“Two of the biggest stars in Major League Hockey are bound by ambition, rivalry, and a magnetic pull neither of them fully understands.” That is the logline Crave is selling, and it is also the exact problem with Heated Rivalry. The show knows what binds Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. It is far less sure what to do with them once they are bound.
Created, written, and directed by Jacob Tierney, the Canadian sports romance runs six episodes, premiering November 28, 2025 and closing December 26. It adapts Rachel Reid’s Game Changers books, taking its title from the 2019 second installment. Hudson Williams plays Shane Hollander. Connor Storrie plays Ilya Rozanov. They are rookies on rival fictional Major League Hockey teams, the Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders, and their relationship continues intermittently over several years while the sport tries to pull them apart.
Trailer, via Crave.
Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov at the Start
The premise is a good one, and the first stretch uses it. Two fresh-faced rookies start a casual sexual relationship. Media coverage amplifies their on-ice rivalry into a public story neither controls. The private thing continues as both chase their careers.
That gap — the loud public rivalry, the quiet private arrangement — is where the series lives. When it stays there, Heated Rivalry works.
The ensemble around the two leads includes François Arnaud as Scott Hunter, plus Robbie G.K., Christina Chang, Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova, Sophie Nélisse, and Dylan Walsh. Arnaud gets the most to do of that group, and in my view the show is better when it gives him room.
Hamilton Standing In for New York and Moscow
The production is a genuine achievement on a Canadian budget. Accent Aigu Entertainment and Bell Media produced it, with principal photography across Ontario. Hamilton served as the primary filming hub, standing in for New York and Moscow. Dundurn Castle, the FirstOntario Concert Hall, and the Sleeman Centre in Guelph — the last for all on-ice sequences — all appear.
A hockey romance needs ice that reads as professional, and to my eye the Sleeman Centre footage does. A show that has to fake Moscow out of southern Ontario and, in my viewing, largely gets away with it has done something right.
The series previewed at the Image+Nation LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Montreal on November 23, 2025. Crave premiered it five days later, with a simultaneous HBO Max release in the United States — HBO Max had acquired international distribution rights before the Canadian premiere. Before season one even finished, Crave announced a second season in development, set for April 2027 and intended to adapt Reid’s 2022 sequel novel, The Long Game.
The Eight-Year Problem
Here is where Heated Rivalry loses its grip. The synopsis promises a years-long journey of love, denial, and self-discovery, and the show has six episodes to cover eight years. In my view it never solves that math.
Time skips do the work that scenes should do. The relationship moves forward because the calendar moves forward, not because the two men on screen change in ways we watch happen. A magnetic pull is asserted in the marketing. On screen, to my eye, it is mostly assumed.
Two of the biggest stars in Major League Hockey are bound by ambition, rivalry, and a magnetic pull neither of them fully understands.
That sentence is doing an enormous amount of structural labor. It is the premise, the arc, and the excuse, all at once.
The result, as I see it, is a series that is easy to admire and hard to be moved by. Williams and Storrie, to my eye, have the physical shorthand down. What they lack, in my view, is the middle — the unglamorous scenes where two people decide, again and again, to keep doing something difficult. Six episodes cannot hold eight years without those scenes, and I do not think Heated Rivalry finds them.
What the show does have:
- A premise with real tension between the public rivalry and the private relationship
- On-ice sequences shot at the Sleeman Centre in Guelph
- François Arnaud as Scott Hunter, the strongest supporting turn
- A Hamilton-as-Moscow production that is more convincing than it should be
- A second season already greenlit for April 2027, adapting The Long Game
What it does not have is a reason to care about the gap between those two men when the cameras are off. Denial is named in the synopsis. It is rarely dramatized.
What Crave Got Right, and What It Didn’t
The published score sits at 6.7 out of 10 — Metacritic 67 out of 100. That number feels honest. Heated Rivalry is a competent, well-mounted, genuinely ambitious Canadian series that, in my reading, mistook a long timeline for a deep one.
The ambition is not the problem. Adapting a multi-book romance into six episodes is a hard problem, and Crave and Tierney took it on rather than sanding it down. The production values, to my eye, are better than the genre usually gets. The casting works for me. The decision to shoot real ice at a real arena in Guelph is, I think, the kind of choice that separates a show that respects its subject from one that doesn’t.
The problem is that the show keeps telling us the pull is magnetic instead of showing us the magnet. By the time the eight years are up, we have watched a lot of hockey and very little of the thing the hockey is supposedly interrupting.
That matters more than the score suggests, in my view. A second season is already coming in April 2027, adapting The Long Game. If the show wants that season to land, I think it needs to slow down. Six episodes of real time beat eight years of summary every time.
This is the part worth watching: whether Tierney uses season two to actually live inside the relationship, or whether he skips ahead again.
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