Heated Rivalry streaming tv show online

Once you click on this new option, you will be able to select from a list of available languages to switch the language of your Reddit interface. Starting today, Android, iOS, and Desktop users will be able to access the first phase of our product translation in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. When hockey rivals Shane and Ilya meet each other as rookies, sparks fly. “Heated Rivalry” was originally created for the Canadian streaming service Crave.

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• “Heated Rivalry” was originally created for the Canadian streaming service Crave.
• Shane and Ilya keep their secret fling alive while their growing connection is t…
• Tierney said it was essential to him that he found two actors who had the “physicality of hockey players” who were also comfortable with nudity and intimacy.
• The Las Vegas sex scene in the episode “Olympians” was filmed on the first day of production.
• Yes, the show was renewed for a second season.
• Ads served on select live and linear content on Standard and Premium Plans.

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.
Furthermore, 15% of viewers were reported to have completed the series five or more times and episode 5 was the most rewatch among the six episodes. After only two episodes had aired, Harper’s Bazaar listed it among the best queer television series of all time. Classical music also makes a number of appearances in the series, including Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata which feature during the episodes “Olympians” and “I’ll Believe in Anything”, respectively. Additional episodes of the series will premiere each week through Dec. 26, 2025, when the finale airs. The TV series follows two rival hockey players, Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), as they navigate their professional lives and mix business with pleasure.

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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”.

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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.

Content advisory

• Cancel anytime, effective at the end of your billing period.
• Clicking on the language setting will link you to the app-specific language setting that’s part of your OS.
• “Heated Rivalry” follows the story of two competitive hockey players, Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander — played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams.
• 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.
• Download limits apply to certain content categories on HBO Max.
• 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.
• The first two episodes of “Heated Rivalry”premiered on HBO Max on Nov. 28.

A cast of real-life hockey players were used to fill out the team, while body doubles were cast for close-up shots of the lead actors in action on the ice. All hockey sequences, including locker rooms, ice surface, and stands were filmed at the Sleeman Centre in Guelph. 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. Principal photography for the first season commenced in April 2025, with filming taking place across two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, for 36 days, according to Tierney. He also wanted to find them together since “the show lives and dies on their relationship”. Tierney said it was essential to him that he found two actors who had the “physicality of hockey players” who were also comfortable with nudity and intimacy.
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 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.
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.
The promotional posters for the series were photographed by Caitlin Cronenberg, daughter of David Cronenberg. Podcast, Tierney stated that he had intended to ask Carly Rae Jepsen to submit an original song for the first season, but “didn’t even try” due to budgetary restrictions, adding that he would “definitely be asking” in the future. 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.

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.

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.
Ads served on select live and linear content on Standard and Premium Plans. Ads served on select live & linear content in No Ads plan. I was catching up on Heated Rivalry this January, just as I was also beginning to blitz through new https://www.boombetonline.nl/ episodes of the second season of HBO Max’s other viral hit, The Pitt. 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. 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.
You can use the Hulu hub on the Disney+ homepage to jump right into streaming some of your favorite Hulu Originals, series, and more. The Hulu + Live TV plans include 95+ live TV channels and additional on-demand content from your favorite sports, entertainment, and news channels you can watch at home or on-the-go. Access to ESPN content in the Disney+ app Tierney is also behind “Letterkenney,” the hugely popular hockey-adjacent TV series. The Canadian sports and romance series was produced on a limited budget for a Canadian streaming service. Download limits apply to certain content categories.