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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- According to Storrie and Chang, filming of the second season is presumed to begin in the summer or fall of 2026.
- There are two available bundle plans – ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited.
- The series has been described by media outlets as a global sensation and a break-out critical hit.
- Alongside the announcement of its second season renewal, Deadline Hollywood reported that the series had become Crave’s most-watched original series to date, with viewership increasing by nearly 400% in its initial seven-day streaming window following its debut on November 28.
- According to Billboard, the songs’ appearance in the series resulted in increased official on-demand streaming activity.
- And they approach that topic with a radical, formal devotion to their characters.
- Based on the Game Changers novel series by Rachel Reid, it follows two rival professional hockey players, Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), whose on-ice animosity conceals a passionate, secret romance.
Shortly after its release, it entered IMDb’s rankings of highest-rated television episodes, attaining a rare perfect 10 out of 10 rating. Vogue Adria and InsideHook highlighted the Empty Netters podcast, hosted by former ice hockey players, for its enthusiastic coverage of the series which they cited as an example of “non-toxic masculinity” within the sport. The series is also streaming on Sky-owned Neon in New Zealand and Movistar Plus+ in Spain.
Kein Rassismus, Sexismus, Homo-/Transphobie, Misogynie o.ä.
According to Storrie and Chang, filming of the second season is presumed to begin in the summer or fall of 2026. The conversation between Shane and Ilya in a Tampa hotel in the episode “I’ll Believe in Anything” was also filmed on the first day of production; the scene served as one of Williams and Storrie’s audition scenes. The Las Vegas sex scene in the episode “Olympians” was filmed on the first day of production. The series’ numerous sex scenes, which contributed to its notoriety and critical attention, were overseen by intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter, and the absence of frontal nudity was a decision made entirely by Tierney. De Simone says he suggested the groin stretch that Hollander does in one episode and that Williams would later demonstrated on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show.
Seasons
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.
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In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry. Between the week of its debut and the week of its season finale, on https://www.boombetonline.nl/ December 27, viewership grew tenfold—from 30 million to 324 million streaming minutes logged—with a growing and notable majority of viewers being women. This November, though, a little Canadian series called Heated Rivalry figured out how to make hockey work on television.
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Each new episode drops on HBO Max at 12 a.m. Here’s everything you need to know about “Heated Rivalry” and how to watch the rest of the season. HBO Max’s newest series has viewers buzzing. Learn more about what content you can watch with Streams at the Disney+ Help Center.
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- In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry.
- Heated Rivalry is ineligible for consideration at the Primetime Emmy Awards because it does not meet the Television Academy’s eligibility requirements for the U.S. co-productions.
- 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.
- Time-jumping and globe-trotting to show us every single time they hook up over the course of about a decade, the show’s immediate devotion to their affair starts to bleed out into the viewer’s perception and anticipation of it.
- HBO Max also revealed the show is the No. 2 driver of first-time viewers on the platform since its release.
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.
There aren’t any free streaming options for Heated Rivalry right now. Currently available on 2 streaming services. Additional terms apply. Select games available and blackouts may apply.
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.
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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.
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.
