January 2026 is a great time to be a fangirl. Stranger Things launched its final season, Harry Styles has resurrected, new receipts from the Blake Lively scandal have dropped, and a brand new show and its actors have risen to stardom overnight.
If you’re chronically offline, you might mistake this show for a Hockey spectacular, but one click into their promotions, and you’d be met with very little hockey shop talk. Heated Rivalry is HBO’s newest hit, and heated is definitely the right adjective for it.
Readers are notoriously critical of book-to-movie adaptations, but this show seems to have very few contentions from fans. At face value, it’s internet catnip–the rivals-to-lovers trope, top secret bubbling romance, emotional angst, and explicit intimacy, all that jazz. But Heated Rivalries’ explosive reaction is much deeper than the thirst edits.
here’s a larger conversation to be had about why romance between two men seems to attract this level of ‘hype’ with media like Red, White, and Royal Blue or Heartstopper setting the stage, while romance between women is either not represented or not appreciated.
While I understand that it’s frustrating, there’s a reason. The audience of Heated Rivalry is predominantly LGBTQ men who see themselves in the characters or women/girls who like men who are drawn to the gorgeous cast and their characters. With the amount of straight women invested in the show, there’s a fine line between loving the characters and investing in their storyline and fetishizing them; which is a big part in why LGBTQ romance between women doesn’t do as well–if the viewership from this is gay men and straight women, then a WLW (women-love-women) romance story would attract LGBTQ women and heterosexual men, which is problematic because then it becomes “two hot girls kissing” instead of the emotionally intimate story it’s intended to be.
Shows that center intimate scenes risk limiting themselves to one-dimensional, hypersexualized narratives. And while their publicists are certainly using these scenes to their advantage to market the show, (rightfully so I mean if you got it flaunt it!) but, the show’s outreach has been so grand because we’re seeing real-world ripple effects because of it. As the only male professional league with no publicly homosexual players, this show is taking representation to a new level. So many closeted athletes, professional and younger athletes, are seeing the show and deciding to publicly declare their sexuality.
Heated Rivalry’s success isn’t just about chemistry or carefully choreographed intimacy. It’s about what happens when a story refuses to treat queerness as niche, tragic, or secondary—and instead lets it be loud, messy, desirable, and aspirational. In a sports culture that has long equated masculinity with silence, this show cracks something open. The thirst edits may pull viewers in, but what keeps them watching is recognition. And for athletes who have never seen themselves represented anywhere near the ice, that recognition can be the difference between hiding and finally being seen.