Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Heated Rivalry has completely taken over the cultural conversation. Originally produced on a shoestring budget for Crave Canada, the series exploded in late 2025, with stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie suddenly everywhere: late-night shows, award ceremonies, hosting SNL, Milan Fashion Week and even carrying the Olympic torch. It feels, increasingly, like everyone is coming to the cottage.
At first glance, the appeal is easy to explain. Based on the 2019 novel by Rachel Reid, the series follows two queer, closeted professional hockey players, rivals on the ice, over the course of their careers as they fall in love, deny their feelings, fight about it and inevitably circle back to one another. The ingredients are familiar and effective: emotional stakes, longing, denial, reconciliation. And yes, there is an extraordinary amount of sex in the opening episodes. On paper, it’s tempting to dismiss Heated Rivalry as gay hockey smut and move on. However, that explanation doesn’t hold.
Strip away the explicit scenes and locker-room tension, and Heated Rivalry reveals itself as surprisingly tender. At its core, the show is about yearning, particularly the physical sensation, the kind that settles in your chest and refuses to leave. The series works because it taps into the universal experience of wanting something intensely while staying just close enough to almost touch it, but never quite reach it. In Shane and Ilya’s case, that distance is enforced by their queerness, rivalry and professional survival. Most viewers won’t face those exact constraints, but the feeling is instantly recognizable. We already understand the appeal of “exquisite pain” in romance. It’s a common trope already explored in romance novels that only recently received the Hollywood makeover. Yearning offers the same masochistic pleasure, with the promise of emotional payoff.
The series also highlights consent as something intimate and sexy through checking in, asking for permission and articulating desire. In one of their first scenes alone together, Ilya constantly asks Shane if he is comfortable or what he wants to do, later checking in based on verbal and non-verbal queues. Notably, the most rewatched episode of the series, episode five, “I’ll Believe in Anything,” contains no sex. Instead, it leans fully into the emotional tension, the elements that define the romance genre at its best.
That appeal lands especially hard with female viewers. In a time when straight women are openly questioning whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing, Heated Rivalry offers a central romance that doesn’t include a woman at all. In doing so, it removes one of the most entrenched power dynamics in heterosexual storytelling. The relationship is structured around mutual satisfaction rather than dominance, a contrast to much mainstream heterosexual media, where intimacy is frequently framed through female discomfort, risk, misogyny or degradation.
Crucially, the show also challenges toxic masculinity, particularly within hockey, a sport where vulnerability is often punished and “locker-room talk” functions as cultural currency. Between its explicit bedroom scenes, Heated Rivalry offers a masterclass in whatever the opposite of toxic masculinity might be. The NHL has noticed the influx of new fans and, rather than gatekeeping, has leaned in. Viewers who once had no interest in hockey are suddenly paying attention. However, as of 2026, the National Hockey League, the NHL, is the only major North American men’s sports league without any openly gay players in its over 100-year history and the sport has a history and continued prevalence of homophobia. Still, the NHL has benefited from a rise in ticket sales thanks to Heated Rivalry.
While the audience for Heated Rivalry still skews heavily toward female and queer male viewers, there’s also a growing contingent of straight male fans, including listeners of the Empty Netters podcast. For them, the appeal often lies less in the romance and more in the emotional honesty. It’s clear they have empathy for the show’s queer characters and their storylines, which grow over the course of the series. It’s refreshing to see them embrace the show openly, without any fear or stigma about how it might reflect on them.
And maybe that’s why Heated Rivalry has captured so many people at once. Not because of the sex. Not because of the sport. Not even because of the novelty of queer hockey players. But it allows viewers to feel something so hopeful and rewarding in bleak times.
It doesn’t hurt that Williams and Storrie are intensely likable, sincere in interviews and still carry the energy of people who broke onto the scene five minutes ago. There’s a freshness to them, a sense that they were waiting tables eight months ago and somehow that authenticity has only fueled the show’s popularity. Yes, it’s produced a slightly unhinged parasocial dynamic, but it seems like everyone in Hollywood is watching both of their careers with great interest.
In a cultural era defined by detachment, Heated Rivalry is sincere. For many viewers, that genuine emotion is the hottest thing of all.