The Narrative Genius of Heated Rivalry |
I don’t like hockey. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Pittsburgh Penguins were building their dynasty. It was arguably one of the greatest places and times to be alive as a hockey fan in the United States. The thing that hockey fans tell you if you tell them you don’t like hockey is that you can’t watch it on TV. The unique genius of the sport does not translate to the small screen. While basketball’s speed, muscle, and craft; football’s strategic gamesmanship and sudden violence; and baseball’s pastoral beauty are all apparent on television broadcasts, hockey looks like a bunch of faceless cubes gliding around chasing an object that’s only intermittently visible to the audience. For all that close-quarters slicing and grinding, you’d think they’d score more.
Hockey, its fans may tell you, is a sport you have to fall in love with live. Its physicality, its brutality, the virtuosity of its skaters, the precise and perilous movements of the sticks, the operatic anger, the balletic movement—these are all things that are visible only if you are in the audience, face pressed up against the glass. 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. It’s exhilarating; it’s just not great TV.
This November, though, a little Canadian series called Heated Rivalry figured out how to make hockey work on television. It’s not necessarily a strategy ESPN can replicate.
Based on the popular Game Changer novels by Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry is maybe the most sexually explicit romance adaptation on TV since Outlander. 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’s been working. Since its release in November, the show has become a huge word-of-mouth hit for HBO Max (which picked the show up from Canadian network Crave). While it isn’t ascending to Bluey levels of global streaming dominance, what’s unique about the show has been its growth. Between the week of its debut and the week of its season finale, on December 27, viewership grew tenfold—from 30 million to 324 million streaming minutes logged—with a growing and notable majority of viewers being women.
Heated Rivalry’s fans can’t stop posting about it on social media. It’s hard not to see why. The show feels unique.........