Heated Rivalry

 

Canadian producer/writer/director/actor Jacob Tierney's Heated Rivalry set the streaming universe ablaze when it premiered last November, riding a wave of LGBTQ+ cinematic content that, based on audience and critical response, the public was ready for.

Tierney, the creative genius behind the irreverent Canadian treats Letterkenny (2016-2023) and Shoresy (2022-2023), returns to the hypermasculine world of hockey first explored in the latter series to tell very different stories of love and competition (and love of competition) in a fictionalized version of the NHL.

Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie star as hockey phenoms on the Montreal and Boston teams, respectively; Williams as Japanese-Canadian Shane Hollander, a charming and disarming Mama's boy, and Storrie as the arrogant Russian-import Ilya Rozanov, the son of a stern Russian oligarch. Both men are harboring sexuality secrets that they discover about each other in short order.

The two aces lead their teams through alternating championship seasons over several years, while meeting on the DL, as time and luck allows, for gymnastic romps in the hay. Tierney stages scorching trysts between the two impossibly handsome players -- the "heated" part of the series' cheeky title.

In the middle of the six-episode series, Tierney places the story of another player, Scott Hunter (the engaging François Arnaud), a struggling and closeted veteran player for New York whose game is suffering until he meets a handsome barista named Kip (a winning Robbie G.K.) and discovers what's been missing in his performance and in his life.

This episode introduces two of the series' most important and related narrative threads -- the need for truthtellers and the immutability of love. Tierney, who is openly gay, does not play fast and loose with "coming out" decisions. Rather, he lays out with clarity and compassion what each of the men sees as threats to owning their personal truths -- with the anticipated blows to their employment topping the lists. He walks the audience through the men's worlds, without judgment or condescension, weighing their fears, which the otherwise fearless Rozanov describes at one point as "terrifying."

Tierney places within each of these men's constellation of friends a truthteller, not coincidentally a female companion, who says what is needed, at the right time, and, perhaps most importantly, with the assurance that her support will not waiver. To me, these women (played by Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova, Nadine Bhabha and Sophie Nélisse) give voice to an eternal truth -- true love might be buried but it never dies.

And maybe, in the end, that's what the audience needed more than sex and heat.

Season 2 is expected to drop in April 2027.