Rivalry on the ice, hot passion off

My Sunday movie was the first three episodes of Heated Rivalry. This is a Canadian production and was such a hit there that HBO brought it to the States. That a gay love story is a big hit was a surprise to many. I heard about the show in LGBTQ news stories and I was surprised when a woman from my church praised how wonderful it is. The story is mostly about two hockey players. Ilya is from Russia and ended up on the professional Boston team (team names have been changed). Shane is from Canada and ended up on the Montreal team. They are on-ice rivals and both are strong contenders for Rookie of the Year. When Ilya noticed that Shane didn’t seem annoyed with Ilya’s flirting in the shower one invited the other to their hotel room for some intimate fun. They repeated this adventure whenever both were in the same town. They knew it had to stay a secret. Episode 3 shifts to Scott, an American player on the New York team, who falls for Kip, the guy who makes his smoothies. Scott is even more determined to keep their relationship a secret. He has more than teammates who would be harmed with his coming out. But the secrecy is wearing on Kip, who is out, especially after his smoothie shop colleague sees the relationship as obvious and he has to start lying to people. I’ll watch the last three episodes on Sunday. Then it’s a long wait until season 2 comes out about a year from now. What I saw so far is a good and enjoyable story, so that long of a wait will be hard. Season 1 is mostly based on the first two books of a seven book series by Rachel Reid. Shane and Ilya are from the second, sixth, and seventh books. Scott and Kip are from the first. So there are a lot more stories of other couples that could go into the series. For a story about hockey players there is actually not much hockey on the screen. There are key moments, to be sure, but just those. I was amused that for the nude scenes we frequently saw backsides, but legs were always positioned so we never see the front. IMDb, in its trivia section for the show, reported that Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya is from Texas. He had to learn to speak in a Russian accent, and for scenes filmed in Russia (where he goes for the off season and where his father berates him for losses) Storrie learned his Russian lines phonetically. He said them well enough that the Russian crew thought he knew the language and tried to talk to him. I started writing about another topic for this post but that’s taking too long to finish in one evening. I hope to post it tomorrow.