I Think ‘Heated Rivalry’ Deserves Emmy Recognition — Too Bad About This Catch
The breakout drama, streaming on HBO Max and Canada’s Crave, might be put in the penalty box for TV’s biggest awards
Happy Monday to all, and even if you’re still in the office today, rest easy knowing it’s at least a short week. Though the Prestige Junkie podcast will keep going throughout the holidays — don’t miss tomorrow’s episode with Renate Reinsve from Sentimental Value — this newsletter is taking a break until the new year. When I return, it’ll be with another great interview, and — believe it or not — the results of another awards show. (The Critics Choice Awards take place on Sunday, Jan. 4, get excited!)
I had different plans for today’s newsletter, but then I caught the latest episode of what, on my social media feed at least, has been the undeniable smash hit TV show of the fall: Heated Rivalry. The latest episode was so compelling it got me wondering if an Emmy campaign might realistically be in its future — until I ran into some weird, frankly confusing rules that might stop it all in its tracks.
Dropping the Puck
Though there’s good TV airing pretty much year-round these days, December is typically more of a time for cozy, low-lift entertainment — when Emily in Paris and The Great Christmas Light Fights of the world thrive in the background while people wrap presents. (Guilty.)
For a while, it seemed like Heated Rivalry was following in this noble tradition, albeit with enough NSFW scenes that you have to save the gift-wrapping until after the kids go to bed. Produced in Canada and then licensed in America by HBO Max, as my colleague Lesley Goldberg has been reporting, the adaptation of Rachel Reid’s smash hit romance novel has been a grassroots success, with leading hunks Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie mastering the viral videos and provocative photoshoots that every young rising star dreams of. Drawing in plenty of eyeballs with its promise of explicit sex and slow-burn romance, Heated Rivalry has picked up a fervent American fanbase and a lightning-quick promise of a season 2 renewal from Canadian producer Bell Media, which streams the show on Crave.
It was all fun, frothy and definitely sexy… and then with its fifth episode, which debuted last Thursday, it also got really good. As young, emotionally repressed hockey players on rival teams who surreptitiously hook up in hotel rooms but rarely call each other by their first names, Williams’ and Storrie’s roles in the first few episodes were primarily physical — sex scenes, sure, but also silent moments of looking at each other and saying very little of what they were feeling out loud.
That all shifts dramatically in the latest episode, “I’ll Believe In Anything,” which finds Storrie’s Ilya back home in Moscow, dealing with a family tragedy and leaning on Williams’ Shane emotionally for the first time. In an extended phone call scene, Ilya unloads his heart — but in Russian, so Shane can’t understand him. As an eternal fan of movies where characters are in love but can’t quite make it work, the sequence is an automatic entry into the pantheon — Shane listening and not understand but realizing the import of the moment, Ilya hesitating and swearing before finally saying out loud, “I’m so in love with you, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Don’t just believe me; the esteemed Richard Lawson called the episode’s final scene — in which the show’s two major romantic plotlines finally dovetail as Ilya and Shane watch from home while star player Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) helps his team win the title and then kisses his ex-boyfriend Kip (Robbie G.K.) right on the ice, a public show of love that spurs Ilya to take his relationship with Shane to another level — “among the most glorious episode endings of my life.” The memes, as you might imagine, are working overtime. And though I’d been hesitant to start ascribing Emmy hopes to Heated Rivalry — being a hit doesn’t make you an awards contender, ask Yellowstone — it was Storrie’s performance in particular in this episode that really got me wondering. If a 25-year-old Texan can pull off a scene like that in Russian, why wouldn’t you put him up against The Pitt’s Noah Wyle or Paradise’s Sterling K. Brown in the race for best actor in a drama series?
My friend Joanna Robinson of The Ringer, who discussed the show with Richard on a recent episode of the Prestige TV podcast, pointed out to me that other romantic phenomenons like Bridgerton and Nobody Wants This have parlayed cultural significance into Emmy success, and “it’s impossible to ignore the meteoric explosion of Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams who are both genuinely great in this show and have such a bright future ahead.” She also singled out showrunner Jacob Tierney, “who in writing and directing every episode is clearly the Mike White-esque architect of some storytelling that has as much a grip on audiences as any prestige TV has had this year.”
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But it turns out there might be something standing between Tierney and a Mike White-esque armful of Emmys, a hangup baked into the Emmy rules but borderline impossible for most viewers to understand — and that might end Heated Rivalry’s awards hopes before they can even begin.
Beyond Borders
This was all first pointed out to me on Bluesky by Myles McNutt, who responded to my post about pushing Storrie into the Emmy race with a real bucket of cold water: “No U.S. ownership, no Emmys.” He followed up with the Emmy rulebook, last updated for the 2024-2025 season, which makes it pretty clear: “Foreign television is ineligible unless it is the result of a co-production (both financially and creatively) between U.S. and foreign partners, which precedes the start of production.”
Myles is the reason I first heard of Heated Rivalry, in a piece he wrote for his newsletter Episodic Medium back in October, interviewing Tierney and producer Brendan Brady about their decision to make the show an exclusively Canadian production, and how they leveraged the enthusiasm of the book’s fans on social media to sell the show to international buyers (HBO Max eventually included). The short answer is that for the sexy, emotional show we love to exist, Hollywood co-producers had to be left out.
“If I’m being perfectly honest, it was a confluence of the right material, the right creator and the right executive at Crave. They just got it,” Tierney told Lesley. “I wanted to get them a script for people to see that we’re not cutting out the sex or whatever the other option is of turning it into something much closer to YA. Romance often drifted into YA or into sweetness or gentleness. That’s not what I wanted to do with this. I wanted to do premium drama. Once they were on board, they got it. And all the choices about the sex — what we shot, how much, what was going on — were all left up to me. They were so supportive. And this is a board of a bunch of executives who were straight women, queer women and gay men.”
What makes Heated Rivalry different, then, from Canadian Emmy-winners like Schitt’s Creek and Orphan Black is that American studios only got involved after the hockey romance was produced; HBO Max is strictly licensing the show in the United States, and currently doesn’t plan to be a co-producer on the second season either. That’s excellent news for fans who want Tierney to continue making the show exactly the way he wants. But that means, at least the way the rules are structured now, that Storrie, Tierney and the rest of the Heated Rivalry team will be sitting this Emmy season out.
Still, there are a few reasons to think this could change.
First, the Emmy rules for the 2025-2026 season have yet to be announced — the Television Academy tells me to look for them in early January. Though there’s no reason to assume they’ve tweaked this very nitty-gritty rule about co-productions, it’s always possible!
There’s also the utter uniqueness of Heated Rivalry’s release, which debuts simultaneously in the United States and Canada, making the viewing experience fundamentally the same across borders. That could provide room for HBO and Crave to petition the Television Academy to make Heated Rivalry an exception, though no such plans are yet in place based on my reporting. If the rules stay firm, Heated Rivalry will remain eligible for the International Emmys, whose submission deadline is Jan. 31. So by then, one way or another, we’ll know where Williams and Storrie will be competing.
To be clear: I’m not sure Heated Rivalry would be a slam-dunk Emmy contender even if it were eligible. If it competed in the Emmys as a drama, it would be up against The Pitt, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, House of the Dragon, Industry, Euphoria and The Gilded Age — and that’s just the competition from within HBO. It also famously took the Emmys ages to warm up to either Orphan Black or Schitt’s Creek. Though online enthusiasm can translate into Emmy wins a bit more often than it does at the Oscars, Emmy voters are still not usually the demographic served by TikTok memes.
But if the Emmys are ever going to adjust their rules to accept the reality of our borderless TV industry, Heated Rivalry might be the show that does it. As Myles tells me, “If the Emmys are a celebration of the American television industry, then the focus on co-productions is a logical technicality. However, if they are — as the TV Academy claims — a celebration of ‘excellence in national primetime programming,’ then we need to acknowledge how many foreign TV shows are accessible to viewers through streaming platforms.”
Myles continues, “While the borders still very much exist for the vast majority of global programming, their ability to break down like this showcases a disconnect between the rules and the reality of our experience of TV.”
In the meantime, the final episode of Heated Rivalry drops on HBO Max (for Americans, at least) just at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 26. Merry Christmas to all!
Episodes 5 and 6 rival some of the best love stories ever told!
Definitely raises a question of relevance if the Emmys as an institution isn’t prepared to begin honoring licensed global hits that US audiences are responding to