As I settled home for the holiday season, becoming sedentary to a point of hibernation and logging more time on TikTok than ever before, I was shocked to see sports videos on my For You page. However, after further inquiry, it became clear that these were not merely hockey videos, but fan edits of Jacob Tierny’s latest TV Show Heated Rivalry. The show was originally supposed to only be available on the Canadian streaming company Crave, but after a trailer received lots of attention in America, HBO Max snatched it up. After the show’s release, Crave’s viewership was boosted by 400 per cent, and it was ranked as the top show on HBO Max, even receiving an IMDb perfect 10/10 (tying with Breaking Bad). Soon after video editors began working their magic and the show’s popularity on social media pummeled it further into the spotlight.
The show is an adaptation of the gay “smut” Young Adults novels by Rachel Reid called Game Changers.“Smut” is a colloquial term for young adult fiction including lots of sex, usually with highly predictable plots such as enemies-to-lovers or forced proximity. The genre’s main audience is Generation Z or millennial women, and is very popular on BookTok (with a trending hashtag where young women read and discuss smut novels exclusively). The novel that the show is based upon follows Russia’s Ilya Rozanov and Canada’s Shane Hollander over a period of several years, engaging in a clandestine affair while they duel on the hockey rink. Jacob Tierney’s TV show stars Hudson Williams as Hollander and Connor Storrie as Rozanov. Over six episodes, the two hockey players have a love-hate but sexual relationship, punctuated by another love story between hockey player Scott Hunter and Kip. Heated Rivalry is not the first low budget adaptation of these smut novels, but its predecessors are generally akin to soft-porn; journalist Madison Huizinga calls them “fast fashion for TV”.
During the Heated Rivalry press tour, Hudson Williams was asked about his familiarity with the books’ material before he got the part: “I wasn’t even very familiar with how these women-catered romance genres, how fucking vulgar they are. Not in a bad way, by any means, but they get into it. They get so nasty and so descriptive. It’s beautiful, I love it”. Jacob Tierny himself referred to the books as “porn”. These descriptions that outline the show as pornographic could lead viewers to believe that Williams and Tierney carry disdain for the genre, but no one could accuse them of that either. In fact, the two seem to admire the authenticity that the genre provides. The show is certainly pornographic in its material, including scenes of the hockey players engaging in sexual acts with one another complete with all the sensory elements described in the novels. Sanjana Baskin, in her essay “Heated Rivalry”, observes how this hyper-sensory display of sexual acts opened the show up to significant scrutiny, and how this scrutiny speaks to the “intense sexual conservatism of our time” as well as a lack of understanding of the genre. She evokes Steven Ruszczycky’s Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction, pointing to his articulation of the distinction between pornography and literature:
“where [literary writing] engaged the reader in the disinterested contemplation of beauty, [pornographic writing] turned one’s attention toward the self-interested pleasures of the flesh. Beyond benign mere description of particular textual properties, the distinction between literature and pornography also served the ideological ends of class differentiations…” .
Essentially, genre literature (in this case, pornographic novels), operate in the visceral, the literal, and often market themselves along class-defined lines. Pulp magazines for women, for the poor, for the overly sentimental and the under-read naivete. All this to say, when romance readers or romance show-watchers see their favourites being described as porn, they take offense to it. It is not a new phenomenon that pornographic material is deemed low brow.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence took decades to find a publisher due to its pornographic material. When, in 1960, Penguin Books published a series of Lawrence works on the 30th anniversary of his death, the Director of Public Prosecutions attacked the publication house, despite the US ban being lifted on Lawrence the previous year. Penguin might have escaped this attack if the books weren’t so cheap, since it was then made accessible to both women and the working class. When pornographic material is consumed by the lower classes, it becomes sordid and something that needs to be regulated or banned.
Heated Rivalry, however, seems to embrace the aspects that often define a genre as porn. The relationship between Hollander and Rozanov is primarily physical and the show’s resolution comes when the relationship becomes something besides physical. I appreciate Hudson Williams’ word choice above, “vulgar” and “ nasty”, because romance is both of those things. Hearing someone give someone a blowjob is both romantic and pornographic, and it doesn’t make the show any less or any more than what it is. Sex is vulgar, but what do we gain by deeming sex as not narratively compelling?
An annual study from University of California, Los Angeles found that Gen Z does not like seeing sex on its screens and while generally movies and TV include less sex, Gen Z has more and more complaints about their media being too raunchy and sexual. Baskin expertly examines how Gen Z viewers turning their noses up to sex on screen is indicative of something more sinister, saying, “the idea that the pleasures of the flesh are mutually exclusive from meaningful contemplation is the product of a world that wants badly for us to self-alienate”. The more time we spend online, where everything is an advertisement or AI or just devoid of anything real, the more we recede from depictions of the physical. Romance is physical, and receding from depictions of sex on the screen is representative of a dangerous culture shift towards conservatism and isolationism. Consuming smutty material then, in a way, is an essential reclamation of physical romance.
