The Narrative Genius of Heated Rivalry

Heated Rivalry is, almost exclusively, the story of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two high-level professional hockey prospects who fall in love. One’s Canadian, the other’s Russian; one is soft-spoken, the other is brazen and bombastic; one is a squeaky-clean national hero with a supportive family, and the other is a “bad boy” lothario with a family that despises him and bleeds him dry. And they are men. While Heated Rivalry is a romantic fantasy, it’s set in the real world of professional sports, where there is currently not a single out athlete in any of the major men’s professional leagues of North America. (This is not the case in women’s professional sports.) While the show’s effort to reproduce realistic gameplay on the ice is cursory at best, its dialogue can occasionally lapse into made-for-TV movie stiltedness, some of its contextualizing side plots can feel paint-by-numbers, and its choppy progression through time can feel like a 10-car narrative pileup, its depiction of the secret relationship between Shane and Ilya gives it unaccountable life.

The world of Heated Rivalry is radically narrow. In its brisk, bustling six episodes, the outlines of a wider world beyond Shane and Ilya are blurry. There are intra-team dynamics, friends and former lovers, complex family situations, international political imbroglios, and social lives outside of the succession of hotel rooms in which these lovers meet. But the show rigorously abstains from too much investment in any of that other stuff. Trimming its plot of almost every bit of material that doesn’t directly impact Shane and Ilya’s affair, Heated Rivalry has a kind of ruthless narrative economy.

One of the most jarring features of the show, which becomes apparent quickly into the first episode, is its skimming-for-the-good-parts storytelling style. In the first 11 minutes of the show’s pilot, for instance, there are four separate time jumps—“One Week Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later,” “Six Months Later.” While the pace slows a bit after that opening hopscotch, the time jump remains the show’s signature structuring device. I found myself laughing about it as the series began, but, as episodes unfolded, there started to be something almost hypnotic about the constant yada-yada’ing of everything that didn’t involve our two leads. This is a show about the slow, slow dawning of a love story between two people, but, from the jump, the show is already formally in love with them. 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. Heated Rivalry almost literally can’t wait to get Ilya and Shane into a room together, almost before the characters themselves feel that way.