Brandy: Hello Kelsey, I hope you had a lovely Christmas.
Kelsey: Hello Brandy, if by “Christmas” you mean “the season finale of the hit show Heated Rivalry starring Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams which aired on December 26,” I sure did!!
Brandy: December 26 is Boxing Day, a very real and important holiday for my people (Canadians), who also brought you this wonderful show.
Kelsey: Yes, Brandy, I have been meaning to thank you for being Canadian, and thus funding this show, which seems to have been made with $12 and a hope and a dream for Crave.
Brandy: Government funding of the arts is so important!
Kelsey: How did you begin watching Heated Rivalry, Brandy?
Brandy: I have been vaguely aware that hockey romance was a huge publishing trend for a few years now, and had heard that this was being adapted, but I honestly didn’t give it too much thought. Then, suddenly, my inbox was full of writers pitching me about it and my group chats were on fire about “the gay hockey show,” so I figured I should check it out. I will say, as someone who is deeply allergic to tv shows that people describe as “heartwarming” or “necessary” or “a balm for our troubled times,” I am very glad that the first few episodes were sold to me as simply “super fucking hot.”
Kelsey: I completely agree. People keep texting me to ask if the show is “good,” which I don’t really know how to answer. It isn’t prestige television. In the finale, the CGI fire is so bad that it’s actually jarring as a viewer. One of the actors (Francois Arnaud) plays a professional hockey player who appears to have never run before in his life. But it is absolutely a show that is horny and sexy and fun to watch. There are butts! Many butts!
Brandy: It’s so horny and the bare asses are all very beautiful. What I really appreciate about the sex in the show is both how much of it there is, how fun it looks, and how showrunner Jacob Tierney is really doing a service for those of us who hate the prudes who complain that sex on tv serves no purpose. The sex in this show is plot, and it is character development, and it is so necessary to what unfolds narratively.
Kelsey: I actually do believe that a sex scene should have a purpose narratively, which is what makes it hard for me to read a lot of the new genre of romantic comedy novels. I have not read the books Heated Rivalry is based on, but in the show at least, the sex is always doing something. It’s showing us their comfort levels with each other, or who feels more in control, or putting them in a precarious position. It all matters, which rules because the scenes are also hot as hell!
Brandy: They are hot and tender and depict the ways that exploring our sexuality is how we come to know something of ourselves. Which is a universal thing and I think goes some way to explaining why the show is such a success. Obviously there have been lots of discussions over the years about the appeal that gay romance has for straight women, and though neither of us are straight there are obviously elements of this show that we do not have personal experience with. However, speaking only for myself, I am interested in all varieties of human desire—I like seeing how people want each other and how that wanting changes them, so just on that level I don’t think it’s super complicated.
Kelsey: I think because the show has rocketed into the public consciousness and because it is on the whole genuine and nice and sweet, there have been some attempts to create discourse from it that has sides and takes. One of them is that this is a show for straight women. I find that pretty boring and reductive considering that the woman who wrote these books identifies as bisexual, the director is gay, and so are many of the actors. I don’t think, in general, the equipment you bring to sex is the thing that really defines it, and that’s part of what I love about this show: it’s more interested in what sex causes and creates than in the mechanics.
Brandy: I will say, the one time I was like “okay, that is maybe something for the straight women” is when Ilya arrives at the cottage and tells Shane that he has also refrained from having sex with anyone else. We are meant to understand that this sexual fidelity signals a new, more serious stage of their relationship, which I will just say does not reflect the thinking of most of my gay male friends lol.
Kelsey: The way I scoffed at this, to be perfectly honest. Ilya is presented the whole show as this horny bisexual Russian who cannot really be tamed and is an asshole on the ice. It doesn’t even fit with his characterization! But I think it also signals toward the fact that this is ultimately a kind of traditional love story! It’s enemies on the ice to lovers. It’s forbidden by their culture (hockey).
Brandy: The traditional love story of a decade-long situationship actually turning out well. Honestly, my fantasy.
Kelsey: Damn. It really is a fantasy. Imagine you and your situationship are both the best in the world at your jobs and you have a beautiful cottage made entirely of glass on a lake and also it’s the best sex you’ve ever had??? Okay great! I love imagining this! Sign me up!
Brandy: I am going to get earnest here for a minute and say that this show actually arrived in my life at a strange time. 2025 has been the best year professionally (I work here now! With you!) but a tough one for my tender heart. I finally got over this incredibly drawn-out, complicated thing and met someone who I thought genuinely liked and respected me. Then he disappeared. And I was shocked by this development, as I always tend to be, because I believe each time that things will be different. I think anyone who has read my writing knows that I am a very romantic person, but at a certain point it just gets hard to maintain that disposition in the face of defeat. But this show, and my reaction to it, sort of proved that I am unable to be anything other than what I am. I’m just a person who believes this shit!
Kelsey: God, Brandy I’m so sorry. One thing I really love and admire about you is how expansive and pervasive you believe love (romantically, platonically, etc) can be. I think your approach to all of your relationships is really genuine and based in a desire to, if not love every single other person, understand them as well as you can. And I think something I felt really firmly as someone with a lot of fucking walls up in general is how much this show emphasizes that to love and to be loved, you do have to allow yourself to be known, which can be a really scary and vulnerable and upsetting thing to do!
Brandy: Yes, I think the show is very adept at understanding that vulnerability is a necessary condition for courage. That plus it’s always better to be romantically brave with Wolf Parade playing in the background.
Kelsey: I would really like to have a word with whoever is music directing this show because it is beginning to feel like a very personal attack. Like, I know the show is mostly set in the early-mid 2010s, but also I am being forced to REMEMBER things from my past because the show keeps dredging up fucking Feist.
Brandy: I love being pandered to! The craziest thing this show managed to accomplish is actually overwhelming my own personal memories of growing up around and occasionally dating real-life hockey players, who are not like this at all.
Kelsey: I really loved the Eva Holland essay on our site that you edited about this. Part of the contrast of the story here is that hockey is this brutal, forceful, masculine game, and here you have two of its biggest stars doing the soft, intimate, caring things together. I have no personal experience with hockey bros because I am from Texas.
Brandy: Well then it’s my turn to thank you for being from Texas, which brought us Connor Storrie.
Kelsey: My fellow Texan, Connor Storrie, is really a star. I’m so proud of him. He’s from Odessa, which, I’m sorry, is absolute shit. (I am also from shit-town Texas). When I learned this, I felt like I had learned about acting as a concept for the very first time because I’m stupid and American and assumed that this man HAD to be Russian. I know a few Russians, and they all hold their jaws that way! But no, he’s just an actor!
Brandy: He is so good at smoldering. Immediately disrupted the world smoldering rankings with this performance. It’s been especially funny watching all the press they’ve been doing for the show and realizing that he actually seems to be a huge goofball. I do worry about him and Hudson Williams, though. Little baby lambs brought to online slaughter.
Kelsey: Yes! The two of them are on the kind of meteoric rises that terrify me. Before the first episode premiered, they each had fewer than 10,000 followers on Instagram and now, six weeks later, they both have more than a million. They’re doing what seems to be three press hits every single day, all of which have a photoshoot.
Brandy: They should go spend a few weeks holed up in a beautiful, very private cottage together. Away from all the attention.
Kelsey: I find their friendship so cute. They seem to really like each other. Something I would like to admit is that two of these six episodes made me cry??? This is not normal for me. Did you cry?
Brandy: I cried so much. Like, openly weeping multiple times.
Kelsey: I wept! Tears streaming down my face! Snotty!
Brandy: I am actually crying right now, but it’s because I realized I accidentally made a “holed up at the cottage” pun.
Kelsey: Oh my god. If you think about it, that’s why we’re blogging this show. Because of hole and because of cry.
Brandy: Thank you to Jacob Tierney for delivering on both.
Kelsey: And thank you to Canada.
