Critic-at-Large

Baby, What Was That? 

How Heated Rivalry helped us talk about sex 

Mild spoilers ahead. 

A number of major album releases last week—Mitski, Gorillaz, Bruno Mars, Bill Calahan, 2charm—but I’m putting them all on hold to cover Heated Rivalry this Sex Week, the softcore-porno-turned-character-drama that captivated the zeitgeist last December. There’s a lot to say about the show as a “phenomenon” generally: how it came together on a shoestring budget; was shot at speed over the span of thirty-six days; has launched the careers of its two impressive leads; and even how it’s reopened discussions about straight women’s engagement with gay male romances narratives. What I want to do here, though, is think about the show as a work of art: what it captures of us and why we were so captured by it. 

I think part of its success comes from how Heated Rivalry struck its audience in a way rather similar to how intense erotic desire itself does. Its first two episodes in particular run on a highly-sexed charge: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rosanov (Connor Storrie) meet first as up-and-coming teenage hockey players, and there’s immediately a spark. Ilya’s dark, brooding, sexed, and distant (Storrie’s botched Russian accent is weirdly convincing here) and Shane’s sheltered, shy, but at least—as he at one point confesses—owns a dildo. The phenoms are quickly drafted onto rival teams, but the hockey of it all sort of falls to the wayside. A few steamy scenes of on-again off-again hotel sex later, interspersed by title cards that travel us six years (!) in the characters’ lives and careers, and Heated Rivalry has arrived at its third episode largely devoid of characterisation beyond these initial cliches. Me and my flatmate got the slightly guilty feeling that what we were watching was just softcore porn. Favourite line so far? Shane’s accidentally hilarious “Why the fuck did you think it was okay to sext me before the game? What the fuck!” 

Until its finale, the show continues at this montage pace—and we the audience are caught up in the heat of it. Ilya treats Shane rather distantly; Shane longingly craves Ilya’s heart, not just his body. The fantasy of a sleazy, domineering guy like Ilya, though, is not that Shane literally wants to be objectified as a sex object. Rather it’s that, in Ilya’s incessant desire for sex, he removes the boundary of shame to help Shane access his own pleasure—all without the indignity of Shane having to ask for it himself. It’s telling that one of the sexual games the couple plays in Episode 2 has Shane “beg” precisely for the sex that Ilya’s dominance and forwardness had previously rendered a given: they break the rule to show us how it had been operating. 

“The heat of it” was the phrase I just used to describe the subject matter and narrative speed of these first two episodes—and who doesn’t feel like dating so often starts with the hookup or the dreaded “situationship” phase, knee-deep in the passenger seat, these days? We live in an age where sex is available and consumable on monetised dating apps, and frank discussions about sexual desires and experiences are no longer so taboo. In a similar way, Heated Rivalry answers all of its questions about sexual compatibility upfront: our boys gravitate to each other like magnets. What’s really risque in the context of such sexual frankness is romance. 

Something changes at Episode 4, in which Shane misreads what Ilya intends as a moment of intimacy. Feeling chastised by Ilya’s talk of sleeping with girls, and frightened at the prospect of glimpsing the Ilya he needs when he could so easily slip away, Shane calls things off. From this point on, I reckon, Heated Rivalry really becomes Shane’s show, as he slowly learns to lead with love and not fear; as he learns to speak clearly about what it is he needs from his partner. In this, it also becomes a genuinely impressive and convincing character drama. 

Isn’t this sort of like how desire works, too? We go along with our lives, our jobs and studies and hobbies, perhaps a random one night stand here and there, when suddenly someone special comes along. Things are turned upside down: the verb associated with this feeling is falling, after all. The hours we’re socialised to have sex in (late night, early morning) are notable in this because they threaten the supremacy of working hours. Running late to your 9 to 5 after a long night with bae? Must be love on the brain. 

What I’m trying to say is that, by its fourth episode, I’d fallen head over heels for Heated Rivalry. What began as a guilty indulgence, a summer fling, had evolved into something else—and the show only gets better from there. The extraordinary Episode 5 has had much written about it already, and it’s a highly accomplished piece of television for how it coordinates a number of narrative threads in an epic setpiece, among other reasons. But what really impresses is the quiet Episode 6: set on Shane’s home turf, at his holiday home, it's the only one of the season’s six episodes that doesn’t move at that aforementioned “montage pace”. We spend a slow few days with the couple, this slower sense of timing throwing those prior episodes into a kind of retrospect, as though the tumultuous beginnings of these characters’ relationship is being remembered by their current, older, wiser selves. 

If, in the early phases of their relationship, Ilya’s dominance released Shane from the shame of wanting sex, the latter half of the season sees Shane slowly wresting some of that control back from his partner, opening Ilya up to the possibilities of fidelity and romance. That this power play manifests in the normative dyads of top/bottom, dominant/submissive, foreign/local, et cetera, in the context of the show’s lead couple—Ilya/Shane—is so obvious it barely needs remarking. But part of what I love about Heated Rivalry is how straightforwardly it includes these discourses about sex: like any good piece of genre fiction, a lot of its would-be subtext is right in front of our eyes. 

It now seems almost like a dream that just a month or so ago this show consumed both my and my social circle’s thinking. My very astute friend Alex wondered if part of its appeal was that it allowed its viewers a chance to talk about their own relationships with pornography, sex, and desire by deferring them onto the show’s ostensibly “fictional” characters—and I think she’s absolutely right on that front. But a lot of media works that way, right? What’s special about Heated Rivalry is how its methods are mimetic of its subject: it struck its audience much like its titular rivalry struck its protagonists. Over six episodes, its initial raunchiness dissolves into romance, erotic intimacy, and subtle characterisation—that bait-and-switch is called love, and even its protagonists didn’t want to see it coming. What a massive show.