A Hockey Romance TV Show Is Coming to HBO Max
BookTok’s favorite sport is coming to streaming. Heated Rivalry, based on the hockey romance series Game Changers Rachel Reid, will run on HBO Max in America and Australia. In its native Canada (it’s a hockey show, of course it’s from Canada), the show will air on Crave.
Heated Rivalry was created by Letterkenny impresario Jacob Tierney, based on the queer romance novels of Rachel Reid. It tells the enemy-to-lovers story of Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). The pair are “two of the biggest stars in major league hockey, bound by ambition, rivalry and a magnetic pull neither of them fully understands,” per the show description. “Over the next eight years, the pair chase glory on the ice while struggling to navigate their feelings off it. Torn between the sport they live for and the love they can’t ignore, Shane and Ilya must decide if there is room in their fiercely competitive world for something as fragile and as powerful as real love.”
Hockey romance is a powerful subgenre in the greater romance ecosystem. It exists comfortably alongside romantasy, historical romance, and thinly veiled fic about Kylo Ren. According to Reid, Heated Rivalry is lightly based on the rivalry between Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. “But I was also inspired by other sports rivalries, by other fictional stories, and by my love of the enemies-to-lovers and forbidden romance tropes,” she wrote in her website’s F.A.Q. Sift fact from fanfiction when Heated Rivalry premieres on Crave and HBO Max November 28.
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