Heated Rivalry: A new book on the story behind the sensation

A new annotated scripts book reveals how Jacob Tierney's hockey romance, starring Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, became a global pop-culture sensation

This July, Sam Seder, co-host of the super-popular podcast The Majority Report, returned from a brief hiatus which he said was "for a small acting job in the upcoming second season of a popular show". His co-host Emma Vigeland's reply was immediate: "Oh my god, was it Heated Rivalry?". For the next 10-odd minutes, one of America's most influential political podcasts was transformed into a fan show, discussing everything from costumes to dialogues and the much-clipped sex scenes in actor-director Jacob Tierney's hit series about rival male ice hockey players who become soulmates.

It was a reminder of the broad appeal of the Canadian romantic drama, based on writer Rachel Reid's Game Changers sequence of romance novels. Heated Rivalry, one of 2025's most-talked-about TV series, has received widespread critical acclaim for its emotional depth, strong characterisation and storylines that avoid queer clichés.

The making of a phenomenal hit

The show has received a Peabody Award and a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding New Television Series. Its weekly viewing on HBO Max rose from approximately 30 million streaming minutes in its debut week to around 324 million during its finale week, according to Luminate data reported by The New York Times. By December 2025, approximately 650,000 copies had been sold across Reid's Game Changers series.

Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov, and (top) Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander, in Heated Rivalry. | Photo Credit: Sabrina Lantos

Hachette India is now giving fans the opportunity to peek behind the curtain with the book I'll Believe in Anything: The Making of Heated Rivalry Season 1 (The Annotated Scripts), which will release in India on October 27. The book is an annotated collection of scripts, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and notes on scene directions, intimacy choreography and costume design, including the now-familiar Canadian Olympic fleece.

The book also explores how Tierney weaves Shane (Hudson Williams) and Ilya's (Connor Storrie) relationship with the romance between the second lead pair Scott Hunter and Kip Grady. According to an excerpt published on Today.com, the original opening scene, which introduces teenage hockey prodigies Shane and Ilya at a junior hockey tournament, was written to run for six minutes but was cut down to one minute to establish the chemistry straightaway.

I'll Believe in Anything is a snapshot of the engine room behind Heated Rivalry. It tells us how and why this "little Canadian show" became a true-blue pop culture juggernaut. Speaking about the show, Tierney says, "When we were writing these scripts, we knew we had something unique on our hands, of course. But it was never designed as a 'blockbuster'. We were writing for a little Canadian show, y'know? None of us could have foreseen the scale that this has ended up achieving. It is so gratifying to see the love that viewers from around the world have expressed for Heated Rivalry."

Hockey, desire and intimacy

For all its unexpected success, Heated Rivalry remains rooted in the high-pressure world of professional ice hockey, and one of the show's underrated aspects is how smoothly those sequences have been shot, emphasising the strength, speed and finesse required to be a professional hockey player at the highest level.

"Ice hockey is an incredibly special part of Canadian culture," Tierney says. "It's the way Americans are really passionate about baseball, or in India, the way people react to cricket, for example. And if there's a nation after Canada that takes ice hockey this seriously, it is Russia. So, for the romantic pairing of Shane and Ilya to work to its full potential, they had to be a Canadian and a Russian, respectively."

A still from Heated Rivalry. | Photo Credit: Sabrina Lantos

Why has Heated Rivalry inspired such a passionate following around the world -- not just among gay men, but also among young women? For many young women around the world, especially in societies exerting a high degree of control over their lives, fictional romances between men may offer a way to explore desire and intimacy outside the conventions and gendered expectations of heterosexual romance. The Japanese manga genre known as 'Yaoi' or 'Boys' Love' (frequently abbreviated as BL), for example, has been largely created by women and has a substantial female readership.

The show's meticulously shot sex scenes, central to its storytelling, have become a major talking point, especially among women fans. The actors convey intimacy while revealing new information about the emotional progression of Shane and Ilya's relationship. There is nothing gratuitous about these scenes; the craft that went into them is undeniable. In I'll Believe Anything, fans can read about how Tierney and the two leads worked with intimacy co-ordinator Chala Hunter to determine the tenor and trajectory of the scenes.

"Hudson and Connor were both outstanding," Tierney says. "Before shooting our first sex scene, I told them both, 'This is Shane and Ilya when nobody is looking'. So, there had to be an honesty to the way both men behaved, a lack of inhibition. They had to forget the way they present themselves in public. And yet at the same time, with every sexual encounter between Shane and Ilya, their characters evolve and we learn something new about them -- I thought both actors did a great job of depicting that process, that evolution."

The power of weekly television

The show's growing popularity also found expression in American late-night television, with jokes from hosts such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers. Like many A-list TV shows over the last few years, Heated Rivalry chose a week-by-week schedule over releasing all episodes in one go. It gave the show a chance to build on its initial rave reviews and develop cultural momentum with each episode.

(L-R) Actors Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie with writer-director Jacob Tierney on the sets of Heated Rivalry. | Photo Credit: Sabrina Lantos

"The week-by-week release definitely helped us a lot," Tierney admits. "It's the way TV used to work before the streaming era. As a viewer, you watched something one day and you talked about it the next day, only to discover that maybe a couple of your friends have also watched it. It's the way word-of-mouth works, or used to work, at least. I think it gave Heated Rivalry the time and the breathing space to develop a fandom, to become a part of the conversation, so to speak."

What comes next

The conversation is set to continue. Season 2 is scheduled to premiere next year, with Williams and Storrie returning as Shane and Ilya. The expanding cast includes Milla Jovovich, Paul Gross, Kevin Zegers, Emily Hampshire, Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie.

The new season will draw on Reid's The Long Game, which follows the couple as they navigate the challenges of sustaining a relationship while keeping it private. It will also incorporate parts of Reid's Role Model, in which professional hockey player Troy Barrett is traded to a new team and begins a relationship with Harris Drover, its openly gay social media manager.

Meanwhile, Reid's next Shane-and-Ilya novel, Unrivaled, has been delayed until June 2027.

The writer is working on his first book of non-fiction.