Heated Rivalry Is Chess

Once upon a time, before streaming services, HBO was the sophisticated cable channel, the one where characters said “fuck” and got naked because it was cinema at home, a Home Box Office, if you will. But if its digital successor HBO Max has any coherent brand in December 2025, it might as well be Home Jack Off-ice, now that Heated Rivalry is the number-one show on the platform. The series is an import from Canadian streamer Crave, and its close-but-not-quite-American nature might explain its uncanny deviations from most TV: unabashedly horny, with far less regard for logical timelines or pacing or dialogue or plot. The show follows two young “MLH” (fictional NHL) hockey players, staid if awkward Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), and passionate, magnetic Russki Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). The sex scenes are long and steamy, and the hockey scenes pretty much don’t exist, although locker-room scenes very much do. It is wonderful. Heated Rivalry may not be like anything else on television right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not like anything else in gay entertainment at large right now. Because Heated Rivalry is pretty much Chess. 

Yes, the hockey smut show is a perfect companion piece to the 1986 musical with tunes by the men of ABBA and often incomprehensible lyrics by Tim Rice, a revival of which is currently running on Broadway. Chess the musical is about chess the sport to the degree that Heated Rivalry is about hockey — basically not at all. Chess uses the game, and its ancient and recognizable motifs, as an ever-shifting metaphor for the tricky intricacies of love, the fragility of masculinity, and, naturally, the Cold War. In its hockey-induced-concussion spin on the format, Heated Rivalry doesn’t exactly use its sport as a proxy for war, but it certainly does use it as a proxy for even more sex than the characters are already having, and both shows frame their respective testosterone and ego-fueled rivalries as a battle of East versus West. These leading characters are men, paired off, bearing the weight of entire nations and also being bad at relationships. (For what it’s worth, the social media team for Chess on Broadway is milking the comparisons, too.)

Chess is focused on a rivalry on and off the board between two sexy top-ranked chess players: golden-boy American Freddie Trumper and moody Russian Anatoly Sergievsky. Heated Rivalry’s Ilya has a lot of both Chess characters in him, possibly because of how much charisma Connor Storrie brings to the role; he has Freddie’s hot-headedness and swagger, but Ilya is ultimately the Anatoly because he is the Russian, and his stakes will always be the highest. Instead of the totalitarian U.S.S.R. Anatoly defects from in Chess, Ilya faces a still-oppressive regime in Russia due to the criminalization of homosexuality. When he loses Rookie of the Year to Shane he fears repercussions at home, for the money he’ll lose and the shame he’ll bring to his father. In episode two, which is set in part at the Sochi Olympics, we see that Ilya’s father is some sort of government or police figure adorned in military medals. He hammers home how much his personal success is tied to his country’s sense of dominance and glory, and how his failures suggest a looming threat of punishment and government overreach beyond what North American Shane Hollander could ever dream of. Ilya’s father says things like, “They teach you no discipline in the American league,” which sounds a lot like how the coach talks in Chess. Like Anatoly, Ilya even has a lover from back home named Svetlana.

Both Heated Rivalry and Chess focus on how these men live their lives in the eyes of the media. Shane, being the Canadian stand-in for capitalist American Freddie, seems far more interested than his rival in the celebrity aspect of being a top player in their sport. In western fashion, he reaps the material rewards of fame, with his brand deals, celebrity girlfriend, and frankly very ’80s-inspired personal stylist. Shane, like Freddie, often doubles as a media personality, a talking head on sports news, the face of Montreal. On Heated Rivalry, we hear commentators describe the characters as “the two most talked-about prospects in the world” and Shane says things like “Hockey is a complicated and nuanced game”; both of these quotes sound like clunky Tim Rice lyrics. And both shows are heavy on time-jumps and globe-trotting, as we catch up with characters many years apart in different cities around the world.

The primary obstacle in my perfect one-to-one comparison of the Europop musical to the Canadian softcore sensation is Florence, the Chess character currently played on Broadway by Lea Michele. Florence is a chess strategist born in Hungary and raised in America who is romantically torn between Freddie and Anatoly. Over the course of the show her affections shift from one man to the other as she tries not to end up another piece in their countries’ larger Cold War games. There is no Florence on Heated Rivalry. There is no in-between character into which the men must siphon their libidinous feud; they cut out the middlewoman and sleep with each other. They also cut out the musical numbers and actually show sex. Much in the way that chess and hockey are proxies for international relations and fucking, maybe Florence was the proxy for Freddie and Anatoly, the Tashi Duncan to their clearly hot-for-each-other Art and Patrick. If Heated Rivalry does have a Florence, she’s you, the girl reading this, or the guy watching and posting about the show. The fans are the Lea Micheles of the story, watching the game unfold for their own pleasure. Now, how soon is too soon for a musical episode?