New Crave hockey drama series Heated Rivalry puts sexy gay spin on the classic Montreal-Boston tension
The rivalry between the Montreal Canadiens and the Boston Bruins is one of the greatest in the history of the National Hockey League, but it takes on a whole other dimension in the new Crave series Heated Rivalry. In the show, based on the bestselling novel by Halifax author Rachel Reid, the focus isn’t what happens on the ice. Instead the camera is front-and-centre filming what happens in bedrooms in various cities when a star Montreal player meets for secret trysts with Boston’s hottest forward.
Heated Rivalry premieres on Crave Friday. In the series, the teams are called the Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders and they’re part of “Major League Hockey.”
And “hot” is the operative word here. The first two episodes — which is all journalists have seen so far — are exploding with steamy fairly explicit sex scenes featuring the two men, Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a Canadian of Asian descent who plays for Montreal, and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storie), a Russian who is on the Boston roster. There’s no frontal nudity but writer-director Jacob Tierney leaves little else to the imagination. In short it’s about as sexually-charged as anything you’ll see on the streaming platforms.
“Sex is a language for this show,” said Tierney, in a phone interview this week from Crave owner Bell Media’s headquarters in the former MuchMusic building on Queen Street West.
Tierney is a former Montrealer who began his career as a child actor here and then moved into directing, with the Montreal-shot films The Trotsky and Good Neighbours. More recently, he co-wrote and directed the acclaimed rural-Ontario-set comedy series Letterkenny and directed the Letterkenny spin-off Shoresy, set in the world of a senior hockey team in Sudbury.
Sex is central to Heated Rivalry, said Tierney.
“This is how these two guys know each other, they know each other by having sex,” said Tierney. “Also the source material is delightfully smutty. Part of the reason that I loved the book and part of the reason that I wanted to adapt it is that the sex didn’t feel gratuitous to me. This is story. This is how you watch this relationship — because the show takes place over almost eight years — you can see the way the relationship progresses by the way that they do this, by their intimacy.”
In the series, Rozanov is picked first overall in the “Major League Hockey” draft, with Hollander going second. Throughout, you see the sports media playing up the rivalry between the two of them — one a shy soft-spoken Canadian, the other a snarly caustic Russian. This part of the series has echoes of the rivalry between NHL stars Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin.
Tierney admitted it’s a bit of a double-edged sword in the current context to pitch a sexually-explicit series about two men in a torrid romance.
“That’s part of the reason the books were so popular and the people who got it, got it right away,” said Tierney. “But yeah, it’s not the easiest time for this kind of content, so that’s definitely a factor. … But the audience for this book are women and it’s women that made this book a hit. Women are kind of our built-in audience and I think it’s hard for people to wrap their mind around it until they see it in action. You see these things go viral on TikTok or Instagram or whatever and you see these hundreds of comments and they’re largely from women. They’re the ones that want this story, that want this book. And this is what the fans want. This is what they love about it.”
The spicy Heated Rivalry trailer
has spawned a slew of videos on TikTok
, with the trailer paired with different pop songs. The series is also gaining buzz south of the border. It was recently bought by HBO for the U.S. and Australia and
there was a feature on it in The Hollywood Reporter this week
.
Astonishing as it seems, there still has never been an openly gay player in the NHL, yet, notes Tierney, there are a ton of queer sports romance books about hockey that are primarily consumed by women.
“Maybe that is a reaction against a perceived lack of progress in professional hockey,” said Tierney.
Tierney said he has no idea what the hockey world will think of his series. He doesn’t know if hockey fans will like it.
“I think it will appeal to their wives,” said Tierney. “I know there’s an audience that loves these books. They’ve sold a lot of copies.”
In a note sent to journalists, Tierney calls Heated Rivalry “my passion project, my baby” and he said it is indeed very close to his heart.
“As gay people, we don’t get to see stuff like this,” said Tierney. “We don’t get sexy fun happy endings. We don’t get to see our characters sail off into the sunset in love. And we don’t get to see sex. I think that’s part of what’s so fun about this — to be able to put out something into the world that feels like queer joy. That makes me very happy. To put something out into the world that’s hopeful, fun, and sexy and gay.”
