Pop Culture Happy Hour - Heated Rivalry

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

The new show Heated Rivalry is a very sexy and very queer hockey romance streaming on HBO Max–and it’s a phenomenon. It follows archrival players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) as they carry on a clandestine affair off the ice. And since it’s based on a whole series of interconnected romance novels by Rachel Reid, it may be with us for a very long time.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hi, Linda Holmes here. Somehow we are almost at the end of 2025. And I'm going to be honest with you, it's been a pretty challenging year for NPR and local stations. But here's the thing. Despite losing federal funding for public media and despite all the attacks we've seen on the free press, we're still here for you. We are still independent, a critical right guaranteed by the First Amendment. And with your support, NPR will not be silent. Here at Pop Culture Happy Hour, will continue keeping you company with thoughtful, engaging conversations about all the movies, TV, music, and more 2026 has in store. If you're already an NPR Plus supporter, thank you so much. We see you, and we're so grateful for you. If not, please join the community of public radio

supporters right now before the end of the year at plus.npr.org. Signing up unlocks a bunch of perks like bonus episodes and more from across NPR's podcasts. Plus, you get to feel good about supporting public media while you listen. End the year on a high note and invest in a public service that matters to you. Visit plus.npr.org today. Thanks. Whether you know it as the sexy hockey show, the hockey sexy show, or the extremely Canadian queer romance adaptation of the year, heated rivalry is a phenomenon. The story of two superstar professional hockey players carrying on a clandestine affair

arrived on HBO Max in November, and since it's based on a whole series of interconnected romance novels, it may well be with us for a very long time. I'm Glenn Weldon. And I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about heated rivalry on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Glenn, it is just the two of us today. Let's set the stage a little bit for this story. Heated rivalry is based on one of a series of hockey romances from writer Rachel Reed. Specifically, it's based on the second book in the series, which follows Shane Hollander, played by Hudson Williams, and Elia Rosenoff, played by Connor Story. They are arch-rival players from before they even turn pro, and when they meet, they have an instant

attraction. For years, they hook up behind the scenes, while a public narrative develops that they are bitter rivals. It's not entirely clear early on, whether they have feelings for each other, beyond that desire to hook up, and they both consider going public with any relationship of any kind to be not an option. This show was developed by Jacob Tierney, who was one of the writers and executive producers of the sitcom Letterkenny. Originally made for the Canadian streaming service Crave, its six-episode season is airing weekly on HBO Max, and it's already been renewed for

another season. And if you've seen the show, this will not surprise you, but if you do need to know, there's a fair amount of sex on this show, there's a fair amount of explicit sex on this show. We are going to talk about it, so just be advised for your listening pleasure. Glenn, I am so glad we are getting together to talk about this show, which it's sort of sneaked up on me a little. Tell me what you think. I think it snuck up on us all, yeah. There's a simple answer why this is taking off on a much more complicated one. Let's start with a simple one.

It's hot. People like things that are hot. And my temptation is not to overthink it, but Linda Holmes, what are we here to do? Exactly. If not to overthink it. So let's get to it. Why it's hitting in the mainstream the way it is, I mean, I think we can't overlook the HBO Max of it all. It is readily accessible if it had stayed.

on that Canadian streaming service crave, you mentioned. I don't know if we'd be having this conversation. I also think it's of the moment. There have been plenty of shows with explicit or explicit adjacent to queer content, but they came out before social media, right? So queer as folk, the L word, Noah's Ark, Dante's Cove. Only I remember Dante's Cove for my sins. Oz had several scenes, let's face it, that would have shown up in your feed.

It was coming out now. And finally, and here's where I'm going to defer to you. I think the romance parts of big deal. Romance is a genre. genres have conventions. Conventions become conventions because they work. I don't read romance, but I do read genres where conventions and tropes set the parameters, right? Which is what they're supposed to do?

Fantasy, science fiction, superheroes. What are superheroes Linda Holmes but tropes in spandex? So I know a trope when I see one and I get excited when I see one. So as soon as we meet Elia, the cocky, sneering, swaggering, jerk who's hiding how much the homophobia of his family hurts him and makes him feel like he can only be about the sex because he doesn't deserve love. Hello, rakey McRakesteen. Hi. Hey, you're a trope.

Yeah. You take the boxes of the rake, but those boxes are boxes for a reason because they make him a hell a lot of fun to watch. He's more fun to watch than Shane, who at one point we see reading a book called The Physics of Ice, which on one level, come on. And on the level, that's funny. That makes him a great contrast with Ilya. I think people are coming for the sex.

They're staying for the characters. I have specific thoughts on why this seems to be hitting with gay men in a way that feels very new to me in a way that red, white, and world blue didn't. But I want your take on why it's hitting so broadly in the culture. Well, I mean, I don't know that I can speak for the entire culture, but I will say what I like about it is how, you know, in the best genre shows, they feel both familiar and fresh. And that can be a really difficult thing to accomplish, right?

And I think it feels familiar for, you know, some of the reasons that you mentioned, right? You know, you do have the guy willing to, acknowledge kind of his feelings, but he's more direct about sex than Shane is. And then you have Shane who's a little more, he's less experienced with sex, particularly with men, than Ilya is. You know, those dynamics, any kind of opposites attract, as you sort of alluded to. That's all really familiar. What is not new to romance at all, but is maybe a little bit newer to television is the use of the dynamic where the sex is first, right? Because in romance, you can have the sex happen at the beginning, you can have the sex

happen in the middle, you can have the sex happen at the end, the idea that, you know, everything is just flirt, flirt, flirt until you finally have sex at the end is a kind of romance, right? It's not all of romance. But the way that it plays out here is, I think, fresh, particularly for TV, for a chance. like HBO. I agree. And even on something like Bridgeton, by the time that people have sex, they will usually have already acknowledged some feelings of some kind, maybe not always, but often. And here you really have the sex first. Right. And so then what they're trying to

figure out is, am I happy with how it is? You know, you and I talked about whether this was a romance or a hookup show. And I think one of the distinctions is if they were hooking up and that seemed stable, right? It seemed like that was a logical endpoint and they were both perfectly happy with it, then maybe it would be more of a hookup show. What makes it a romance to me is the underlying tension. You need longing, right? Yeah, sure. You start to get that sense that like in some cases they want to be able to talk to each other maybe more than they would talk to each other if they were just hooking up. Not that people who hook up don't talk to each other, but you know what I'm saying? Like that maybe they're trying to have a different kind of relationship, but

they're not sure. Like obviously, neither one of them is sure if the other one wants that. And on top of that, as we mentioned in the intro, there's this underlying terror of what happens if people find out, which obviously presents a different challenge if you're talking about dating. than if you are talking about hooking up, which they managed to do for a long period of time without anybody really finding out. Well, you didn't want to speak for the culture. I'm going to speak for all middle-aged gay men, who are me.

Yes, exactly. Who are you? Who are you? And this is why it's taken off and why. I mean, this is really taking up. They're posting reaction videos and lip sync videos and reenactments. I think, not to repeat myself, but the HBO max of it means we don't have to seek it out. We don't have to hear about it from some festival.

It's not some shattered glass production that makes it out of a festival. It may never make it out of a festival. and get Wolf video distribution that maybe someday it'll show up on Tubi. No, this is HBO Max. And the reason most people are assuming it's hitting with gay men is the simplest one. It's also wrong, which this goes exactly to your point. Gay men find the show because they hear the dudes are hot and the sex is explicit. That's not really what's going on here.

That doesn't explain this because Linda Holmes, prepare to be shocked. I don't know if you got pearls. Prepare to clutch him. If gay men just wanted to watch two or more hot men hooking up with each other, we have existing avenues for that. We have means. Sure. I have not seen it myself, but I have very good authority. Some of those means have even been put up on the information super highway.

Yes. Imagine that. What hath got rot? That doesn't explain what's happening here. Yes, the men are hot. Yes, the sex is explicit. But context matters. This is a mainstream product.

It's not some of those alternate means I just mentioned. It means that gay men don't have to pretend it doesn't exist when we talk to our straight friends. We don't have to restrict the conversation to our private group chats. We can talk about this show with people outside our closed friends circles. And that's what mainstream means. It means it's more socially acceptable. I guarantee you, Linda Holmes, there are going to be some very weird conversations over Christmas dinner with the family this year about this show. Boundaries will be crossed.

Right. And yet it is more explicit than we have come to expect for mainstream queer content. That's, I think, the difference. I mean, there's also something different about the nature of the sex and how it's depicted. We'll get into that. But before we get to that, does that make sense to you? It absolutely makes sense to me. And interestingly, what it makes me think about is that I think there are people who come to this show who aren't really romance readers, right?

which is what you said about yourself, who assume that this is way more sex than you get from quote-unquote romance. Right, right. Like the specifics of the sex in the show comes specifically from the sex in the book. And that is true of lots of romance. Like I have said for many, many, many, many years, people who don't read romance, there are segments of the population that don't read romance who have a profoundly misguided understanding of how horny it is. Right? How explicitly sexual a lot of romance is. And that includes romance that you can like buy at the grocery store.

And that's always been true. And there's all kinds of gendered stuff that goes into whether we quote unquote assume that visuals are more explicit than writing. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting stuff about that. But to me, what I felt like I was seeing was this is a TV version of what they would call. Are you familiar with the chili pepper scale? Yeah, sure. I think so. Yeah. The chili pepper scale is when people talk about romance novels in particular. Okay. Maybe you know it different chili peppers.

Yeah, I was thinking schoolable units. Nope, I'm not. Go ahead. Say more. In romance novels in particular, there is a rating of chili peppers where people will take a book and they rate it. And it's separate from the idea of good and bad, right? They'll rate it on a basis of essentially one to four. Usually I have seen it as one to four. Sometimes it can be one to five. Chili peppers. And that means how much sex is in it, explicitly on the page. And the volume of sex in these books is quite high, which I want to come back to in a second. But this is a TV version of like a four chili pepper book.

Okay. And that is something that has not been done a lot in adaptations. You can argue about Bridgeton. I think there are some similarities and differences, but it's not that common to see a TV adaptation of a four chili pepper book done pretty faithfully to how it feels to read the book. Okay. The thing that sets it apart for me is the nature of the sex. I mean, when gay romance goes mainstream, and I'm sure it's also true with heterosexual romance,

but I can speak specifically when gay romance goes mainstream. Historically, it comes up against the fact, or at least I should say that maybe the widely perceived notion that gay sex gives straits the ick. And when I say straights, I mean straight men, generally speaking, because masculinity is a prison. And because the world is run by straight men, what we've gotten used to seeing over the years is our two leads kiss, then we pan away to the gently wafting curtains or we fade to black. And suddenly, that's all we know about these two characters is that they had sex. But what this show understands, and I think fellow travelers from 2023, the Matt Bowmer, Jonathan Bailey show also understood, is that that isn't enough. That doesn't tell us anything.

It doesn't describe. It doesn't characterize. It doesn't delineate. It doesn't show us anything about their relationship. If there's a power differential, if there's a specific dynamic, the unique energy that exists between them, we've talked about before on the show, the writer Alan Gerganis, who is a gay man who writes literary fiction. He has talked a lot about how in American fiction, I would extend that to television and movies, characterization tends to stop at the bedroom door. In literary fiction, anyway, authors, filmmakers are missing out on a huge opportunity to show us a pretty important part of their character's lives, not just that they have sex, but how they have. And I've read the voices online who maintain that sex scenes are unnecessary and get in the way.

And I couldn't disagree more. And this is a hill I will die on. Yeah. You know, perhaps has to do with Jacob Tierney and the work that he's done developing this show, you know, the direction of the show, other things. But I think on this show, and it's true in the book, too, these guys have sex in ways that very clearly give you information about where they are in the relationship. Exactly. And so to make a sex scene that conveys something is, A, difficult to do, and B, not something that always happens. And so sometimes you get a devaluing of sex scenes that is understandably based on the fact that a lot of them are kind of generic.

Right. Right. It's very much like, and I'm far from the first person to make this comparison, but it's sort of like an action scene. It's sort of like a battle scene or a fight scene. A fight scene can be really satisfying in that it tells you a lot about what's going on in the story. I mean, first of all, it can just be fun to watch, right? Ditto for a sex scene, right? Fun to watch.

But sometimes you're getting who is this person and where are they at this moment and is this different from what you've seen before and all of those things. I think this show is really good at showing you, first of all, in the run-up to the sex, Like, how are they talking about it? How are they inviting it? How much are they sort of overtly talking about wanting to do it versus pretending they don't want to do it until they get a lot closer? You see what I mean? I do. I understand where this sense of like, I don't like sex scenes, they're unnatural. I understand where I think that can sometimes come from, which is having been subjected to a lot of artless sex scenes. But I don't like sex scenes. But I think that can sometimes come from. which is having been subjected to a lot of artless sex scenes. But artful sex scenes, like the ones in this show and like the ones in good romance novels, are specific to these characters and this situation. Sure. I think what I'm advocating for is not simply more sex scenes.

I'm advocating for exactly what you're talking about. Well done sex scenes. And the reason we don't see them a lot is because they're tough to pull off. I mean, what happens when you can do it right is that you're not leaving nuance on the cutting room floor in the first draft. Stuff we want to know about these people. And it's a lot more nuanced, I should say. This goes to speaking about how sometimes it can feel characterless. Like, it's a lot more nuance than even a lot of gay men will think because in gay circles, there is a very reductionist idea of roles and positions as destiny, as defining traits.

You are one thing or you're the other and you are that for life. But that's BS and it always has been. There are femme tops. There are mask bottoms and everything in between. And the nature of sex, if you can convey it well, is that those roles and positions can shift. And it's in those shifts that character gets revealed, how they deal with things like intimacy and vulnerability, all the unspoken negotiations of sex. And the humor. Sex can be very funny.

Can they laugh at themselves? Can these characters laugh at themselves? There is a lot of that. I think this is a show that is particularly good at that, that sometimes it can be awkward. Sometimes it can be like, there's a little bit of like a you want me to do what kind of humor. to this show. And at the same time, I also really like the fact that it's also very sweet at certain moments. You know, there's a moment in the fourth episode where you get a kind of a, I don't even know how to describe it, a cuddle. Yeah. And what happens after the sex in that episode? They sit on opposite ends of the couch from each other watching TV. Yes. And again, can I just say, taken straight out of the book. Yep, that's important. Taken straight out of the book. It's the energy in the moment. It's who's taking charge in the moment. And that gives us a series of snapshots of relationship. And then, you know, The first time we saw sex on this show, it showed them, as you mentioned, starting to have sex.

Then we fade to black. And I guarantee you I was not the only person that you're going, well. Oh, sure. I guess that's what we get. At least they showed us the butts. They have good butts. Then we fade up and they're in a different position. And that happens again and again.

And we're getting a fuller view, literally and figuratively, of these characters. We're getting queer sex depicted with directness and clarity, which means we can get. Because they're doing it correctly. So doing it well, we can get those rooms for complexity and layers without coyness or without apologizing. Or shame, the lack of shame, that intentionality coming from behind the camera. That's the game changer here, I think. I also think, can we just say that the setting is intriguing? I'm the last person who ever thought, I would say that.

But look, if we're going to queer a space, sports is a good one to queer. I mean, my parents were huge hockey fans. I got dragged, Linda, to so many Flyers games. And I would sit there stewing. just watching what struck me is a pretty performative. They're very sweaty under there, though. Yeah, but everything told me this was not a world for me. I can't picture myself in this world.

Yeah. This show allows me to imagine what would happen if I found myself in that world. No, I don't have the skills. I don't have the butt. But I do have the desires. How would those desires work in this space? Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's plausible for me to be there.

I mean, it's working for me like a fantasy novel. Like, I'm Lucy and I'm walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. Mm-hmm. And Mr. Tumnus comes skating out of the darkness and slams me into the boards. But that's what I'm thinking. That's how I'm feeling about this. It's like it's not me, but it's people like me. How could they navigate this?

Sure. How plausible does it seem to me? I don't know. But I'm not caring right now. I don't care. And I will say, you know, for people who are interested in this show, you know, maybe try the book. I will say there's also these books in a lot of ways are a uniting of several different things that have been extremely popular, some for a shorter period of time, some for a longer period of time, right? I think there's been a really welcome boom in queer romance in the last, I never want to say exactly how many years because I lose track, but sort of in contemporary romance compared to when I was, you know, maybe in my 20s, right? Also, hockey, this is not the only hockey thing. There's so much hockey romance out there. I don't know exactly what the definitive beginning of it was, but hockey romance is such a thing. And if you think, like, I would read more hockey romance.

Romance, let me tell you, there's more hockey romance out there for you, some of which falls into the third category I would talk about, which is interconnected romance novels that involve groups of people, right? Here it's the hockey league, right? All of the Rachel Read books are interconnected. The couple that they went and showed you in the third episode, Kip and Scott, are the couple that was in the first book. Very common structure. I read a whole series that was a football league. I read a bunch of a series that was race car drivers. So this story is kind of like, again, it feels fresh, but a lot of really classic and really popular elements. And that's not to mention the ongoing popularity of the four chili pepper book. I think this is a show that we both like. We do. And perhaps according to our different ways of arriving at it, both really enjoy this.

But there are going to be ultimately six episodes. The first four are out as we record this. we want to know what you think about heated rivalry. I know what a lot of you think about heated rivalry. But I want to know what you think about heated rivalry. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCH. That brings us to the end of our show. Glenn Weldon, thank you so much for being here, buddy.

This is really fun. Hockey reference goes here. Thanks, Linda. This episode is produced by Carly Rubin, Kayla Latimore, Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

I'm Linda Holmes. and we'll see you all next time.