t a chain around his neck. He yearns for emotional freedom. As a half-Japanese ice hockey player - even in a liberal country like Canada - he is burdened with responsibility around how he holds himself publicly. He’s a marginalised person as it is, and ice hockey is, like most major sports, baffingly a place where players are not publicly ‘out’.

Ilya, meanwhile, is from Russia, where being bisexual comes with huge personal risk. It is a little bit of a narrative shortcut to make the dominant character Russian, but this is played fairly sensitively in the show. Ilya manages to escape to another country, but his family ties keep him stuck in a state of stasis. A personal trauma via the tragic loss of his mother - again, a familiar trope in romance - makes him leery of giving in to the desire for love.

Telling a story on screen means utilising familiar tropes in order to make viewers recognise something emotionally real. In repressed Shane and troubled Ilya, we find two men in a macho world who are afraid to admit their emotional truths.

This simplistic romantic formula is a crucible for testing human vulnerabilities. For example, it hits hard when the viewer realises that Shane telling Ilya he loves him might be the first time he’s heard ‘I love you’ since his mother died.

Pass the smelling salts, please.

Naked nous

Heated Rivalry is not a documentary about gay hockey players in North America, or an arthouse film about repressed young men. It is not trying to be a sophisticated piece of ‘prestige’ TV. It is naked, literally and figuratively. It knows what it is and is not afraid to display this to us.

Still, it does this with artistic nous. Take a moment to notice the lighting and cinematography in this show, and you’ll see that a lot of care was taken here. (I suspect theses on the use of fire in Heated Rivalry will be written in the future.)

This refusal to dress itself up in a more po-faced, high-culture way - while paying close attention to making a high-quality show - has parallels, of course, with the ‘journey’ towards authenticity Ilya and Shane go on. But I think it appeals, too, to those of us who want something that is thoroughly itself, while eschewing snobbery. It takes itself seriously. It dares to ask even the most sceptical of us: why aren’t you enjoying this beautiful thing?

I write this as someone who has gone on quite the journey herself with cultural snobbery. I am prone to choosing literary over popular, and don’t like when something gets ‘too mainstream’.

So it’s been quite the joy to give into the charms of romance via Heated Rivalry. It’s also made me realise that some of my favourite books (where I tend to be most picky about what I consume, genre-wise) are romances: Just Kids by Patti Smith, Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. (That said, I have tried romantasy and it is most definitely Not For Me, sorry.)

It’s quite freeing to just be a fan of something because you bloody well enjoy it and it makes you feel good, not because it’s The Thing You Need To Like Right Now To Prove You Have Taste. It’s also freeing to enjoy something escapist and heavy on romance when, as is my wont, I often reach for ‘serious’ books about boys in borstals or men in Tudor Britain. Cheering!

Off-screen fandom

For all of the reasons above - and tons more, but we all have lives to be living and if you’ve read this far, hats off to you - Heated Rivalry has become more than just a smutty romance to viewers, particularly women.

In a world where idiotic, venal, spiteful men are making decisions with global ramifications, watching two lovely, unproblematic male characters fall in love is as calming as a slick of Sudocrem on itchy skin. Heated Rivalry is the ultimate in escapism, and in 2026 we are all ravenous for an escape from reality. Some days I wish I could be shot off into space rather than live on a planet that seems to be rotting at the core.

Off screen, Heated Rivalry fans the flames of fantasy and fandom even further. The fact that the lead roles are played by newcomers with enticing backstories adds massively to its considerable appeal.

‘They were WAITERS just EIGHT MONTHS AGO!!!’ you can cry when waxing lyrical about Hudson Williams’ and Connor Storrie’s skills. ‘And Connor Storrie is from TEXAS! He LEARNED RUSSIAN for the part!’ you might even wail, for good measure.

There’s been a delightful media campaign too, with Williams and Storrie going from sweet, almost shy newcomers to red-hot stars who are the toast of Hollywood.

The contrast between the men and their characters adds another ‘pinch me!’ dimension to Heated Rivalry. Turns out brooding Ilya is played by a man with the personality of a golden retriever, and reserved Shane by a slightly chaotic charmer. This is both charming in and of itself and a clever way of helping us to see that they are, indeed, great actors.

The success feels very deserved, but must be an entirely overwhelming experience for both men. They signed up to star in a sexy show for a Canadian streamer. ‘Being asked about your peachy arse in global interviews’ was likely not on their agenda for the next 12 months.

As we learn in Heated Rivalry, fame can be a drag. Being [redacted] years older than Williams and Storrie means I recognise that they have signed a Faustian pact. They’re already witnessing the attendant parasocial relationships that come with being so high profile. I wish for them a long holiday at an anonymous five-star resort.

My one problem

I do have one major problem with Heated Rivalry though.

• It tries to make tuna sandwiches sexy.

A key moment in Shane and Ilya’s relationship hinges on a tuna melt sandwich. (Not in a sexy way - they just eat it. Keep your mind out of the gutter for a second.)

I refuse to accept this. Who in their right mind would want to get it on with someone who’s just been chewing a combination of fish paste, toasted bread and melted cheese?!

Not even Connor Storrie himself (I think?) would entice me to kiss them after chowing down on that abomination. This isn’t just because I’m a vegetarian and prefer my tuna to be swimming free in the ocean, but because a tuna melt is a certified boner killer. So if I was to change anything about this show, it would be that.

But you know what? Just as in love, even with Heated Rivalry you can’t expect perfection.

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If you want to hear more about my thoughts on contemporary culture, I co-present the arts and culture podcast Get Around To It with fellow arts journalist Lauren Murphy. Our latest episode is on all the culture we think you should catch in 2026. We also talked about Heated Rivalry on our previous episode.

It drops every Monday and you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast - all other links can be found here. It’s sponsored by the fantastic Imbibe Coffee, an ethical coffee roastery based in Dublin. If you’re enjoying it, please do spread the word!

1. It’s on NOW TV, if you haven’t watched it.