DANIEL FIENBERG It’s time for another of our seasonal face-offs! This winter has given us the premiere of the Canadian hockey romance Heated Rivalry on HBO Max and the launch of the fifth season of the Canadian hockey romance Shoresy on Hulu. In between, we had action from the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, an odd rush of ice dancing programming on Netflix and more. Winter sports were big these past few months!
HBO didn’t appear to know what it had in Heated Rivalry, even though the source books by Rachel Reid came with a burgeoning fan base. The announcement of the Crave production’s HBO Max premiere came just nine days before airdate, and critics were only sent the first two episodes. That meant I reviewed it without knowing about Scott and Kip, the cottage and other highlights. Those two first episodes introduced the show’s unapologetically steamy sex, but the emotional sincerity of the love story took a little longer to reveal itself. Angie, was it a power play that HBO Max let this one develop as a word-of-mouth smash or was it just dumb puck … sorry … luck?
ANGIE HAN Can it be a bit of both? The rollout strategy suggests HBO Max was caught off guard by just how popular Heated Rivalry turned out to be — surely if they’d had an inkling, they’d have promoted the show and its stars a little bit harder — but in retrospect, I wonder if it worked in the show’s favor.
Through the (American) Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and into this year, I’ve watched the conversation evolve from, “There’s a gay hockey show?” to, “OMG, you have to watch the gay hockey show,” as friends turned each other on to this seemingly out-of-nowhere hit. The series’ initial obscurity meant fans came to it at different times, stretching the buzz way past what you’d expect from a slim six-episode run. Leads Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie went, seemingly overnight, from two dudes no one had heard of to the hottest young stars in the biz, in the sort of Cinderella story that tends to get fans personally invested in their ascents. (It also, unfortunately, seems to have sparked no small amount of parasocial toxicity, but that’s another conversation.)
People love to feel like they’ve discovered something new, especially at a time when networks can seem desperate to cram more of the same-old down our throats. More Stranger Things, several seasons after that saga ran out of creative juice? Obviously! More heavily hyped Ryan Murphy FX extravaganzas? Have two: The Beauty and Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette! More murder mysteries? More ’80s IP reboots? Peacock’s gone so far as to resurrect, for some reason, The ‘Burbs!
It’s not that those shows are bad. I’ve enjoyed many of them more than I expected to. Disney+’s Marvel spinoff Wonder Man and HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms made two giant, well-trodden franchises feel fresh again by finding the smaller, more intimate stories within them. The new Muppet Show special gave people what they wanted by just giving them the old Muppet Show back, after years of trying to reinvent the wheel.
But — to circle back to Heated Rivalry — it’s just more fun to tell your friends all about the gay hockey show no one saw coming. (Pun not intended.)
FIENBERG The toxicity within the Heated Rivalry fandom is connected to the discovery of the show. There’s no point, for example, in getting possessive about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms; it already belonged to everybody. But with Heated Rivalry, it felt like the people who had read the books got irritated with the people who discovered the show in its first weekend, and those people got annoyed at the people who only found it at the end of its run. And nearly everybody got annoyed with Saturday Night Live for making Heated Rivalry its entire personality, even bringing in Storrie as host in one of the fastest “unknown to SNL host” rises in memory. Gatekeeping is often the gateway to toxicity, and Heated Rivalry had multiple gates being vigilantly kept.
Fortunately, it doesn’t change the fact that at its best — Ilya’s Russian monologue to Shane and their shared shock at Scott’s championship “moment” made the fifth episode the peak — it was simply a very good show.
Heated Rivalry was easily the biggest wholly off-radar success (I wish the TV Academy could reconsider its rules so that Storrie and François Arnaud could at least be in the Emmy conversation). More frequently, though, my winter surprises have been confirmatory rather than revelatory. I’d already seen Mia McKenna-Bruce in the 2024 indie How to Have Sex, so Netflix’s serviceable whodunit Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials just reiterated that she’s a star worth following. I adored Derry Girls, so creator Lisa McGee’s latest Netflix offering, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, just proved that when her dialogue is in the hands of gifted actors — Roisin Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne all shine — she can do almost anything.
I’d put A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Wonder Man in a different sort of “pleasant surprise” category. It’s not like either show snuck up on anybody. Instead, both thrived by discarding all the fanciest trappings of their branded siblings. Knight was basically a two-hander, carried by the charm of Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell rather than dragons, exotic locations and epic mythology. Ditto Wonder Man, which worked because of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley, often forgetting entirely that it was a superhero show.
Oh, and I didn’t hate The Beauty! That was a surprise. It isn’t good, but it’s silly in better and more provocative ways than the other recent Ryan Murphy output. It’s a show that’s designed to be shocking and provocative for people who have never seen a film or TV show before, but … at least it had things on its mind.
HAN How to Get to Heaven From Belfast is enough like Derry Girls and the un-McGee-related Bad Sisters that I’ve been recommending it to people who like either, but it’s different enough that it doesn’t feel like a retread. Mysteries may be a dime a dozen on TV, but it’s rare to see one whose perspective and personality feel so fully formed from the jump or that flits between tones — it’s hilarious and tragic and dark and sweet — so nimbly.
I’ve also been suggesting people check out NBC’s The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins if they’ve enjoyed the Tina Fey-Robert Carlock constellation of sitcoms. It’s not the brightest star in that system, and the first episode is pretty rough. But it’s much improved by the second! Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe, playing a disgraced NFL player and the documentarian trying to film a project about him, are the buddy-comedy pairing you didn’t know you needed, and Erika Alexander, as Morgan’s ex-wife, is a delight as the requisite “most normal person who still isn’t all that normal” character.
Then there are returning shows. No one needs to be told at this point to watch HBO Max’s The Pitt, which is back for a second season that ought to please anyone who liked the first. But maybe they could use the reminder that HBO’s Industry remains perhaps the sharpest exploration of power, sex and money in recent memory — and that its latest outing might be its nastiest, most ambitious yet. Then there’s Peacock’s The Traitors, the fourth season of which has delivered what is sure to be one of the most satisfying scenes of TV in 2026: the banishment of Michael Rapaport.
FIENBERG You know what would have been even more satisfying than the banishment of Michael Rapaport on The Traitors? The absence of Michael Rapaport on The Traitors. Between the Rapaport of it all, the strange bullying of the socially awkward Ron Funches and a surplus of Housewives I don’t care about, this season has mostly had me looking forward to the upcoming all-normie season.
The Pitt deserves credit for meeting the hype that comes from Emmy domination and saying, “Yes, it’s possible to do this every year and deliver, just like TV shows used to!” I’ve thought this season has occasionally tried to do too much, hitting its topical targets — encroachment of AI in medicine, crippling health care costs, lingering effects of the Tree of Life tragedy in Pittsburgh — with the level of subtlety it reserves for its goriest surgeries. Man, though, I love this ensemble.
AMC’s Dark Winds, which just returned for its fourth season, offers still more proof that while brilliance is nice, reliability is underrated. Look at all the shows this winter that have either failed, or struggled, to live up to previously hyped chapters. Is anybody talking about the second season of Fallout or the fourth season of Bridgerton? Compared to the evidently successful tawdriness of His & Hers — a series that has split audiences between those who found the ending jaw-dropping and those who found it to be intelligence-insulting idiocy (I’m the latter) — the Bridgerton buzz has seemed muted, while Fallout‘s sophomore season mostly made me realize that the parts of the show I like (Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins, basically) are overshadowed by what bores me.
But I’ll close with positivity. In their respective third seasons, Apple’s Shrinking still makes me cry, and Adult Swim’s Primal still astonishes with its brutal animated audacity. I loved Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson in Peacock’s uneven Ponies, endorse Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti’s scenery-chewing in Paramount+’s uneven Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and thought Patrick Dempsey’s hair looked great in Fox’s Memory of a Killer. Angie, your final takeaways from the Winter of Shane and Ilya?
HAN I could rant about how Hollywood has underestimated romance lovers, hockey lovers, Canadians and Jacob Tierney at their own peril. Or how Heated Rivalry is proof of how essential a great sex scene can be. But if we’re talking the most surprising thing I learned this season? It’s that between Shane Hollander and Bridgerton‘s Benedict, no one seems to have any idea what the hell a “cottage” is.
This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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