Last Tuesday, Francis Dominic, a 32-year-old content creator, watched his first live ice hockey game at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. He arrived dressed for the occasion, sporting not a jersey for his local team, the LA Kings, but a T-shirt featuring one of the stars of his favourite show, Heated Rivalry.
Based on a 2019 novel of the same name by Canadian author Rachel Reid, the new hit show follows a steamy will-they-won’t-they romance between rival ice hockey players.
The show first aired on streaming platform Crave on 28 November in Canada but it caused enough buzz that HBO Max picked it up for weekly episodes in the US and Australia before it was released. Although not yet available to stream in the UK, it is already trending on social media, and the book is at No 8 on Amazon’s list of bestselling fiction.
Dominic was also one of 200 fans who packed into West Hollywood Gym Bar, a popular gay sports spot, for a “watch party” of the series finale on Boxing Day.
Gym Bar’s co-owner, Erik Braverman, 55, who is also a senior marketing executive for the LA Dodgers baseball team, has been putting on the parties ever since episode three was released.
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Their popularity reminds him of the early 2000s viewing culture that grew up around the acclaimed British series Queer as Folk. “It’s just that kind of queer joy that people need to experience and see, and they’re hungry for it,” he said.
Perhaps unusually for such an explicit television show – episode one features a nearly 10-minute-long oral sex scene – Heated Rivalry has also proved a hit with critics. The fifth episode of the series briefly tied with Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias” episode as IMDb’s highest-rated television episode of all time.
Although in recent years “romantasy” (romance fantasy) has taken the crown as the most popular form of “adult” fiction, hockey romances such as Heated Rivalry come a close second.
The somewhat niche genre has become increasingly popular on social media and internet forums, and authors such as Reid (whose real name is Rachelle Goguen) have been catapulted to the top of bestseller lists.
When Jacob Tierney, a writer and director, contacted Reid on Instagram in 2023 to see if she would be open to him adapting the series for screen, she had just received a diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease.
“I laughed, because things like this aren’t supposed to happen to authors of sexually explicit, queer romance novels about hockey players”, Reid wrote in a blog post earlier this year.
As with “romantasy”, heterosexual women appear to be the main target audience for the hockey romance market. According to 2024 figures, “romantasy” book buyers are most likely to be women under 35. In the UK, romance book sales grew to £69m in 2024, nearly three times the pre-pandemic level.
Heated Rivalry has already been picked up for a second season and will be streamed in the UK on Sky and Now TV from 10 January.
Photograph by Sphere Abacus, Crave via AP