Why everyone’s talking about Heated Rivalry, gay erotica on ice

Readers of a delicate disposition, look away now. I bring you news of a new Canadian erotic drama, Heated Rivalry (Sky Atlantic/Now), that’s been attracting huge viewing figures – especially among women – and causing a notable stir in its home country, the US and Australia. Created by Jacob Tierney, and based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, it’s the tale of a steamy secret tryst between young gay male ice hockey opponents.

It is also sexually explicit – daringly so for a mainstream series. The first episode has barely begun before the hockey hotties – Canadian Shane Hollander, played by Hudson Williams, and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) – stop squaring up on the ice rink and start eyeing each other up in the shower. Cue, handjobs, blow jobs, anal sex, mutual masturbation and incessant sexting and sex talk. “Did you enjoy sucking my cock?” demands the fiery and imperious Ilya.

Indeed, there’s no mistaking Heated Rivalry for the chaster, more yearning form of gay TV romance – Heartstopper on ice, it isn’t! – though this gay erotica is not as graphic as it could have been. While there are lots of glistening torsos and thrusting buttocks, there are no penises, even flaccid ones – they’re obscured by prudent camera angles or carefully raised thighs.

Over the course of six episodes, the story whizzes through the years and across global locations (the US, Canada, Moscow), following the couple’s fictional teams – the Montreal Metros and the Boston Raiders – competing in various tournaments. There’s barely any sport, however, unless you count sexual encounters in swanky hotel rooms and sumptuous apartments, arranged by the young men using female aliases (“Jane” and “Lily”) on mobile phones.

The series has sparked several debates: should gay male sex be used as a dramatic device to titillate heterosexual mainstream viewers? What are those huge numbers of female viewers enjoying quite so much? Low-stakes (for them) porn? A weird sense of kinship with the male leads?

Viewed simply as a drama, Heated Rivalry has a big problem: when the bonking stops, the story struggles and the dialogue perceptibly flags. Storrie does a decent job of fleshing out the bisexual Ilya and his fraught circumstances in Russia, while Williams has to work with a calmer – and blander – backstory. The banter between them (“You shouldn’t be smoking”, “You shouldn’t be talking”), presumably intended to show their growing emotional bond, feels half-hearted. The show is strongest when dealing with topical issues: homophobia in sport and elsewhere; fear of discovery and the threat of losing sponsorships, or worse; the courage it takes to come out; cultural differences; the support of family and friends. It also works as a phenomenon to be interrogated: is it just a piece of cheap titillation – sex with a side order of emotional intimacy – or does it say more?

On Disney+, it’s the second six-part series of A Thousand Blows, Steven Knight’s raw 19th-century tale of bareknuckle boxing and bold female criminality, partly drawn from real social history. Stephen Graham returns as Sugar Goodson, the once fearsome but now reduced fighter, who is seen being rescued drunk from the gutter by Jamaican fellow boxer Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby from Small Axe) in the opening moments. “I’d rather die on the cobbles than be indebted to you,” he says. Erin Doherty (who co-starred in Adolescence with Graham) reprises her role as Mary Carr, the resourceful, hardnosed “queen” of the all-female crime syndicate the Forty Elephants, dealing in everything from pickpocketing gangs to audacious art robberies.

As was evident with Knight’s masterwork Peaky Blinders – the film version of which is due in March – he’s the kind of dramatist gifted at building whole worlds in which characters can live and breathe. A Thousand Blows delivers on the desperation, violence, filth and stink of working-class life in 1880s London, while the sprawling cast churns with talent (James Nelson-Joyce, Darci Shaw, Daniel Mays).

Considering the series started out billed as a kind of Victorian-era Raging Bull, with Sugar its East End Jake LaMotta, there seems to be fewer big showcase fights this series. Initially a threatening physical presence – prowling the ring like a dangerous dog – Sugar barely puts his dukes up this time round. Elsewhere, a distracting subplot involving Hezekiah coaching a regal personage in fisticuffs takes up too much space. Nevertheless, the period drama seethes with incident and colour, alliances, betrayals, deaths, grief, revenge – the whole shebang. It hasn’t lost, as it were, its punch.

Although His & Hers sounds like a set of fluffy bath towels, it’s actually a new Netflix psychological thriller set in Atlanta, Georgia, and adapted from the 2020 Alice Feeney novel of the same name. A woman’s body is found lying on a car bonnet in isolated woodland, having been stabbed more than 40 times. Jon Bernthal (The Bear, We Own This City) plays Jack Harper, the cop sent to investigate the brutal murder, while his estranged wife, Anna (Tessa Thompson), still recovering from a deep trauma, is reporting on the story for the local TV network. Other bodies turn up, each murdered in an appallingly showy way and bearing the killer’s hallmarks. Who is guilty and why are others hiding crucial evidence?

Bernthal is a charismatic, assertive actor – a jangle of nerve endings – and together with the elegantly intense Thompson, he carries a story that keeps threatening to collapse into parody. Running over six episodes, His & Hers doesn’t quite nail its prestige southern gothic brief, à la 2018’s peerless Sharp Objects. As well as its god-awful title, the show is lumbered with a murmuring voiceover and increasingly overwrought flashbacks. It is a lacklustre study of race and class, while in-house conflict at Anna’s TV station makes it feel like The Morning Show with blood spatters. On the plus side, just as you think you’ve worked out the twist, another rises out of the Atlanta soil. Implausible but moreish.

Photographs by Sabrina Lantos/Robert Viglasky © 2023 Disney