Review: Heated Rivalry, "Hunter" | Season 1, Episode 3

Last December, when author Rachel Reid told me that Heated Rivalry was becoming a television series as opposed to a movie, the decision tracked. Although the entire Game Changers series has been successful, the story of Shane and Ilya in Heated Rivalry is its most beloved, and its most serialized given the sequel The Long Game concludes the series. The first book itself is also structured in a way that would be difficult to tell in a different medium: while you could standalone romances like book one Game Changer into 90-minute movies without a lot of difficulty, that would never work for Heated Rivalry.

When I noted this to Rachel, though, she had an additional piece of information: writer-director Jacob Tierney was actually adapting Game Changer into the series. It’s a piece of information that Tierney has chosen to hide during promotion of the show, even censoring the reveal of the episode’s title in social media posts and turning it into a mystery. IMDB might have been able to tell you that the show had cast the book’s two main characters, New York Admirals star Scott Hunter and smoothie maker Kip Grady, and there’s even a glimpse of them having sex in the show’s trailer (they also release character posters for them, which kind of gave up the goat as it were). Ultimately, though, Tierney wanted it kept secret that he wasn’t just putting Shane and Kip into Shane and Ilya’s orbit: their love story would be a critical part of the story Heated Rivalry is telling, and the subject of this third episode.

In the abstract, having had a year to consider this, the decision made sense. While the primacy of Shane and Ilya means that many readers read Heated Rivalry first, I started at the beginning, meaning that Scott and Kip were my introduction into the Game Changers universe. There were some challenges in this—do not listen to the audiobook, whatever you do—but the book explores the idea that is vital to every book that follows: what would it mean for a queer hockey player to be an out queer hockey player? What would happen if the world knew that Scott Hunter was gay, and that he had fallen in love with the muscular prospective art history grad student from Straw + Berry?

In practice, knowing how the dialogue around the show has exploded over the past week, I knew “Hunter” wasn’t necessarily going to feel as logical as it did when I first heard about the plan for what Kathryn VanArendonk would identify as a departure episode. First and foremost, having a departure episode only three episodes into a season is itself challenging, although I would imagine that The Last of Us was a reference point for Tierney and the same was true there. However, that was in a 10-episode season, and in a genre context where worldbuilding is more expected. Here, the show had invested people in what seems like a story of star-crossed lovers, left them at an emotionally raw moment, and then poof: it’s 8-ish months earlier, Shane and Ilya are relegated to cameos, and we’re watching an entirely different romance play out. I could see the angry TikToks.

Now, I went into “Hunter” ready to defend the importance of telling Scott Hunter’s story in a show about Shane and Ilya, and I stand by that instinct. However, having now seen the episode, I have to admit to being somewhat flummoxed by the way it doesn’t actually focus on Scott’s story. Although true to Game Changer’s narrative structure, and successful at creating a baseline investment in Kip and Scott’s romance, this wasn’t the entry into the intersection of queerness and hockey culture I imagined it to be. The result feels like a departure without something significant to contribute to the show’s worldbuilding, another pacing challenge in a show that has already suffered in this area.