A Romance You Watch in Secret

The Russian-language reception of Crave’s ‘Heated Rivalry’ shows how tenderness, desire, and character complexity shape a phenomenon that transcends borders.

By Olga NechaevaMarch 14, 2026

• Television

• Cultural Studies

• Gender & Sexuality

IT IS HARD to finish Heated Rivalry (2025– ) and simply move on. It has been more than a month since the first season’s finale, but people cannot stop talking about Jacob Tierney’s series for Crave, which follows two hockey superstars—the Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and the Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams)—who are forced to keep their relationship private while their rivalry plays out in public. As one viewer, a 43-year-old woman, shared online: “I found out about this series on TikTok the day after the first two episodes came out, and since November 29 I haven’t had a moment’s peace. I’ve become obsessed. I rewatch every episode every day.” Another described the show’s aftertaste as something stranger than satisfaction: “After the finale, what’s left isn’t the euphoria you get from so many series. It’s the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.” A third viewer framed the show less as escapism than as something closer to solace: “Heated Rivalry arrived in the midst of a crisis of meaning and a global epidemic of trauma and loneliness, where the hunger for intimacy and the fear of it go hand in hand. For many viewers, the series had a therapeutic effect.”

If you came across these lines in the wild, you might assume they were pulled from an American or Canadian thread—they use the language of North American fandom. But these posts were written in Russian. They belong to the show’s audience in Russia— in a country where the state has made queer visibility legally and physically dangerous, Heated Rivalry has become an underground hit.

I watched Heated Rivalry in the United States the easy, official way, on HBO Max. Back home, in Russia, that wouldn’t have been an option. There, the show is effectively unavailable through legal channels. Most Western streaming platforms stopped operating in the country after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, leaving viewers to rely on unofficial routes. And yet the show’s Russian audience is unusually visible: on Kinopoisk, Russia’s largest film-and-TV database and ratings site, it sits at 8.3/10 with more than 60,000 ratings, a score in the same range as recent mainstream hits like Stranger Things (2016–25) and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026– ). It also shows up, as you might expect it to, at the top of piracy-demand charts tracking the Russian-language internet, where Heated Rivalry lags just behind Stranger Things. Rachel Reid’s Game Changers romance novels, on which the show is based, are just as hard to get legally, so fans hungry for what happens next turn to a gray market of amateur Russian translations sold online.

As a scholar of Russian culture and someone who grew up there, I keep wondering why Heated Rivalry hits with such force in Russia. One obvious place to start is with the simple pleasure of seeing a Russian character who isn’t written as a stock villain. Ilya Rozanov, the star forward for the Boston Raiders, is not the standard-issue “Russian” usually seen in North American film and television. He is not a mobster from The Sopranos (1999–2007), not a spy from the James Bond universe, not an evil Soviet military guy from season four of Stranger Things. He’s not even a spoiled oligarch’s son! However convincing Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) is as a character in Anora (2024), it is hard for Russian audiences to identify with him, because his wealth and privilege are far removed from most people’s lives.

Ilya is a different story. He feels like a real human being, one who embodies real contradictions: grief and bravado, anger and longing, strength and weakness. Yes, he is rich and famous, but success does not make his problems disappear. His family humiliates him. His queerness is something he has learned to manage rather than inhabit openly, and the show does not pretend Russia is a place where that management is optional. He is also a foreigner in North America, moving through a world that is culturally and linguistically alien. This sense of being out of place is painfully relatable for many Russian viewers, especially since 2022; they know firsthand the strain of self-censorship, the feeling that intimacy requires strategy.

It’s surprising how much of this recognition survives despite the obvious fact that Connor Storrie isn’t Russian. If anything, Heated Rivalry’s Russian-language reception often begins with amazement at the performance’s texture. One viewer wrote on Instagram: “I’m amazed at how naturally he pulls off the role of a Russian guy. It isn’t even about the language so much as the way he holds himself, the way he eats spaghetti, the way he sits in the car and looks at Shane in silence.” Another commenter made the point bluntly: “Perhaps no one has portrayed someone from Russia this convincingly in North American film and television.”

Still, the language does matter. Storrie had no background in Russian before the role, but he underwent intensive coaching in the weeks leading up to and during filming, meeting every day with dialect coach Kate Yablunovsky. Many Russian-speaking viewers nonetheless assumed he had studied Russian in school. Initially, some fans even thought that Storrie had Russian roots, and one described Ilya as feeling “like one of our own.” His pronunciation is far more convincing than “Hollywood Russian,” and that plausibility becomes part of the show’s emotional infrastructure. When a series asks you to take intimacy seriously, even small linguistic missteps can snap the spell. Here, the language mostly holds, and so do the emotional stakes. The viewer can focus on Ilya’s feelings.

It’s a testament to Storrie’s performance that some Russian-speaking viewers have gone so far as to recommend watching the show in the original, with Russian subtitles. Because English proficiency varies widely in Russia and imported film and TV are often consumed via dubbing or voice-over, this insistence is notable: on Threads and other social media, fans urged others to avoid the dub precisely so they could hear Storrie’s Russian. Otherwise, they warned, you “lose a lot.”

Not everyone experiences Ilya’s portrayal as uncomplicated. Some Ukrainian viewers, watching the show amid the ongoing war, object to any sympathetic Russian character on principle, arguing that it risks softening attitudes toward Russia and, by extension, toward Russian violence in Ukraine. At the same time, the show itself resists romanticizing Russia. It gives Ilya an unpleasant father and brother, and, most importantly, it frames Russia as a place where open queer life is not possible. For some ambivalent viewers, then, the series still attains a rough kind of balance: it does not excuse the state, but it refuses the idea that an individual must be morally contaminated by their country’s worst political actors. As one commenter put it on Reddit, “I don’t think it’s fair to paint all Russians as being bad and undeserving of having their stories told.”

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Yet Heated Rivalry does more than give Russian viewers a sympathetic, emotionally legible Russian character. It also does something Russian-language mainstream screen culture has struggled to achieve for decades: it keeps love and sex in the same narrative register, without turning sex into a joke, a moral warning, or something that must stay off-screen. In a queer romance, that choice becomes even more charged, given that Russian culture routinely treats same-sex desire as something that cannot be named, and certainly not shown directly.

This attitude is reflected in a long-running cultural joke. In the 1970s, Ardis Publishers, the Michigan-based press that became famous for publishing uncensored Russian literature in the West, coined a slogan that still circulates: “Russian literature is better than sex.” The line was meant as advertising, a way to sell 19th-century classics alongside 20th-century works suppressed in the Soviet Union. But it also hints at a second meaning: that Russian culture is more comfortable with lofty feeling than with embodied pleasure. It is not a sociological law, of course. Still, the phrase points to real sentiments as well as long-standing norms governing representation, censorship, and respectability that have shaped not just Russian literature but its media more broadly.

Russian-language culture can sustain grand declarations of love, but it often treats sex as awkward, displaced, or narratively suspect. Even canonical writers tend to encode sex through discomfort, euphemism, or stylized detour. In Anna Karenina (1878), Tolstoy does not narrate Anna and Vronsky’s first sexual experience; instead, he lingers on what follows it. There is no glow of fulfillment, only stunned shame and a shared sense of irreversible pain, as if something precious has been broken rather than consummated. Later, even Vladimir Nabokov—writing in English and far from Soviet censorship—often reaches for mock-heroic euphemism. Lolita’s (1955) phrase “the scepter of my passion” is famous in part because, however deliberately lofty Humbert Humbert’s diction, it is difficult to read without wincing.

It would be misleading to suggest that Russian culture has never spoken explicitly about sex. There have been moments when sex became a conspicuous, even urgent topic of public debate—most strikingly in the early 1920s, amid postrevolutionary experiments in gender emancipation associated with figures like Alexandra Kollontai, and again in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Still, according to dominant screen conventions, sex is often signaled through quick cuts or brief nudity rather than sustained erotic intimacy—a tendency that is particularly pronounced in today’s Russia, where sexuality is increasingly policed through the rhetoric of so-called “traditional values.” And when sex does become more explicit in contemporary Russian film and television, it is often used to signify characters’ cynicism or lust for power. In the series Gold Diggers (2019–23), for example, sex functions largely as a language of status and leverage, not as an act of tenderness and pleasure commensurate with love.

So far, most of the examples I have named concern heterosexual love and desire. When it comes to queer intimacy, there is simply less that Russian-language mainstream culture has been willing, or allowed, to show as love. There are important exceptions, but they tend to register either as scandal or as rarity. In Eduard Limonov’s novel It’s Me, Eddie (1979), for instance, same-sex sex appears in an explicit encounter with a homeless Black man, rendered in a blunt, obscenity-heavy register that seems designed to shock more than to sustain attachment. More recently, Pioneer Summer (2021) and its sequel Silence of the Swallow (2022) by Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova offered many readers something closer to a queer love plot that endures, only to become lightning rods in the post-2022 censorship regime that pushed the books out of circulation and, amid an “extremism” case tied to LGBTQ+ literature, resulted in the publisher’s closure and the detention of multiple publishing professionals. On-screen, the scarcity is even more noticeable: films like Sergey Taramaev and Lyubov Lvova’s Winter Journey (2013) are remembered because they center same-sex attraction as emotionally consequential, even when the story is harsh and violent rather than conventionally romantic.

In this context, Heated Rivalry feels disarming. It tells a story of queer love where erotic intimacy and emotional sincerity share the same register. That fusion becomes unmistakable for many Russophone viewers in the show’s fifth episode, when Ilya is spiraling after his father’s death and a bitter family conflict. He calls Shane but cannot get the words out in English. Shane offers him something unexpectedly intimate: “How about you tell me everything that’s on your mind, but in Russian. I won’t understand, but maybe it’ll help.” The offer is practical, but it is also a kind of care. Intimacy here is not comprehension. It is staying present.

Ilya’s monologue is long and messy. He moves from grievance to guilt to exhaustion, and then—almost as if he cannot stop himself—into confession: “Not the way I love you. That’s what’s so messed up. I only want you. I’ve only ever wanted you. I love you so much, and I don’t know what to do about it.” The point is not the poetry of the phrasing; it is the blunt coupling of want and love in the same breath. Desire does not interrupt tenderness—it carries it. And yet even in that moment, Ilya cannot imagine a future for what he is naming. He doesn’t “know what to do about it” because the world he lives in trains him to treat this kind of attachment as structurally impossible: he and Shane are rivals in public, lovers in private, with homophobia and public expectation always threatening to turn intimacy into catastrophe.

This is where genre matters. The season ends happily for now because the show is adapted from a series of romance novels, and romance is built on the promise that love will not be narratively punished. Seriality strengthens that promise. Reid returns to Ilya and Shane in later books, with another installment still to come, so their story reads less like a fragile reprieve than like something that continues. That may be one reason the show has felt unusually emotionally safe to some viewers. Not because nothing bad happens, and not because homophobia or family damage disappears, but because the relationship is treated as durable. Even if the world is harsh, the love plot asks the viewer to trust that tenderness can last. That kind of durability is not what Russian high culture is best known for. Yet Helen Stuhr-Rommereim suggests that this “modest fantasy,” too, has precedents in Russian literature, including Nikolai Pomialovsky’s little-known 1861 novel Molotov, a class-focused romance whose rare insistence on a livable happy ending performs a similar kind of consolation.

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But a story can console without persuading the viewer that its happiness is transferable to life outside fiction. This is the tension Mikhail Zygar points to: Heated Rivalry can function as an emotional counterpublic, a temporary world where queer intimacy is visible and not punished, but many gay Russians are so conditioned by repression that the finale’s happy ending feels impossible to believe. As one commenter put it, “So, guys, here’s a fictional series to help you dream a little, or stop yourself from dreaming too much.”

No wonder dreaming too much can feel risky. Even amid overwhelmingly positive ratings, the series has drawn its share of fury. The nationalist group Sorok Sorokov denounced it as “blatant propaganda,” railing at “sodomite sex scenes” and urging that it be banned—an absurd demand, given that the show is already effectively unavailable through official channels. The word “propaganda,” though, is not a throwaway insult in today’s Russia: it echoes the country’s expanding “LGBT propaganda” regime, under which even neutral or affirmative representation can carry real legal consequences. Still, that kind of outrage reads as a minority response. Most reactions are enthusiastic, and the show’s Russian reception is not confined to queer audiences. A large share of its most devoted viewers are straight women.

That fandom, too, has a longer history. Male-male romance on the page and screen has long been disproportionately written, read, and watched by women, even as queer-authored work across genders has come increasingly to dominate the landscape over the last decade. It is tempting to reduce the interest of straight women readers to voyeurism, but the better explanation may be sociological. For many women, male-male romance becomes a space where partnership can be imagined without the most familiar heterosexual scripts of inequality, and where tenderness is not automatically coded as weakness. One Russian viewer put it plainly in a review on Kinopoisk: “We’re just missing men like that—brave, strong, passionate, and at the same time caring and tender.”

That longing might be broadly recognizable, but it has taken on a sharper edge during wartime. Since the invasion, Russian public life has been saturated with militarized masculinity: endurance as virtue, emotional shutdown as discipline, aggression as inevitability. And when men return from the front line, that style does not always stay “over there.” For many women, it can arrive back home in the form of volatility, entitlement, and danger. Against that backdrop, Heated Rivalry offers a countermodel that can feel almost utopian in its simplicity. It gives viewers strength without brutality and vulnerability without humiliation, and it treats care as compatible with masculinity rather than as a betrayal of it.

I do not want to overstate what a TV romance can do. But when queer intimacy is routinely silenced, a story that gives equal voice to desire and sincerity can be quietly transformative. And when everyday life trains people to equate masculinity with aggression, a romance that imagines intimacy without menace can shift, even slightly, what viewers allow themselves to want.