Heated Rivalry is likely to return to television screens in the spring of 2027.
Show creator Jacob Tierney and executive producer Brendan Brady joined Gayle King on CBS Mornings Thursday, where the pair talked about the highly anticipated second season of the show. Tierney said they’re writing the second season now and are shooting in August. King revealed that the show is expected to return in April 2027.
“There will be more Heated Rivalry on your TVs, like, truly, as soon as humanly possible,” Tierney said. Brady added that “like the best parts of this show” that fans should “enjoy the yearn” of waiting for the show’s next season.
Tierney and Brady also spoke about making the show with Crave, the Canadian streamer that they’d worked with previously for shows like Letterkenny and Shoresy. “They trusted me, but they also trusted the material and the audience already loved this,” Tierney said. “What struck me was that there’s a lot of people who think that they’re smarter than the audience that loves the book, and I don’t think they are.”
The writer, director and producer also added that he felt Heated Rivalry was a “very faithful adaptation” of Rachel Reid’s source material. “This was a Canadian book. We’re Canadian producers,” Tierney told King earlier in the segment.
Tierney and Brady have long been advocating for taking the story and the fans of the story seriously. “This is what I told Rachel [Reid] — the thing I want to do with it is take it seriously, which is to say I don’t want to do what I think a lot of people do when they look at adapting romance, which is simplify, truncate, shorten,” Tierney told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the show’s premiere in November. Added Brady, “[We] wanted to elevate this to the level that it deserved.”
Heated Rivalry, hailing from Canadian streamer Crave and airing on HBO Max in the U.S., centers on a fictional hockey universe based on Reid’s books. The show focuses on two rival professional players — Canada-born Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) of the fictitious Montreal Metros and Russia-born Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) of the fictitious Boston Raiders — as they navigate a near-decade-long situationship-turned-relationship.
Crave renewed Heated Rivalry for a second season, and HBO Max confirmed it will continue to air the series. Reid announced earlier this year that she’ll be publishing her seventh book in the Game Changers series, which Heated Rivalry and its sequel The Long Game belong to. The book, Unrivaled, will be the next chapter in Shane and Ilya’s story. She announced Tuesday that she’d be pushing the book to a 2027 release date.
The show has made certifiable stars out of Williams and Storrie. The leading men have also seemingly snagged their first post-Heated Rivalry roles with Williams joining the Crave series Yaga and Storrie, who is hosting Saturday Night Live this week, eyeing a role in the A24 film Peaked.
