Review: Heated Rivalry, "Rookies" | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome to our coverage of Heated Rivalry, a Crave original debuting in the U.S. on HBO Max. As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To support our work and read all our coverage in the months to come, consider joining us.

I wasn’t new to the world of “spicy” MM (Male-Male) romances or hockey romances when my friend Erin recommended Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series last spring. More “mainstream” novels like Red, White, and Royal Blue were a gateway of sorts for the former, and I suppose my Canadianness naturally led me to the latter. As I was in the market for new audiobooks, Erin’s Instagram stories resonated with me because of her emphasis on the serialized nature of Reid’s series, with characters from earlier novels recurring as new characters take center ice, culminating in an emotional finale paying off one of the couples from an earlier book.

I don’t want to suggest that I need this kind of intellectual point of engagement with a romance novel to enjoy it, but I—like Erin—am a media scholar, and I believe there’s something valuable about taking marginalized genres like romance seriously in terms of narrative and thematic analysis. My time with Game Changers was spent admiring its investment in hockey as a complicated conduit for identity, and thrilling at its ability to follow the impacts of one character’s coming out on the people in their orbit. Reid’s books understand hockey as a sport, but they more importantly understand it as a culture, and the version of the NHL she creates by the end of the six-book series is aspirational without feeling disconnected from reality. The novels never try to “transcend” the tropes of romance, but rather map them alongside the tropes of hockey, and explore what the sport might look like if…well, if the game changed from the perspective of queer identity.

As part of my goal in taking romance seriously, I spun off my engagement with Game Changers into a conference presentation proposal, discussing the series’ paperback release and switch to illustrated covers from the (mostly) faceless torsos of the mass market/e-book releases. And since I learned after finishing the series that Reid is also a Nova Scotian—we went to the same high school—I reached out to her on Instagram to see if she’d be willing to chat while I was home for the holidays. Over coffee, she was kind enough to share some insight into her experiences, a conversation that felt like a wonderful capper to my experience with the books.

And then she told me it was becoming a TV show.

I need to make this clear: nothing could have prepared me for this. Only Rachel would know the look on my face when she broke the news, which wouldn’t make it to the trades until January, but I was stunned. It’s not that I didn’t think they’d make a great TV show, but rather that Heated Rivalry—the second book in the series, and the starting point of the adaptation—was on a different level of “spice” than Red, White, and Royal Blue and other romance adaptations (and the less said about that terrible effort, the better). I would argue that’s a huge part of why fans of Reid’s books are so passionate: even as Heated Rivalry took its place as a standard bearer for MM romance and hockey romance, mentioned in trend pieces and widely read on Kindle Unlimited, the book always still felt like it existed in a secret corner of the world that would forever be the domain of fan art and merchandise that no one else would ever recognize.

It’s now almost a year later, and Heated Rivalry—and with it Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov—has officially broken containment. I’ve already written about the behind-the-scenes factors that led to the show being able to remain faithful to the book while being developed in Canada, and the social media frenzy that helped the show secure a late-minute day-and-date release in the U.S. But even though I’ve covered this story closely, there was still something surreal about clicking over to HBO Max and hitting play and knowing that an adaptation of this book series exists, debuting with a premiere episode that reinforces creator Jacob Tierney’s commitment to Reid’s vision alongside some dramaturgical shifts worth examining more closely.

As we’ve already established the level of explicit sex in Reid’s novels, non-readers should note that Heated Rivalry makes this clear in its prologue. The book begins in medias res, as Shane and Ilya are years into whatever you would call the relationship that we see develop in “Rookies.” It’s a choice that quickly establishes a crucial part of what separates Heated Rivalry from the other books in the Game Changers series, and many other books within its genre: there’s no slow burn toward its explicit content. We open on a sex scene because the reader needs to expect that Ilya and Shane’s relationship is going to burn fast, with sex as the primary medium for their connection.

The choice to remove this scene and begin in Regina removes this “warning” of sorts, and I’m therefore really curious how an average viewer with no knowledge of the discourse reacts to the sex scenes when they emerge. There’s nothing “radical” about the way Heated Rivalry portrays sex in the larger history of premium cable queer intimacy, out of context—this level of rear nudity is not without precedent. But when Shane and Ilya become intimate, what stands out is that we never pull away. We stay with moments where some shows would cut away, experiencing their encounters primarily in real time much as they play out in the books. None of their encounters take place as gauzy montages of intimacy, and whereas some shows might move the conversational elements to a post-coital context, the whole point is that they’re discovering each other through sex in a way that needs to be witnessed.

The choice to remove the prologue has two primary effects. The first, as noted, is that it makes the intimacy more shocking, aligning the viewer with Shane’s perspective in that moment when Ilya translates their earlier tension into the encounter in the showers. With the series losing access to Shane’s internal monologue, the relative “suddenness” of the turn toward explicit sex following their sexual tension on the exercise bikes after the MLH draft pushes his character’s innocence to the forefront. If this is a narrative of self-discovery (they’re teenagers when they first meet in 2008), it makes sense to also have some of the shock of that discovery felt by the audience.

The other effect, and the one that feels to me like the dramaturgical reason for the prologue’s absence, is that the show is jumping around in time so much already. This is also part of the book, but on the page there is more opportunity to fill in gaps with easy exposition. In the show, there is an almost overwhelming number of “X Months Later” chyrons, and in the absence of proper dates it becomes hard to track how much time has passed. Having read the book, I could do the math: we begin in Regina at the show’s equivalent to the World Juniors in 2008, jump to the MLH draft in June 2009, return to the “International Prospect Cup” in December 2009, drop into the photo shoot in June 2010, and then work our way through their rookie seasons right until the MLH Awards in Las Vegas in June 2011. But that’s a lot of work to go through, and adding the in medias res prologue onto it would have exacerbated the existing challenge of making the timeline clear for audiences.

That timeline is pulled directly from the books, although the content within those moments gets some additions. These are more minor in Ilya’s case, with a recurring thread of his brother Andrei’s freeloading and his father's dementia moved forward from later in the book, but Shane’s side of the story takes on a new primary focus. Shane’s Asian-Canadianness is certainly part of the novel, but it isn’t necessarily foregrounded. Here by comparison, the Montreal executive notes their (forced) excitement that Shane is “breaking barriers,” and later his mother Yuna—reframed here as his manager—specifically frames his responsibility to sponsors through the lens of being a “role model.” These additions frame Shane as a queer person of color in a very direct way, merging generic anxieties a closeted person might face with the specific pressures of representing an already marginalized community. I’m curious to see how these will continue to inflect Shane’s journey with a stronger foundation to work with.

The focus on Shane’s sponsorships also serves to give more context for the unavoidable fact that Shane Hollander is more boring than Ilya Rozanov, especially without the internal monologue to work with. In his review at The Hollywood Reporter, friend of the newsletter Dan Fienberg noted that actor Hudson Williams was “pretty bland when he’s going through the paces of more conventional hockey expectations.” I can understand the defensiveness that fans showed when reading this, given how quickly they’ve taken to Williams and Connor Storrie as representatives of characters they’ve loved for years, but for better or worse that’s Shane’s story. Canadian hockey players are trained to be boring, and someone with the dual pressures of maintaining that identity while serving the Asian-Canadian community and living up to the expectations of corporate sponsors like Rolex is going to double down on flying under the radar. It’s what makes his stolen moments with Rozanov so powerful, and so long as that contrast continues to evolve the show can make the relative lack of dynamism in Shane’s story work to its advantage.

For all of the talk of the amount of sex scenes in the show—Tierney has promised “three per episode”—the biggest change here is actually the removal of one: whereas in the books Shane and Ilya follow through on their encounter in Montreal following the All-Star Game, Tierney introduces a freak snowstorm that cancels the game, forcing them back to their respective worlds. It creates a space for Svetlana, the woman who appears in Ilya’s apartment upon his return home, as well as the introduction of Shane’s teammate Hayden Pike. It also turns their encounter on the rooftops of Vegas into a moment of unresolved tension, where they’re both carrying a lot of baggage that we’ve seen accumulate throughout the episode. Shane thinks Ilya’s sulking is just about losing Rookie of the Year, but Ilya is grappling with his family in Russia, and it’s the first moment where their intimacy risks extending beyond the bounds of their professional identities (hence the constant use of Hollander and Rozanov instead of their first names).

It gives this first episode a proper cliffhanger, reinforcing that what might feel inevitable for us as observers of their intimacy could still be easily erased by the circumstances they find themselves in. “Rookies” jumps around in time a bit too much to have a consistent throughline, and there’s a lot to establish here, but that moment of them on the rooftop is not unlike the moment in Boston and Montreal’s first encounter when the noise around them disappears as they line up for the climactic face-off. The world of Game Changers may be bigger than non-readers currently understand, but it still stops for Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, and seeing that journey play out over these six episodes continues to feel like something of a pipe dream given where that journey began.

Stray observations

• I'll talk about this more as we get further into the series, but I think what shocked me most about Rachel revealing this would become a TV show was that it would actually be a TV show and not a movie. The idea of expanding the world of a book instead of constricting it just works against so many industry logics, and I don't want to take that for granted.
• I like to play a game of trying to decide why certain changes were made. For example, the scene in the hotel gym in the books had them racing on treadmills, not exercise bikes. Was it that bikes were safer, or that it’s hard to be sexy while running on a treadmill?
• I enjoy seeing examples of scenes that Tierney has “plussed” in certain ways. The All-Star Game press conference is a good example: Ilya’s foot-touch comes earlier in the scene than in the book, and it’s Shane who touches him back after fielding the tough question on Ilya’s behalf. It lets Shane be a bit more active than in the books, which we see again on the rooftop when Shane turns him around and pushes him against the wall before they part.
• Changing Yuna to be Shane’s manager makes a lot of practical sense, although I was somewhat alarmed at the suggestion that she was a lifelong Montreal Metros fan, which…well, we’ll get there eventually. (I also hope we’ll return to that “fuck him up the butt” line).
• I know they established the show starts in 2008, but I was still very confused when Shane’s father David didn’t know what YouTube was, so maybe a bit more temporality might have been helpful. It also raises a question: was a “YouTube rabbit hole” a phrase that was being used casually in 2010? I legitimately am unsure.
• Not that it wasn’t part of Shane’s story in the novel, but his careful folding of his clothes while undressing and his macrobiotic diet are both lampshading parts of his personality that will resonate as the story continues.
• There’s some larger story reasons why Scott Hunter is a bit more of a presence here than in the books—like being the player who Shane talks to on the bench as Ilya propositions him at the All-Star Game—but it doesn’t feel too conspicuous at this point. I’ll be curious to see how the second episode continues this process.
• Not that a show with a Crave logo at the beginning needed to necessarily prove its Canadianness, but the Feist needle drop was a nice reminder.
• Thanks for joining us for some bonus coverage of Heated Rivalry following its last-second U.S. release. I’ll be following up with the review of the second episode released today over the weekend, and then we’ll see weekly reviews through the end of the season.