A cast of real-life hockey players were used to fill out the team, while body doubles were cast for close-up shots of the lead actors in action on the ice. All hockey sequences, including locker rooms, ice surface, and stands were filmed at the Sleeman Centre in Guelph. The first day of shooting included Shane and Ilya’s Las Vegas hotel room encounter, while the hockey rink scenes were completed over a stretch of just over a week of filming near the end of the shoot. Principal photography for the first season commenced in April 2025, with filming taking place across two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, for 36 days, according to Tierney. He also wanted to find them together since “the show lives and dies on their relationship”. Tierney said it was essential to him that he found two actors who had the “physicality of hockey players” who were also comfortable with nudity and intimacy.
- Miley Cyrus also expressed interest in contributing music for the second season, as did rapper Bbno$.better source needed
- Access content from each service separately; live local & primetime NFL+ Premium games available on phones & tablets only.
- The series debuted on Crave with a two-episode premiere on November 28, 2025, followed by weekly episodes, with the finale airing on December 26.
- Here’s everything you need to know about “Heated Rivalry” and how to watch the rest of the season.
- Select the language and return to the app.
- US judge threatens ICE chief with contempt, orders court appearance
- Titles without ratings like live sports, news, and more, and the advertisements included therein, may feature mature themes, products, and services.
Cast and characters
Live Sports available only on select plans. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are hockey stars drawn together by rivalry and desire. A hockey player’s high-stakes career collides with love when a chance meeting ig… Shane and Ilya keep their secret fling alive while their growing connection is t… Blood and sex are both effects viewers register with their own bodies, but so too is time. And they approach that topic with a radical, formal devotion to their characters.
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. It doesn’t feel like hockey, and it doesn’t feel like anything else on TV right now; it feels a little bit like falling in love. While it isn’t ascending to Bluey levels of global streaming dominance, what’s unique about the show has been its growth. To really appreciate what’s going on on the ice, you have to be in that big refrigerator, shoulder to shoulder with the raucous crowd, bodies flying at you left and right.
The six-episode series tells the story of the forbidden queer love affair of two professional hockey players, and it does so by documenting each of its lovers’ dalliances at length and in languorous detail. It was arguably one of the greatest places and times to be alive as a hockey fan in the United States. By January 21, 2026, episodes were averaging 8 million viewers and the show hit a series high for weekly viewership the week prior. Alongside the announcement of its second season renewal, Deadline Hollywood reported that the series had become Crave’s most-watched original series to date, with viewership increasing by nearly 400% in its initial seven-day streaming window following its debut on November 28.
What Time Is ‘The Traitors’ on Tonight? How to Watch Season 4, Episode 6
Although HBO Max later acquired the series, it became involved only after the first season had been completed, meaning the show was not developed as a U.S. co-production from the outset. Despite a minimal marketing campaign and a low-cost licensing fee of approximately $600,000 per episode, it experienced a rapid surge in popularity following its late-November premiere. According to data shared by Crave’s social media accounts, the show exhibited unusually high “stickiness”, with a rewatch rate where approximately one-third (33%) of the total audience watched the entire season more than once. According to JustWatch, Heated Rivalry ranked fourth on its television streaming chart during the week of December 7, 2025, while Whip Media, based on data from its TV Time viewership tracking platform of more than 25 million users, reported the series placed sixth during the weeks of December 7 and 14. Following the episode’s reception, the series itself also entered IMDb Top 250 TV shows chart.
Ads served on select live and linear content on Standard and Premium Plans. Ads served on select live & linear content in No Ads plan. I was catching up on Heated Rivalry this January, just as I was also beginning to blitz through new episodes of the second season of HBO Max’s other viral hit, The Pitt. There is a momentary break in this dynamic in the third episode, when we return to an earlier moment at the Sochi Olympics and follow Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), a fellow hockey player who’d mostly only appeared at All-Star games and award ceremonies to this point. 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.
Live Sports
By the end of the year, the series ranked among the best TV shows of 2025 on the lists by Cosmopolitan, the New York Post, Refinery29, The Seattle Times, and the Toronto Star. Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com described the series as “revolutionary” and called it “one of the most entertaining shows of the year” as well as “the most significant queer show of the year”. For their performances in the first season finale, TVLine named both Williams and Storrie as “Performers of the Week”, while /Film described them as the strongest break-out performances of the year. On December 10, 2025, the trailer for the series was aired at the Pride Night game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Tampa Bay Lightning. In advance of the program’s television premiere, the first episode received a preview screening in Montreal at the 2025 Image+Nation festival on November 23, 2025. On November 19, 2025, nine days before the series premiere on Crave, it was announced that HBO Max had acquired US and Australian rights to the show for a day-and-date global release.
Watch Now
- The series had its preview screening at the Image+Nation LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Montreal, Canada on November 23, 2025.
- Access to select Hulu content in the Disney+ app†
- A cast of real-life hockey players were used to fill out the team, while body doubles were cast for close-up shots of the lead actors in action on the ice.
- By January 21, 2026, episodes were averaging 8 million viewers and the show hit a series high for weekly viewership the week prior.
- Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com described the series as “revolutionary” and called it “one of the most entertaining shows of the year” as well as “the most significant queer show of the year”.
- The series is also streaming on Sky-owned Neon in New Zealand and Movistar Plus+ in Spain.
- For a time, which started on December 20, 2025, it tied with Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias” (2013) as the only television episodes to receive a perfect rating on the platform, and ranked among the highest-rated episodes of all time.
According to Storrie and Chang, filming of the second season is presumed to begin in the summer or fall of 2026. The conversation between Shane and Ilya in a Tampa hotel in the episode “I’ll Believe in Anything” https://www.boombetonline.nl/ was also filmed on the first day of production; the scene served as one of Williams and Storrie’s audition scenes. The Las Vegas sex scene in the episode “Olympians” was filmed on the first day of production. The series’ numerous sex scenes, which contributed to its notoriety and critical attention, were overseen by intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter, and the absence of frontal nudity was a decision made entirely by Tierney. De Simone says he suggested the groin stretch that Hollander does in one episode and that Williams would later demonstrated on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show.
US judge threatens ICE chief with contempt, orders court appearance Select the language and return to the app. In the app-specific settings screen, there will be a section for “Preferred Language”. Clicking on the language setting will link you to the app-specific language setting that’s part of your OS.
ESPN Unlimited^^
The series has been described as a slow-burn story that’s emotional and filled with sexual tension. “Heated Rivalry” follows the story of two competitive hockey players, Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander — played by Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. If you want know when it is streaming for free, click ‘Free’ in the filters above and hit the notification bell.