Sex Sells: How NSFW gay hockey show Heated Rivalry became the Internet’s Obsession

Heated Rivalry blew up with its steamy sex scenes becoming a talking point, but the show proves that there’s much more to its queer, physical dialogue.

“Sex sells.” That’s the unofficial slogan of Heated Rivalry and the phrase engraved with ink on the legs of the show’s stars. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie’s matching tattoos couldn’t be more apt for their Crave show that has erupted, thanks to a feverish fandom online that has mounted along with every episode. But what has really led the charge, and got everyone talking, are the show’s sex scenes.

With numerous hot and heavy sex scenes per episode, Heated Rivalry certainly isn’t shy about exploring the sexuality of closeted ice hockey players. But the show arrives at a time when sex scenes are embroiled in a continued discourse about their necessity.

Thanks to the show’s unabashed sex scenes, Heated Rivals has resuscitated the debate around depictions of queer sex. To some degree, these conversations feel cyclical. Time and time again, we return to the discussion of how sex appears on our screens. In 2023, the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers reported that Gen Z’s young adults “want to see less romance and sex on screen”. Such an outlook implies sex scenes are unproductive to the narrative, pointless and gratuitous in their inclusion.

In Heated Rivalry, sex is a dialogue

Simultaneously, GLAAD’s 2025 ‘Where We Are on TV’ report outlines that queer characters are disappearing from TV. The report details that while there’s a slight increase in LGBTQ+ characters on our screens, 41% of those characters will not be returning due to show cancellations and endings. When laid out quantitatively, the data is worrying. Heated Rivalry arrives at an intersection, a queer drama proudly showcasing gay sex as part of its storytelling. Reports say one thing, but as hype continues to build and the show scores a second season, Heated Rivalry seems to be the breakthrough of this year.

Written and directed by Letterkenny’s Jacob Tierney, who also co-wrote Xavier Dolan’s The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, Heated Rivalry draws from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, charting endearing Canadian hockey rookie Shane Hollander (an understated Williams) and his Major League Hockey archrival, brooding Russian prodigy Ilya Rozanov (an alluring Storrie), as competitive ambition morphs into a heated situationship spanning their professional careers.

Between Olympic gold medal battles and Stanley Cup campaigns, Shane and Ilya fall into a clandestine enemies-with-benefits relationship where hotel rooms become secret sanctuaries for sexual indulgence that would shatter their careers if anyone found out. This secret ties them together before their naked bodies even touch. However, once they do, it’s an endless spiral of lust and soft sub-dom dynamics for the inexperienced Shane (the socks stay on!) and cocksure Ilya. Their ‘no strings attached’ flings mean nothing when they’re facing off on the ice. Until it does.

Sex scenes give way to something else

In Heated Rivalry, sex is a dialogue. The communication of the fastidious Canadian and the bisexual with an ice-cool exterior begins entirely through sexual desire. Tierney neatly frames handsome faces and chiselled bodies as the pair explore each other physically. Their toned silhouettes make them formidable in the rink, but also bring each other pleasure in the bedroom. What begins as transactional sex, a thrilling extraction of pleasure from sleeping with their greatest rival, develops into a mutual vocabulary of erotic understanding. Ilya and Shane are both high-performance athletes, taking turns to lift trophies and be crowned MVPs, but they still have desire raging through them that hockey cannot placate; it’s a craving for something they don’t have, can’t have: each other. Tierney isolates sex as the easiest, least (emotionally) painful manner in which they can experience such intimacy. 

From the outset, the show makes it no secret that the titillating scenes are integral to the plot. However, they are not gratuitous and there are no prosthetic penises. Instead, clever camerawork reveals just enough skin to imply the act while the camera tracks their reactions. Their foreplay is in face-offs on the ice, and props to the editors, Véronique Barbe and Arthur Tarnowski, who slice between hockey players battling up against the boards to intense sex scenes like it’s an art. This is what sets Tierney’s show apart: it’s smut, but it’s stylish, evocative, and interestingly shot, as moments slowly build from indulgence to romance.

Sex scenes are not a reason fans turn off

As the episodes tick by, sex scenes give way to something else, something entirely more dangerous than physical attraction: yearning. Longing between the two men has always been bubbling under the surface yet it seems bizarre to call Heated Rivalry a slow burn when its protagonists are having sex barely halfway into the first episode. But the term fits. Their relationship is laden with repressed desire that slowly blooms in dimly lit hotel rooms but is laid bare when they meet in Ilya’s home, in broad daylight, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows. Suddenly things between them look all too domestic as they have sex on Ilya’s sofa after sleeping together in his bed. 

It is thanks to the sex scenes, alongside the chemistry built between Williams and Storrie, that their intimacy becomes devastating as the physical becomes unavoidably emotional. Sex was once the way they’d communicate back and forth, but when they’re left actually to converse with words, everything slows down and Tierney’s show reaches its euphoric climax. 

Add this all together and Heated Rivalry is a case study that points out sex scenes are not a reason fans turn off. The show’s rising popularity may seem explosive, but still it’s far from the only explicit queer representation on screen – just recently there’s Interview With the Vampire, Fellow Travelers and the recent BDSM film Pillion. Heated Rivalry is not totally groundbreaking nor is the show particularly revolutionary in its framing of gay sex, but its unabashed attitude towards the inclusion of sex as intimacy and dialogue is standout in today’s landscape of sanitised TV. 

Heated Rivalry is streaming now on Crave in Canada and HBO in the US. The show has a UK release on Sky and streaming service NOW from 10 January.