Avid book readers should know that Tierney tried painstakingly to stay as true to the source material as possible. He notably chose to maintain Hollander’s ethnicity as a biracial Japanese-Canadian, which Hollander actually discusses with his movie-star girlfriend, Rose Landry (Sophie Nélisse), in episode 4.
“I felt like [his cultural identity] needed to be said out loud because his name is Shane Hollander, so you can whitewash him in your brain really easily when you’re reading a book or when you’re listening in a way that I don’t want to with this show,” explains Tierney. After all, hockey, he says, is a sport where it is still more common “to be Finnish than to be Asian.”
Tierney, however, still had to make little changes. Shane will not have a “f*ck apartment” in Montréal, because “we couldn’t afford that many locations.” And since he needed to rename all the hockey teams, including the Boston Bruins, for legal reasons, he decided against giving Rozanov a bear tattoo. (“God willing, if there’s a sequel, he’ll get the loon tattoo,” he promises.)
But all in all, Tierney hopes that fans will be “holistically” satisfied with his adaptation. “I think that fans of this genre don’t necessarily think they’re going to see [their favorite books] on TV. They might want to, but I don’t think they’re like, ‘Oh, obviously, I’m waiting for my gay hockey smut to end up on the TV.’ I’m so happy to be able to give them the thing that they never expected.”
Since the show was announced merely five months ago, the Heated Rivalry fandom has grown exponentially, with a vocal subset even actively campaigning for an international distribution deal. The trailer alone has already amassed a total of over 1.6 million views across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. “I think a lot of queer women, a lot of non-binary people, really feel seen by these people that kind of live in the grey, that live in this underrepresented middle ground that you don’t really see in society,” Storrie says.
