(There are spoilers below.)
I’m obviously not in the right circles (anymore?), because when a couple of months ago my friend J— asked me if I was watching Heated Rivalry, the thing that everyone was watching, I hadn’t heard of it, and since then I’ve had it mentioned to me independently only once.
Back then I read the plot and my main reason not to watch it was that it sounded like there was way too much hockey for my taste. I was assured that was not the case, and that hockey was just an excuse to allow dudes to both hate each other (the rivalry part) and also get to be very close to each other (the heated part). I’m a huge Ted Lasso fan, so obviously I can take some sport in my fiction—but I’m pretty sure that as little as I care about soccer I care about hockey even less.
A few days ago J— made her case again, so I gave in and shelled for a month of HBO Max. I’m writing about it here because it’s easier than via text. Disclaimers: I’m not going full-on academic because I don’t have the patience anymore, and the title of this post is largely just trying to be cheeky—no reason to read too much into it.
The little I’ve read about it after the fact can be summed up as:
- Critical acclaim for the story, the production, and the actors
- People (both fans and critics) raving about how revolutionary this series is for queer narratives on television
- Fans going all out to defend both the book series and the TV show against any form of negative comments
- Negative comments mostly being about unrealistic depictions of queer relationships and m/m sex, plus bad acting
I’m sure there’s more, but there are only so many mediums, substacks, and reddits I’m willing to read through, and I’m definitely not gonna link to them.
First: I have no expectations of anything like this being realistic. That’s what’s always ticked me off about criticism of both comedy (“People would never leave their doors unlocked in New York in the ’90s!”) and drama (“There’s a dude on the island that’s been alive for centuries?”), and I’m not going to do the same here. Also, this is not porn—not that I think porn is realistic—and I understand why depictions of sex might be sanitized in more ways than one. You’re writing something like this to hopefully appeal to a slightly broader audience than even the books do—perhaps even to the liberated straight dude who doesn’t get too squeaked out at the display of male skin—so you can’t really go into too much detail. Words used to describe acts don’t stray too far from what a more mainstream audience wouldn’t already know or say, and implied actions are left to the viewers’ own imagination or first-hand experience to decipher.
Second: I don’t think the acting is bad. If anything, I have to give (most of) the actors credit for working with writing that’s mostly not that good. While I don’t expect situations to be realistic, I would like for the human interaction to feel, well, human. The writing is not catastrophic—maybe the subject matter does its part, but the show does an okay job at keeping me watching despite the frequent eye rolls, and despite the fact that the first two episodes try their best to get me to give up.
I don’t get the raving reviews of the first two episodes. My friend had told me the prize is later on, so I stuck with them, but I found the temporal jumps an annoying crutch, perhaps a failed attempt to imitate Challengers. Not that I found Challengers particularly good in that sense either, but the problem with the first two episodes of Heated Rivalry is that the tension builds for a few seconds before a new jump, and is solved immediately as the characters end up in bed again in one of the many indistinguishable variations. I get it, episodes one and two need to cover a lot of ground. They need to establish this so-called rivalry more by repetition than through any substantial means. They need the viewers to truly get that the rivalry is created by external forces, and that the only reason why the two characters don’t just tell the world who they really are and how they really feel is also because of external forces.
But do I need two episodes of that? Do I need an episode of rivals who secretly fuck in North America and one episode of rivals who’d like to fuck, but they can’t because they’re in Russia? I could have done with a half hour between the two of them.
Then episode three comes, and it’s literally a different story. There may have been hints, and if you pay enough attention to François Arnaud’s Scott Hunter in the previous two episodes you either see it coming or hope it will. It was puzzling to me, since I haven’t read the books, but now I know that episode three is basically the first book in the series, which Heated Rivalry could simply ignore, except that ignoring it would leave it short on material and give it one less plot twist in episode five.
I enjoyed episode three. It’s duly corny at times, but the characters are better written, or I simply get them more. Then they disappear for almost two full episodes, only to have one single moment of glory again. This seems imbalanced and a glued-on afterthought, and I wish the entire season had been a parallel narrative between the two couples. You want to do a show about two books? Do a show about two books.
Once the characters are established, the writing improves a tiny bit, although not enough to be fully redeemable. The freakout, the beard, the reconciliation, it all flows by seemingly very smoothly, without real drama (Shane and Rose are going to be best friends forever!) or trauma (okay, Shane does end up in the hospital, but that’s also a bit of a gimmick). Yet at the same time it feels like it’s taking forever for things to happen. Episode four has three things to say, and it takes an hour to say them.
Episode five gives Ilya the prize for being the more developed of the two main characters, thanks to his messed-up family dynamics and yet another trip to Russia—this time for his father’s funeral—which serves as a catalyst for the relationship with Shane, because we all know what absence does. At the end of the episode, Scott Hunter’s “ridiculously public” (his words) coming out serves as a launch pad for the season finale, which is what would happen if Hallmark made softcore.
Episode six relies a lot on the expectations built on the previous one, but doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. Yes, Ilya and Shane have sex again, possibly multiple times (I forget, and I’m not gonna go check), but mostly they finally build other aspects of their relationship. It’s cute to see Ilya out of his element, between domestic banter and being scared of bird calls, but after forty minutes of long shots of the lake I start hoping they’ll put me out of my misery and drown in said lake or get eaten by a bear. Instead, they just get caught kissing by Shane’s dad, who just can’t seem to keep track of his phone charger. Isn’t there an Apple Store in the woods?
What follows is some of the most authentic writing in the entire show, particularly as Shane gets repeatedly grossed out at the word lovers, which makes me wonder if Tina Fey wrote that bit. Parents are puzzled, the line of TMI is fondled, apologies are made in a queer-appropriate direction—Shane has nothing to be sorry for—and schemes for the future are schemed. Sure, let’s establish a nonprofit to justify spending time together in public. Welcome to adulthood.
Ultimately, if I’m writing so many words about this instead of writing about Pluribus (boy, do I have things to say about Pluribus) it’s because I’m supposed to know enough about TV and perhaps even about queer stuff, so I must have an opinion. And my opinion is that I didn’t like it nor dislike it. It was funny more than fun, and while I get why it’s somewhat revolutionary I don’t think it’s enough of a quality product for search engines to be flooded by people who would die defending this text. At best, it’s fine. And in the words of Roy Kent, don’t you dare settle for fine. Not that it’s any of my business.