Heated Rivalry is, almost exclusively, the story of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two high-level professional hockey prospects who fall in love. It doesn’t feel like hockey, and it doesn’t feel like anything else on TV right now; it feels a little bit like falling in love. While it isn’t ascending to Bluey levels of global streaming dominance, what’s unique about the show has been its growth. To really appreciate what’s going on on the ice, you have to be in that big refrigerator, shoulder to shoulder with the raucous crowd, bodies flying at you left and right.
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However, ten days later, Tierney told Variety that the second season would not premiere at the same time the following year, citing slower progress on the episode scripts. Tierney’s creative executive at Crave, Rachel Goldstein, discouraged him from adapting Heated Rivalry’s epilogue into the series, as it could have been perceived as setting up a second season that had not been confirmed at the time. The first season then premiered online on Crave on November 28, 2025, and was picked up for streaming on HBO Max in selected territories; Neon in New Zealand; and Movistar Plus+ in Spain. A trailer for the series alludes to the covert nature of the hockey players’ tryst as a woman asks Shane if there are “any gay hockey players.” The first two episodes of “Heated Rivalry”premiered on HBO Max on Nov. 28.
Although HBO Max later acquired the series, it became involved only after the first season had been completed, meaning the show was not developed as a U.S. co-production from the outset. Despite a minimal marketing campaign and a low-cost licensing fee of approximately $600,000 per episode, it experienced a rapid surge in popularity following its late-November premiere. According to data shared by Crave’s social media accounts, the show exhibited unusually high “stickiness”, with a rewatch rate where approximately one-third (33%) of the total audience watched the entire season more than once. According to JustWatch, Heated Rivalry ranked fourth on its television streaming chart during the week of December 7, 2025, while Whip Media, based on data from its TV Time viewership tracking platform of more than 25 million users, reported the series placed sixth during the weeks of December 7 and 14. Following the episode’s reception, the series itself also entered IMDb Top 250 TV shows chart.
The series debuted on Crave with a two-episode premiere on November 28, 2025, followed by weekly episodes, with the finale airing on December 26. According to Billboard, the songs’ appearance in the series resulted in increased official on-demand streaming activity. He also told The Hollywood Reporter that, although he would direct all episodes of the second season, it is a possibility that “other writers will come in to help him out”.
Storyline
He had listened to the Game Changers series on audio book and wanted to discuss the possibility of adapting them to a limited television series. Jacob Tierney first reached out to Reid on August 7, 2023, a day after The Washington Post ran an article about hockey romance novels. Heated Rivalry is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novel series (2018–2026), with the second novel, Heated Rivalry (2019), providing the series’ title. Although their on-ice rivalry is amplified by media coverage and public perception, the two develop a private, initially casual sexual relationship that continues intermittently over several years as they pursue their hockey careers. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are two professional ice hockey players who compete on rival teams, the Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders, respectively.
Episodes
However, in late September, Tierney and the executives decided to push the release forward to take advantage of increased audience interest in new series during the holiday season. HBO Max’s acquisition of the series, which was spearheaded by the company’s content chairman and CEO Casey Bloys and the SVP content planning and programming Jason Butler, was attributed in part to online social media buzz generated by the Game Changers fanbase who campaigned for global distribution. Miley Cyrus also expressed interest in contributing music for the second season, as did rapper Bbno$.better source needed He eventually disposed of those songs when he received footage from the episodes, and re-wrote the music to the images over about seven weeks. The former serves as the series’ theme song, while the latter accompanies the scene in the episode “Olympians” depicting Shane and Ilya’s first instance of anal intercourse. The episode also features Storrie delivering a four-page monologue in Russian; after a particularly strong take, Tierney asked Storrie’s dialect coach, Kate Yablunovsky, how much of it could be used, to which she replied, “All of it. He humbles me”.
- The Hollywood Reporter reported that the Spotify streams for the t.A.T.u. track more than doubled following the release of the fourth episode.
- “Heated Rivalry” follows the story of two competitive hockey players, Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander — played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams.
- In this stand-alone episode, we watch Scott come to terms with his own sexuality, begin secretly dating a barista named Kip, and see that relationship run up against the wall of Scott’s inability to come out.
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For a time, which started on December 20, 2025, it tied with Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias” (2013) as the only television episodes to receive a perfect rating on the platform, and ranked among the highest-rated https://www.boombetonline.nl/ episodes of all time. Tom Smyth of Vulture and Mads Misasi of Tell-Tale TV both gave the episode perfect five star ratings, while Cody Schultz of Show Snob described it as “a masterclass in storytelling” and one of the greatest television episodes of the year and of all time. David Caballero of Collider gave the series an 8 out of 10, noting the effective early development of their characters both individually and as a potential couple, and the prominent yet accessible use of hockey in the story.
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Each new episode drops on HBO Max at 12 a.m. Here’s everything you need to know about “Heated Rivalry” and how to watch the rest of the season. HBO Max’s newest series has viewers buzzing. Learn more about what content you can watch with Streams at the Disney+ Help Center.
In the terms of film theorist Linda Williams, they are both series within the realm of “body genres”—dramas built around showing the body in moments of distress and/or elation. The Pitt has nearly a dozen series regulars in the main cast, another dozen recurring characters, and many dozens more who filter in and out of the E.R. This is, I might guess, what good hockey is like. Though, for what it’s worth, the moment when that happens, when these two plotlines converge, is one of the most electrifying sequences I’ve seen on TV in the past couple of months. This episode is counterprogramming to the Ilya-Shane romance. In this stand-alone episode, we watch Scott come to terms with his own sexuality, begin secretly dating a barista named Kip, and see that relationship run up against the wall of Scott’s inability to come out.
- There is a momentary break in this dynamic in the third episode, when we return to an earlier moment at the Sochi Olympics and follow Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), a fellow hockey player who’d mostly only appeared at All-Star games and award ceremonies to this point.
- BJ Colangelo of /Film also praised the performances, specifically Williams, Storrie, and Sophie Nélisse, and remarked that the series and Storrie are deserving of Emmy recognitions.
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- However, ten days later, Tierney told Variety that the second season would not premiere at the same time the following year, citing slower progress on the episode scripts.
- The first day of shooting included Shane and Ilya’s Las Vegas hotel room encounter, while the hockey rink scenes were completed over a stretch of just over a week of filming near the end of the shoot.
- I found myself laughing about it as the series began, but, as episodes unfolded, there started to be something almost hypnotic about the constant yada-yada’ing of everything that didn’t involve our two leads.
- The series also debuted at number two in Australia, and consistently ranks as the number one show each week.
By the end of the year, the series ranked among the best TV shows of 2025 on the lists by Cosmopolitan, the New York Post, Refinery29, The Seattle Times, and the Toronto Star. Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com described the series as “revolutionary” and called it “one of the most entertaining shows of the year” as well as “the most significant queer show of the year”. For their performances in the first season finale, TVLine named both Williams and Storrie as “Performers of the Week”, while /Film described them as the strongest break-out performances of the year. On December 10, 2025, the trailer for the series was aired at the Pride Night game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Tampa Bay Lightning. In advance of the program’s television premiere, the first episode received a preview screening in Montreal at the 2025 Image+Nation festival on November 23, 2025. On November 19, 2025, nine days before the series premiere on Crave, it was announced that HBO Max had acquired US and Australian rights to the show for a day-and-date global release.
Live Sports available only on select plans. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are hockey stars drawn together by rivalry and desire. A hockey player’s high-stakes career collides with love when a chance meeting ig… Shane and Ilya keep their secret fling alive while their growing connection is t… Blood and sex are both effects viewers register with their own bodies, but so too is time. And they approach that topic with a radical, formal devotion to their characters.