Heated Rivalry and the Art of Anti-Dystopia

Joy in the present makes joy in the future seem plausible.

“Those who control the fantasy control the future.”

— Monika Bielskyte, Futurist

As I sit down to write this, the first episode of the show, Heated Rivalry has been out in North America and Australia for less than 2 months. The 6th and final episode has been out only 3 weeks. In that time the show has amassed over 600 million minutes of streaming on HBO alone, increasing, in a “highly unusual” growth curve, 10x since its debut. The show has just premiered in the UK 3 days ago, and it is already a pirated hit worldwide, including in Russia and China, where it is not only unavailable but, due to it’s LGBTQ subject matter, banned.

The stunning, astronomical rise of Heated Rivalry has found us all trying to answer the question Vanity Fair poses: “Why can’t we stop talking about Heated Rivalry”? Why has this seemingly niche show with a modest budget and virtually no promotion, produced for Canadian streaming service, Crave, with just 4 million subscribers, led by a cast of unknowns, about an autistic half-asian and a traumatized Russian involved in a secret love affair, based on a queer hockey romance book series, taken over the world? How did this happen? Who is this pair of neophytes no one had heard of a month prior, suddenly presenting at the Golden Globes? WTF is going on?

Sure, it’s a faithful adaptation of a best-selling book series with a fanbase already built in. Yes, it dutifully adheres to the conventions of the Romance genre, and romance will never let you down when it comes to a happy ending. It appeals to gay men and queer people for a myriad of reasons. It appeals to straight women, and women generally for a myriad of reasons. It even appeals to straight men (To paraphrase an Instagram reel that I saw floating by, “Hollander and Rozanov are your buddies. And you’re always happy for your buddies to get laid. And, if they’re getting laid with each other, great!”) Obviously, the chemistry between the actors is unrivaled, and the standom they’ve inspired is at a boy-band fever pitch. The film-craft is absolutely superb, sending the last two episodes of the first season to #12 and #13 on IMDB’s list of top TV episodes of all time (again, the show hasn’t been out 2 months). On and on and on. There are many reasons to be enamored with this piece of visual storytelling media.

So I would like to add one more reason to the mix.

It’s because Heated Rivalry is Anti-Dystopia art.

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The 21st century entertainment landscape is filled with dystopian fantasies that inure people to violence, brutality, and trauma. In the parlance of our time, any one of these can be appended with the postfix “-porn” to efficiently communicate the ubiquity and banality of these kinds of explicit visuals within the culture. Dystopian movies and TV shows have transcended mere entertainment and become cultural shorthand. We refer to real life events in the frame of reference of The Hunger Games or Squid Games or Mad Max or The Handmaid’s Tale. Reality has become Black Mirror. Dystopia’s vernacular of dehumanization, desensitization, and cruelty, especially towards women, seeps into everything. From comedy (the jarringly gratuitous gun violence ostensibly played for laughs in The Out-Laws), to fantasy (the pornographically lurid murder montage of one woman stabbing, choking, slicing the throat of another over and over in Wheel of Time)—

—to action (the glorified dissociation in Lioness), to drama (the grimy bleakness of Euphoria). Even superhero movies, which draw an obvious younger audience, expose viewers to hyper-real terrorism spectacles from the destruction of cities on par with 9/11 to the destruction of half of all life in the universe with the snap of a finger. Deeply disturbing and inhumane narratives and visuals in the guise of entertainment are constantly streaming into our eyeballs like we are all living in A Clockwork Orange. Dystopia as cultural shorthand strikes again.

Heated Rivalry might not be science fiction, but it, too, is a fantasy set in a speculative universe: in that universe, the captain of a major league hockey team publicly comes out, setting in motion a cascade of events that diverge from our current reality in which, out of thousands of players, there are currently zero openly gay or bi men actively competing in any of the major North American sports leagues.

As it ascends to the status of global phenomenon, creating an entire new cultural shorthand and lexicon along the way, Heated Rivalry offers a cinematic universe that references our own, but casts an alternate vision of a world that’s possible—a world of pleasure, mutuality, humannes, intimacy, creativity, and joy.

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Sex & Pleasure

In 2021, Raquel Benedict wrote in her essay, Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny:

When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?

But the scene that left perhaps the greatest impact on the minds of Nineties kids—and the scene that anticipated our current cinematic age the best—does not feature bugs or guns. It is, of course, the shower scene, in which our heroic servicemen and -women enjoy a communal grooming ritual.

On the surface, it is idyllic: racial harmony, gender equality, unity behind a common goal—and firm, perky asses and tits.

And then the characters speak. The topic of conversation? Military service, of course. One joined for the sake of her political career. Another joined in the hopes of receiving her breeding license. Another talks about how badly he wants to kill the enemy. No one looks at each other. No one flirts.

A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.

Counterpoint:

Shane Hollander checking out Ilya Rozanov in the shower, on Heated Rivalry Ep 1

As Jacob Tierney, Heated Rivalry’s visionary screenwriter, director, and showrunner, said in an interview on the Spare Parts podcast:

“Something that this [show] is I guess in conversation with is that I think that TV does not have a lot of sex right now and the sex that we do see all the time is rape. We see endless nonconsensual sex as a storyline, like ‘How does this crime begin?’ There’s so much sex you don’t want to see. And [Heated Rivalry] is like two people who want to be fucking.

Dystopia, which presents a violent and degraded world, has likewise turned sex, a fundamental aspect of humanness and aliveness, into a plot device for violence and degradation. Pleasure has become torture.

Is it any wonder a 2023 UCLA poll found that out of 1,500 respondents, ages 13 to 24, roughly half said sex isn’t needed in most shows and movies? That a 2024 survey of 2,000 Americans by market-research firm Talker Research found 43% of respondents think sex scenes don’t add to a story? That more than 40% of the Gen Z participants said they turn a movie off once a sex scene comes on?

The success of Heated Rivalry is an indication that many people actually do want to see sex scenes when they show sex we actually want to see: people genuinely having a mutually pleasurable experience.

As Evan Stern, host of the Spare Parts podcast commented in response to Tierney, characters experiencing pleasure together is pleasurable because “pleasure is nice.”

If that is a novel concept in 2026, taking women’s pleasure seriously is almost galaxy brain unthinkable. Heated Rivalry, the show, is of course based on the Game Changers romance book series written by Rachel Reid, a woman. The romance genre is almost singlehandedly keeping the publishing industry afloat thanks to its preponderance of female readers. Even more pointedly, the genre of gay romance stories and erotica written by and for women is a phenomenon currently receiving an extraordinary amount of attention on the heels of the show’s wild success.

As Julia Carrie Wong writes in the Guardian:

Straight women, queer women, cisgender women, trans women; young and old, single and coupled, Canadian, American and increasingly every other nationality – they’re all going feral for the love story between Shane and Ilya…. What does it say about gender relations in 2026 that so many women are fantasizing about gay smut? The fervent popularity of Heated Rivalry suggests that for many, the real romantasy is not sex and romance with dragons and fairies, but sex and romance without misogyny and gendered hierarchy. If the only way to get that in today’s media environment is through sex and romance without any women, they’ll take it.

When Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the leads of Heated Rivalry, were asked their thoughts on why M/M romance appeals to women in an interview for the audio erotica app, Quinn, for which the duo teamed up to voice Ember & Ice, a 3-part series about two, rival fae princes from dueling kingdoms (which dropped a few days after the Heated Rivalry finale aired in North America), Williams replied: “I heard someone online say, when you see a hetero couple you are forced to sort of relate to the woman character, and then that comes with a lot of restriction. And a lot of writers are writing very conventionally, outdated tropes, old archetypes. Getting to watch two men, they’re not forced into a box of ‘Here, this is your person to relate with.’”

Storrie offered, “There’s a certain amount of separation that allows for safety. Especially when it comes to sex.”

Even public policy experts on gender violence have weighed in. Katherine B., Director of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE), wrote on LinkedIn about Heated Rivalry and the Rejection of Romanticised Harm:

There is something quietly revealing about the cultural obsession with Heated Rivalry. On the surface, it is a romance. A rivalry. Two elite athletes locked in years of desire, denial, and obsession. But its popularity points to something deeper: the way audiences are renegotiating masculinity, danger, and safety in an era shaped by sustained conversations about violence, power, and control.

This isn’t a rejection of intensity. If anything, it is a demand for it. What is being refused is something else entirely: the expectation that intimacy must come with fear, vigilance, or asymmetry.

For decades, heterosexual romance has taught us to misread risk as chemistry. Jealousy is framed as protection. Persistence is framed as devotion. Power imbalances are sold as security. Emotional volatility is recoded as depth. These tropes are so familiar they barely register as narrative choices at all. They form the background noise of popular culture.

Yet those same tropes map uncomfortably well onto what policy now names as coercive control. Surveillance becomes “care.” Isolation becomes “us against the world.” Boundary violations become “grand gestures.” Economic dependence becomes “being looked after.” And crucially, the harm is rarely spectacular. It is patterned, cumulative, and often invisible to everyone except the person living inside it.

This is where fantasy becomes instructive.

What Heated Rivalry removes is not desire or dominance, but the structural conditions that allow domination to flow in one direction. The relationship is symmetrical. The characters are matched in strength, status, wealth, and credibility. No one is economically dependent. No one’s social standing collapses if they walk away. No one is managing another person’s emotions in order to stay safe. Conflict exists, but it does not metastasise into fear.

This is why the appeal of “safe fantasy” should not be dismissed as escapism. It is diagnostic.

Audiences are not asking for softer men. They are asking for masculinity whose intensity does not spill over into threat. For desire that does not require someone else to become smaller, quieter, or more careful. For relationships where no one is performing constant risk assessment.

Intimacy & Connection

Dystopia at its core is about cynicism. The cynicism of resignation to the future being inevitably more of the same, but worse. The cynicism of disappointment that things aren’t what we had expected to be entitled to. It doesn’t have to be science fiction to be a dystopia. So often, shows set in a world indistinguishable from our own are peopled with characters who are almost anaphylactically averse to experiencing or communicating genuine emotion. Where stories use sincerity as a punchline. Where even when characters perform intimacy—platonic or otherwise—they are choked in layers of irony, fear, self-loathing, and dissociation. Where we watch actors pantomime connection and experience nothing genuine transmuted through the screen. Where intimacy and emotional depth are merely script direction: [Vulnerability goes here.]

Its easy to understand the appeal. Cynicism is prophylactic. It allows us to walk through a deeply scarred, imperfect world without being swallowed up and destroyed by its horrors. It allows us to compartmentalize the news we see on our screens, sigh, and then go back to finishing the email due by the end of the business day. It deadens us and desensitizes us from feeling anything too much amid the tragedies. It allows us to reconcile the dissonance between the toxicity all around us, and our desperate yearning to breathe in something that doesn’t make us sick. Heated Rivalry is like a gust of fresh air that blew in from Canada.

“This isn’t a story about perfect communication or exemplary behaviour,” Katherine B writes. “The characters are guarded, emotionally avoidant, competitive, and often terrible at saying what they mean. They hurt each other. They make selfish choices. They sit in tension far longer than they should. None of that is smoothed over or excused.”

The narrative and emotional arc of the show’s first season is the journey of these two characters, two men, navigating emotional intimacy and the deepening, if fraught, connection they feel. “Sex is allowed to act as dialogue,” Adrian Horton writes in The Guardian, “A language unto itself between the characters for whom physical intimacy is their primary form of communication…. Everyone from hockey bro podcasters to queer men to especially women not only understand this language but are drawn to it.”

On a technical level, there is nothing particularly more graphic about the show’s sex scenes than the standard fare from HBO, the show’s American distributor. Unlike, say, Game of Thrones’ full-frontal nudity, there is nothing more explicit about Heated Rivalry’s than the actors’ derrières. Instead, what makes Heated Rivalry truly subversive is how the intimacy of physical connection is crafted. “How the characters’ relationship develops,” Faith Hill writes in the Atlantic, “touch by touch, over time.”

“Imagination comes alive through the body as an actor,” Chala Hunter, Heated Rivalry’s intimacy coordinator said on the Permission for Pleasure podcast. Hunter, whom Tierney credits as “the hero of this show,” draws on her background as a theater actor working in “embodied, highly physical shows involving dance and experimental movement.” She describes the process of orchestrating the show’s sex scenes like dance choreography—an art form that conveys emotionality through physicality.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hunter said:

“When I’m on set, I’m looking at the monitors, but I’m literally listening with my whole body—sensing what’s happening for them, getting a read on whether it’s telling the story right, keeping an eye on all the technical things simultaneously. I definitely brought that to my work, my [work] with Jacob and also to my collaboration with Hudson and Connor. Luckily, we all got along really well, so that was a very pleasurable kind of back-and-forth.”

“[The conversations] are very detailed. It requires a lot of listening on my part, not just active listening, but a kind of deep empathic listening. Sensing if someone is maybe not completely saying what they mean, and then I try to ask more questions to really flesh it out to make sure that if they’re consenting to something, they’re doing that confidently. Not because it feels coercive or because they feel pressured or because they feel like they’re supposed to say yes.”

In Heated Rivalry, viewers are offered depictions of physical intimacy they so eagerly do want to see because the process of creating them was itself the result of intimate connection: the deep conversations, negotiations, planning, and—equally importantly—creativity between cast and crew.

As Esther Perel says, “Sex isn’t something you do. It’s a place you go.” In a culture where porn is ubiquitous, depictions of graphic, explicit sex are abundant and low value. Its mere mechanistic frictions can only show us people doing something. Heated Rivalry transports us somewhere else. The show’s intimacy is not just in arousal, but in being known, in being understood, in being a part of a heightened, ecstatic experience beyond ourselves. Watching people start the series and go through the entire arc of emotions on the journey from the first couple of episodes until they arrive at The Cottage is like being on molly and watching it kick in for someone else.

Seeing pleasure that is deeply human, intrinsically entwined in “the dance of intimacy,” doesn’t makes us want to slam the lap top shut. It makes people want to watch and rewatch it, take the show to #1, launch its cast into superstardom, and tell others about it with the zeal of religious missionaries proselytizing the good word. In defiance of dystopian cynicism, it connects us.

Joy & Creativity

“What I wanted to put out into the world,” Tierney explained on What Chaos!, a podcast that is otherwise about hockey, “Was queer joy: The idea that we’re allowed to exist, we’re allowed to have sex, we’re allowed to be in love, we’re allowed to live. That’s the whole appeal. That’s why I made it.”

It worked.

This intent, to put joy and love out into the world transcended the camera lens not just into the hearts and minds of audiences but into the production itself. François Arnaud, who plays Scott Hunter, captain of the New York team in Heated Rivalry’s fictional major league hockey universe, called it “the least toxic set I’d ever worked on.”

“We really had a joyful experience as a production,” Chala Hunter told Vulture.

“One thing our camera team did,” cinematographer Ashley Iris Gill, posted on Threads “Was at the end of the week we had a little award ceremy and honored one person on the team with a little gold pin presented in a lit up ring case. Whoever stood out that week got it. Kinda like an employee of the week. By the end of the show every single person had got 1 and on our final day at the cottage the last pin went to our Cinematographer, Jackson Parrell.”

The reactions at the wrap of the last day of shooting at the cottage are telling for the tenderness and camaraderie between the cast and crew.

@popfaction

Pop Faction - Jasmine Anomnachi on Instagram: "Hudson Williams …

It is unsurprising that art explicitly intended to elicit joy was cultivated in a creative environment that could sustain it. After all, how much of people being thrilled to craft lush spectacles of dystopian cruelty and violence to put out into the world overlaps on the Venn diagram with people for whom creating dysfunctional, abusive work environments feels comforting and familiar? Probably not zero.

That Heated Rivalry was created outside of the Hollywood system is perhaps critical to its success in achieving what Tierney set out to create. This show, literally, couldn’t be made in Hollywood. According to Arnaud, it was originally supposed to be developed with a major American streamer where executives had such extensive notes that Tierney balked and took the show to Canada. Apparently one of the notes was no kissing until episode 5.

As my friend, Futurist in Residence at Nike, Monika Bielskyte, says, “Those who control the fantasy” — the narratives and media that people consume — “control the future.” But the fantasy controls those who control the fantasy, too. When The Economist analyzed the 250 highest-grossing U.S. movies since the start of the century, they found a 40% decline in sexually explicit content, even as violence, drug references, and profanity levels stayed the same. In Hollywood, the fantasy factory, what succeeds becomes a template for creating more of the same.

Ever since the empires of media moguls like Harvey Weinstein and P. Diddy imploded and the dark horror stories that made Hollywood an epicenter of #MeToo spilled out into the light, we have seen who the people who control the fantasy really are. How much of the sex we are exposed to is sex we don’t want to see because the so-called creative minds behind this content can’t envision getting off on anything else?

So much of the media Hollywood serves up is cynical dystopia because its creators are influenced by the cynicism of the world they themselves inhabit. It primes their perception and becomes reflected back to us through the lens of their own visions, melding the real and fictional. Art imitating life imitating art imitating life and on and on and on. That the American public lives in a county where one of the top news stories dominating the cultural conversation and social imagination for years has been the world’s most elite child sex trafficking ring doesn’t help. When Hollywood executives — who also exist in this culture — envision what shows or movies to greenlight, how would a vision depicting deeply intimate, mutually enjoyable pleasure, especially for women, even come to mind? Hollywood right now simply does not know how to not make everything a casual viewing dystopia.

Dystopia’s tropes have so pervaded our entertainment, they’ve trained us to expect them, to preemptively envision them in our own minds before we even see what transpires onscreen. Especially when it comes to portrayals of marginalized characters. This informs why so many people, gay, queer, and straight, have expressed that they expected something terrible to happen as they watched Heated Rivalry. Everything from the closeted lovers’ phones being hacked and their clandestine text messages discovered (doesn’t happen), to tragedy when Shane finally comes out to his parents (that doesn’t happen either), to a car crash in the very final moments of the season finale, as our heroes drive off into the sunset together and the credits roll (also, nope). We literally cannot imagine we’d be allowed to simply experience joy from entertainment media. We cannot stop ourselves anticipating the worst. And after everything we’ve seen, who could blame us.

Dystopia limits our imaginations, and also those of film and TV creators. It perpetuates itself, replicating more of the same, but worse. It presents a world beyond repair, and consequently, futile to be engaged with or salvaged. A world where creativity is pointless, pleasure is dissociation, and sincerity and tenderness an invitation for humiliation and pain.

When discussing culmination of episode 5 of Heated Rivalry, one of the most exquisite sequences in all of television, which begins with Scott Hunter kissing the man he loves on the ice after winning the Stanley Cup, thereby wordlessly coming out to the world on live TV, and climaxes with Ilya calling Shane to say the now iconic words, “I’m coming to the cottage,” Tierney has said: “This has to feel like an opera. This has to feel as big as it can possibly fucking feel. As much of my heart as I can put into anything. And as much of my skill as I’ve been able to put into anything in my career ... that was my years of doing this kind of adding up to be like, ‘I think I can make a moment feel like this.’ I really think I can, if I use all the stuff I’ve learned, all the experience I’ve had of what works and what comes together to do something.”

Dystopia may conceive of itself sometimes as satire (which doesn’t work because the targets of satirization don’t get it), or cautionary tale (which merely provides a product roadmap to build the torment nexus), but it is in fact, an intensely conservative, hypnotic tool. Every vision that has, for decades, depicted the future as a dissolute, perverted, joyless world fallen from grace has conditioned us to expect this inevitable, hopeless fate: more of the same, but worse.

The vision Heated Rivalry constructs is revolutionary. It shows us something we haven’t seen in this way before. It was a team effort to imagine this into the world. It took Rachel Reid to imagine it into her books. And it took Jacob Tierney to imagine it onto the screen. And the entire cast and crew devoted to creating an encounter with the depth of aliveness, pleasure, intimacy, creativity, and joy. What this vision offers is a “tonic.” A mass corrective experience. As Esther Perel says in her review of the show, “an antidote.”

All speculative fictions bleed into reality. As Bielskyte, who consulted for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and worked as a futurist with BBC, Universal, Dreamworks, and Ridley Scott Associates before founding Protopia Futures, says, “All change begins with imagination first. It’s not the tech gazilionaires that are the most influential future shapers. It’s those that give birth to visions that expand our horizons and open our curiosity. There is no normal to go back to. If we are to climb out of the pit we are being thrown into right now & to efficiently counter propositions of fear/hate, we will need to find a way to capture more effectively people’s imaginations with visions of (informed!) hope.”

“Fantasy,” as Katherine B. writes, “Is not a retreat from reality. It is a rehearsal for a different one.”

What kind of world has all the cynical dystopia content been giving us a rehearsal for?

Here it is. Check it out.

Heated Rivalry shows us that the most transportive, visionary, speculative future isn’t one that looks different from our reality. It’s one that feels different. It’s a difference that we as the audience can feel as if we’ve already lived in that world too.

When confronted with the unknown that looms ahead of him and Ilya at the end of the first season, all Shane Hollander can muster is, “We just want a future.” He speaks for all of us right now. Heated Rivalry has broken through the onslaught of pop culture visions that make dystopia’s cynical, joyless futures seem inexorable precisely because it is a piece of art that not only show us, but allows us to FEEL that another world is truly possible. That lets us somatically experience a future beyond what exists now, a future we all actually want. Joy in the present makes joy in the future seem plausible. And that, too, is hope.