Why Heated Rivalry is the new Pride and Prejudice

I was trying to explain to my gay best friend why he needed to watch Heated Rivalry , the hit show about two ice hockey players who fall in lust and later in love, ‘ it’s got all the things you like.. really fit men with nothing on.. the bottom count per ep is stratospheric, but the great thing is that it isn’t porny at all , it’s romantic.” GBF was sceptical, but I know that it won’t be long before he too will be Team Ilya or Team Shane.. Every woman I know and all their gay friends are mad for the unlikely love story between Byronic Russian Ilya Rozanov and Canadian boy next door Shane Hollander. Indeed among the women of Los Angeles where I am currently staying, the question is not have you seen HR, but how many times? The record so far is three times, but it is early days.

Mostly I get bored by sex on screen – it never seems to serve the story. But in Heated Rivalry the sex, of which there is an eye rolling amount, manages to be awkward, lustful, comic and passionate in a way that feels as complicated as the real thing. It’s not porny – the only penis in the entire show is in a sext, it’s not even that erotic, but it is romantic and I think that is the reason for the show’s huge success. This isn’t Grindr type instant gratification, this is a slow burn with six packs. It’s modern in that the two leads hook up right away, but it is the growing emotional charge between the them that makes it so compelling.

In fact, spoiler alert, the trajectory of the first season is not so very different from a nineteenth century ‘marriage plot’. Ilya, the tough, supercilious Russian whose emotions are under permafrost has definite Darcy vibes, while Shane the sensitive, demure Canadian makes a good Elizabeth Bennett. Their attraction to each other is instant but there are many plot twists including a Wickham esque female starlet to confuse the path of true love. The cut and thrust of the Regency ball/ marriage market is replaced by the aggressive but graceful moves of the ice hockey games and the tribal conflicts between rival teams. Helmets take the place of bonnets, and luxury penthouse apartments or lakeside ‘cottages’ stand in for Pemberley. The series ends not with a bang but with the most charming coming out scene imaginable which in many ways serves the same purpose as the wedding in Pride and Prejudice. It is one of the most satisfying happy endings I have seen in a long time. Of course, thanks to the global success of the series there will be many more seasons to come, but these six episodes ( the same number coincidentally as the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice) have a perfect romantic arc.

What’s interesting to me is that despite the ubiquity of porn and the ease in which people can hook up, what they really want to watch is yearning. The ultimate turn on now is not flesh but feelings. It’s the emotional distance that the characters have to travel in shows like Heated Rivalry that make them so compulsive not the physical closeness. Although I have to say that the onscreen chemistry between the two actors onscreen is stratospheric. But the scene that has really stayed with me is not a steamy grappling in the shower, but the moment when Ilya, standing in a Moscow tunnel, confesses in Russian on the phone to an uncomprehending Shane back in Canada that he loves him. It’s up there with the moment where Darcy finally confesses to Lizzie how much he ardently admires her.

I don’t know how many straight men are watching Heated Rivalry, , but I think they should be encouraged to have a look. It’s a glorious antidote to all the toxic masculinity out there, and better still it is a worldwide hit that doesn’t include a single dead blonde.