It was so much easier when all anyone was talking about were the buns. Heated Rivalry, a sudsy gay phenomenon that’s finally arriving on UK shores this week on Sky, is officially a TV show about star-crossed hockey player lovers who yearn and pout their way through an illicit affair. But it’s primarily about buns – jarringly bountiful sportsman buns, displayed in homoerotic-turned-plainly-homosexual shower scenes, or under saucy hotel room mood lighting.
There was a point, in the crisp weeks before Christmas, where Heated Rivalry’s inherent silliness reigned supreme in the discourse that surrounded it. It felt appropriate: there is an undeniable novelty to an expensive and well-made series fuelled by endless rounds of gay sex and softcore nudity, and also one that is so deeply unserious. Heated Rivalry is adapted from a series of smutty romance novels by author Rachel Reid, and hurtles between one melodramatic set piece to the next, bearing all the hallmarks of sloppy, salacious, fanfic-y work forged in the fires of Twilight, Tumblr and that conspiracy about Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson having a secret baby together.
Over the past month, though, and as the show’s stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams have become ubiquitous pin-ups (they’re presenting at the Golden Globes this weekend), Heated Rivalry has become exhausting to talk about and think about, primarily because such a loud bulk of its fandom – an army of digital natives that seems to cross gender, age and sexuality – have come to treat the show as practically sacrosanct. Dissenting critics have been aggressively piled-on across social media, while screaming devotion to the show’s two stars seems poised on a cliff edge, as Storrie and Williams’s opinions, personal lives and digital footprints are inspected with a fine tooth comb for anything remotely spiky or clumsily worded.
It’s ruined Heated Rivalry, and the same fan instincts have ruined a lot of the television that dominates cultural discourse right now. The US launch of Heated Rivalry coincided with the slow unspooling of Stranger Things’s final season, and there were echoes of identical obsessive fandom there too. As Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven exploded and Noah Schnapp’s Will weepily came out of the closet, the inevitable disappointment many fans felt over the plotting of the show’s last run has given way to conspiracy theories and wildly outlandish allegations of behind-the-scenes impropriety.
On X and Reddit, two platforms awash in parasocial madness and paranoid group-think, the Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer have come under sustained attack. Infuriating claims have been made against the pair, often by young fans using very serious language to discuss the mundane, innocuous realities of making television: when Schnapp said in an interview that his character’s emotional coming-out scene took 12 hours to film, followed by another 12 hours of reshoots, some X users deemed this to be abusive, and proof that the Duffers were treating their actors poorly.
Similar language has invaded Heated Rivalry’s fandom, too. In December, the actor Jordan Firstman – a self-styled gay and horny provocateur currently starring in the Rachel Sennott comedy series I Love LA – innocuously declared in an interview that he found the sex depicted in Heated Rivalry to be unrealistic. Firstman was subsequently raked over the coals by the show’s fans and one of its supporting actors, François Arnaud, before he made a public apology. (Parroting fan complaints didn’t prevent the 40-year-old Arnaud, it should be said, from being called a “creep” for “dating” the 25-year-old Storrie a few days later, a romantic union entirely made up in the heads of fans.)
Elsewhere, the gay New York Magazine journalist Jason P Frank was aggressively trolled for thoughtfully and amusingly engaging with Arnaud’s criticisms of Firstman during an interview with the actor. (Blessedly, Frank ignored repeated calls to apologise.) And when another gay journalist, Salon’s Coleman Spilde, asked whether Heated Rivalry’s fandom was fetishising gay men while simultaneously piling on any gay man expressing negative or critical thoughts about the show, he himself became a social media punching bag for a time. (This pile-on was also dressed up in the language of social justice, with many of Spilde’s detractors taking issue with a line in the piece that stated that his use of the word “women” encompassed the show’s trans women fans, too, and that he had deliberately not used the word “female” – “female”, in the context of talking about trans identity, is sometimes viewed as a transphobic dog-whistle. Being the internet, this entirely innocuous and clearly well-intentioned linguistic decision was declared transphobic itself. Are you still with me?)
In the process, a fun TV soap has become defined by the more irrational elements of its fanbase, many of whom seem to only speak in the language of conflict. A bitchy aside is malicious. An interview is aggressive and unprofessional. A lengthy, thoughtful essay – with which you are more than welcome to agree with or disagree with – is hateful. The easy answer, of course, would be for all of us to log off and enjoy Heated Rivalry with a glass of wine and a step-by-step plan to start squatting a lot more once the end credits hit. But part of the fun of watching silly television is talking about it afterwards – it was worth sitting through the terrible Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That, or Kim Kardashian’s deranged legal drama All’s Fair, purely because the post-show Reddit discussions about them were so funny, along with the comment sections of episode recaps.
Attempting to talk about Heated Rivalry on the internet, though, has increasingly become a humourless drag, where any attempt at levity or actual criticism gets you tarred and feathered. The show’s stars will probably be next in line, too. Just this week, a private Letterboxd account reportedly owned by Hudson Williams to log and review films that he’s watched was leaked on X and Reddit, and many fans are already calling for his head. The reasons? He, um, didn’t like the movie Nope and liked Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, and has made critical remarks over Pedro Pascal and Rachel Zegler’s acting abilities. It’s actually quite a camp scandal, filled with the kind of juicy nothingness that goes down easily in the tedious first weeks of a new year. But something tells me Heated Rivalry’s fandom – armed as they are with pitchforks and finger-wagging – won’t quite appreciate it.
‘Heated Rivalry’ is on Sky and Now from 10 January
