Heated Rivalry looks the way a romance novel feels to read, sex and all. It’s not an accident: writer and director Jacob Tierney has two other hit shows under his belt, and he spent years developing an expressive visual language using both confident camerawork and characters grounded in physicality. For that slim wedge of the Venn diagram who was familiar with both Tierney’s sitcoms and Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series before the new tv adaptation was released, Heated Rivalry’s success has been less of a surprise and more a joyous validation and delight.
In Tierney’s shows, hockey runs on two blades: muscle and mouth. You need the athletic strength, speed, and skill — and if an opponent asks you, “Nice onesie, does it come in mens?” You need to be able to shoot back: “Oh, I think you come in men enough for both of us.”
Lines like that made Jacob Tierney’s Letterkenny (and its later spinoff Shoresy) memorable from the outset. It’s all about the mouth: the show has a specific and unhinged delight in language, goofy and dirty and fun to echo. (Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er.) There’s so much for the ears to take in that it’s easy to overlook all the plot and character work being done by the muscle: Wayne’s shrug to loosen up at the start of a fight, the skids’ nonstop tweaking, the hicks lounging as a group by the farm stand with all the artful lassitude of angels in a Renaissance painting. Tierney himself plays closeted preacher Glen, whose Southern twang is all godliness but who can’t stop suggestively licking or fondling every phallic prop within reach. The body exposes a truth in defiance of what a character might protest — which any romance reader will recognize as a hallmark of the genre.
And as negative space between the verbal pyrotechnics we have hypnotic slow-motion sequences where the camera lets us luxuriate in simply watching how characters move. It’s a technique that takes a scene of, say, a flannel-clad Canadian hick dancing to a Francophone disco tune and turns it into a moment that absolutely shimmers with pleasure and yearning. It looks the way a great party feels.
Shoresy takes the original show’s meandering tone and sharpens it like a skate blade, pointedly focusing on one hockey team’s rise to league success. When Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization player Shoresy first appears in the original show he is entirely identified by gloriously filthy dialogue, his face always purposefully hidden to lampshade the fact that he’s played by Jared Keeso, who also plays Wayne. It’s not until the spinoff that we see the sacrificed tooth in that hockey smile, a sign of the physical toll the sport demands from its acolytes. In the NOSHO, hockey is everything — it is what bodies are meant to be used for, whether it’s posing for a beefcake team calendar fundraiser or not squandering stamina on sex (“playing a period between the sheets”). The body is strong for what it endures, and weak for what it desires — the same paradox at the heart of Heated Rivalry.
Shoresy manages to turn chirping into romantic banter: whenever he runs into journalist Laura Mohr, all his vulgar slights turn to pure (though still vulgar) sunshine: “I’d sit bare-assed on the Big Nickel just to have you flick some debris off my shirt, I swear to god, I’d be so good to ya.” But their romance can only move forward once Shoresy retires from playing hockey. The two priorities cannot coexist. It’s a notably more satisfying payoff than, say, Ted Lasso, which talked a great game about romance during its run but balked at the finish like a soccer player faking a dive. But Shoresy is still poised halfway between Letterkenny’s virtuoso trash talk and romance’s sincere confessions of love.
Romance novelists pay attention to muscle. Bodies are the instruments on which we play love songs. Characters in romance novels don’t just feel worried, they get passages like this from Reid’s Heated Rivalry: “Shane felt like he was made of alarm bells. Like his panic was going to somehow wake up the entire hotel. If it was just that he was kissing a man, he might be able to get a grip. But kissing this man in particular was so absurd and wrong wrong wrong… But his dick didn’t seem to think so.” Romance’s strength is that you get both the lingering physical experience and the wordy monologue, at the same time.
Translating this deep interiority from text to film is complex, which may be one reason why it is vanishingly rare to see films treat romance novels as texts worth being faithful to, outside of Jane Austen. Even then, Pride and Prejudice adaptations often flesh out Darcy’s role with hot action you won’t find in Austen’s novel: a plunge into a pond that makes linen cling sluttily, a close-up on a clenching hand, a figure striding through the mist on the moors, shirt swooning open from neck to nips. The body’s movements invite the audience to imagine the feelings beneath the surface.
In an interview for Elle Magazine, Heated Rivalry’s intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter makes it clear this faithfulness was Tierney’s goal: “The scenes are written very specifically as they are in the book, and Jacob really laid out the action in the script… The sex is such a big part of the emotional, physical, and psychological journey that these characters go through.” Between the work of the cast, the camera, and the crew, I cannot think of the last time this much care was put into a story many directors would treat like Hallmark-channel fodder. Tierney went butch Merchant Ivory here, with robust edits and gorgeous lenswork and sheer gravitas. There are action shots that feel like sports documentaries, and quiet scenes that scream queer indie cinema. The show is simultaneously true to the book and inventive — just the kind of sophisticated interpretation that earned Emma Thompson an armful of awards for Sense and Sensibility.
Heated Rivalry is also a historical romance that spans from 2008 to 2017. Like Regency society, professional hockey is a unique world where finely parsed codes of behavior are enforced by social shame. Ilya’s queerness is outright illegal in Russia, but Shane isn’t breaking any Canadian laws. Like Austen’s characters, his fears are about violating a taboo of manners in a way he will suffer for not just socially but financially. Nudity in a professional locker room is unremarkable; looking at nude teammates with desire is anathema.
And like any good period piece, Heated Rivalry rewards attention to physical subtext.
The first episode’s opening scene presents Shane and Ilya purely as bodies interacting. Before we learn anything else about these men — even that they play hockey — we see Ilya indulging in forbidden physical pleasure, lighting a cigarette in a nonsmoking area as Shane walks up to introduce himself. The first handshake is a firm, businesslike clasp. Shane’s attempts at small talk receive curt, one-word replies. He goes to leave and out of nervous politeness offers a second handshake — far too soon after the first one. It’s a bit silly, and Ilya notices. He looks down and up, and when he puts his hand forward there’s an attitude that wasn’t there before, a little James Dean grace note of sensual amusement that curls the corners of his mouth. Ilya’s first full line establishes their competition: “You will not be so nice when we beat you.”
Shane laughs silently, mouth open in outrage that matches both Ilya’s amusement and his challenge. “That’s not happening,” he says, shaking his head. And then, immediately: a little nod. No, then yes, Push and pull. The Russian tilts his head sideways to say: we’ll see. A third option, neither up nor down. Shane walks away and Ilya’s smile grows, though he tries to hide it behind a long, thirsty drag on his cigarette.
If you only listen to the words here, you’ve missed most of the scene.
The realistic dialogue, hewing close to Reid’s novel, is worlds away from the stylized, staccato beats of Tierney’s earlier shows — which caused Daniel Fienberg in the Hollywood Reporter to warn viewers after the first two episodes dropped: “don’t go in expecting all that many direct similarities to Letterkenny.” In an instantly-infamous passage, he then suggested Tierney “could have pushed Heated Rivalry forward as a will-they-won’t-they relationship drama … building up to perhaps a chaste kiss in the first season finale.” That would be as absurd as making a television adaptation of Moby-Dick where Ishmael only boards the Pequod in the season 1 finale. Viewers would justifiably feel cheated. The dick is the point.
Earlier this year, Fienberg’s review of Apple TV’s Murderbot analyzed in detail changes between the book and the show, so he knows adaptation is an act of interpretation that critics can and should evaluate. Yet it’s not clear that he bothered to read Reid’s novel at all, even as background for his review. “It’s hard to anticipate where exactly it’s going,” Fienberg lamented — as though the original romance novel was some niche text languishing in obscurity, or Jacob Tierney was not talking specifically about queer joy and happy endings throughout the press tour.
I don’t know how many interviews we need where the Letterkenny writer says he’s a fan of Reid’s writing before people believe that he means it.
Even in this more naturalistic mode, Tierney still finds room for structured comedic repetition, such as the first-episode moment, invented for the show, when Ilya runs into Shane’s mom Yuna as he takes the elevator to Shane’s room; Yuna sticks out out her hand to formally introduce herself exactly like her son did at the start, like it’s the Official Hollander Handshake — then has to jerk back when the doors slide shut. Ilya’s horror is awkwardly legible: Hey, mom, I’m off to fuck your son.
When hockey chirping later breaks through the hotel-room haze — when over lunch Yuna cries out “Fuck him. Right up the butt!” — her son hides a laugh. But it leads immediately to Shane and Ilya’s first professional face-off. The threat in Yuna’s words has yanked us from those soft, quiet, low-lit spaces and shoved us into a too-bright, too-cold arena with a thousand screaming spectators and six inches of gear between your skin and anyone else’s.
Shane’s body, of course, is visibly marked in a way Ilya’s is not: as a biracial Asian hockey player, he knows he already has one penalty against him when measured against hockey’s straight, white false ideal. It’s also worth pointing out that Shane and his Japanese mother are played by actors who are Korean and Taiwanese-Filipino — especially since it feels like the same kind of regrettable flattening-out of ethnicity we recognize when the team’s owner says they’re “thrilled” Shane is “Asian, or Asian-Canadian.” This declaration is transparently lip service. Mouth without muscle.
As in Austen, secondary couples and rival suitors offer clarifying contrasts. Fellow pro hockey player Scott and barista Kip are our Bingley and Jane, sweeter but just as trapped. They use their words like adults to express what they want — what a concept! — but Scott has devoted his life to hockey, and it forces them apart (until — spoilers! — episode five). Shane’s brief fling with Rose and Ilya’s longstanding hookup with Svetlana, both delightful women, offer ostensibly acceptable partnerships not only as sexual substitutes, but as people Shane and Ilya feel safe talking to. It’s just that, as the song says: this is not enough.
The heart cannot be argued with or fought against. And queer hearts in Heated Rivalry upset all the systems established to lock hearts away. Instead of being antagonists who sabotage one another, Ilya’s considerate tutoring of Shane in queer sex is paralleled by the way Shane verbally covers for the Russian player when he can’t immediately parse press questions.
At the end of the first episode, Ilya is again outside smoking somewhere he shouldn’t, dreading a return to his abusive family in Russia. Shane emerges and an argument results. Shane again offers a handshake in farewell. It’s your classic comedy rule of three: the third handshake in a third scene. But this time, Ilya stalks forward, grabs Shane’s hand, and turns the move into a desperate kiss of longing, the men pressed against the wall with their fingers tangling in each others’ hair.
Words aren’t safe. Touch is the only way Ilya can possibly express what he’s feeling to the man he’s feeling it for.
Later, in each other’s phones as “Jane” and “Lily,” they’ll establish a teasing text chain. But it’s only in episode four that Tierney begins deploying those lush slow-motion needle drops, as years of provocative texting and post-game fucking deepen into real infatuation: Shane being sprayed with champagne in the locker room after a victory but focused entirely on his phone, the neon-toned agony of the closing club scene, when Ilya and Shane are both with women and make jealous eye contact across a dance floor, while t.A.T.u’s “All the Things She Said” goes briefly slow-motion — as though the weight of Shane and Ilya’s anguished longing is pressing too hard on the turntable.
A romance narrative ends when it succeeds in bringing the physical and the verbal into harmony with the feelings, no matter how hard the characters resist. In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy gets the hand clench and, “You have bewitched me, body and soul.” (Also not in the book, but still great.) Mouth, muscle and heart have all got to play as a team if you’re going to win.
By considering Heated Rivalry only as a vehicle for sex scenes, and sex scenes only as titillation, critics have both neglected the physical eloquence of the romance show and ignored connections to the nonverbal language of Tierney’s previous work. Complaints that there’s not enough hockey in Heated Rivalry or that the dialogue is less obviously artful than that of Letterkenny or Shoresy miss the point — all three shows were made by the same director, for the same network, about the same sports culture that envisions sex as an exercise in power. They’re an oeuvre, if you’ll let me use all my Frenchiest vowels for a moment. To treat the queer romance as disconnected from the sitcoms is to isolate Tierney’s queer-centered work from his other shows — as if the first two weren’t also made by a queer man.
It’s the same close-mindedness which imagines queer love as something a character (or a person) can just wall off, ignore, suppress, and live without.
I’m not saying people are required to like romance novels, or the “gay hockey show” as Heated Rivalry is often referenced; I am saying that if they don’t believe there’s anything to learn from romance as a genre, they’re going to miss the central ideas Tierney is engaging with. You need to accept romance’s invitations. If critics are able to admire two-minute riffs on fucking your mother, but not a nuanced two-minute scene of fucking your lover, they’re in the same boat as our poor lonely hockey players, groping their way through the dark.
Both Letterkenny and Shoresy have warm hearts beneath the bluster — they focus on the goofy, awkward, laughable parts of sex, using a patter that unfortunately does devalue sex and love, especially if you’re queer (Shoresy’s wholesome romance chirps excepted). Taken in concert with Tierney’s earlier work, Heated Rivalry stands as a fresh, rebellious chapter in favor of intimacy, openness, and sincere passion.
