Heated Rivalry director Jacob Tierney: ‘Here’s what I can reassure everyone about season two’

Heated Rivalry director Jacob Tierney has assured fans that the second season of the hit ice hockey romance “will not change” its approach after the runaway success of the first series.

The Canadian show has become a phenomenon since its release by Crave in the US and Canada last year. It landed in the UK on HBO in January and has continued to grow its audience by over 100 per cent since the final episode aired in December.

Based on the Game Changers book series by Canadian author Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry follows rival players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two of the biggest stars in Major League Hockey.

What begins as a secret fling grows into a years-long affair as they struggle to navigate their true feelings for each other.

Along with the story itself, the show has generated huge interest over its soundtrack, which includes a much-discussed club scene that uses the 2002 hit “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u as well as a recent cover version by British producer Harrison.

A number of songs featured in the show, including two tracks by Canadian indie-pop artist Feist and “I’ll Believe in Anything” by the Montreal-formed band Wolf Parade, have since gone viral on TikTok.

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Appearing on the Good Vibrations podcast, Tierney responded to a question about online anxiety from fans, who have expressed concern that the show’s success might change the look, sound or feel of the show for the next season.

“Here’s the thing, I can reassure everyone – I really don’t have a lot more money for season two,” Tierney said. “It’s not gonna change philosophically – imagine it just opens with ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ [by The Rolling Stones] or some billion-dollar song… we will not be able to afford anything like that.”

More importantly, Tierney said, part of the fun in Heated Rivalry’s soundtrack was choosing songs that felt like discovery or re-discovery moments for the audience: “If a song comes with too much of its own collective memory, then it’s doing too much of the work, I think, and I still want the show to do the work and the song to accentuate it.”

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Tierney said he was enjoying getting back to writing for season two and revealed he’d started a “whole new playlist” that he was writing to.

In the same interview, Tierney spoke about the positive reaction to the sex scenes between Shane and Ilya in the show, and suggested it was partly due to a fatigue over the prolific depiction of sexual violence in film and TV over the past decade.

“That’s what we want less of – stop starting your story with the rape and murder of a young woman,” he said. “It’s endless, sexual violence [on TV] is endless.”

In Heated Rivalry, neither character is coming from a place of trauma – as has been the case in previous depictions of same-sex relationships onscreen – and sex is instead used by Shane and Ilya as a way of learning more about one another, and learning to communicate.

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“That’s how they know each other. They learn about each other through sex,” Tierney agreed. “That’s how they get to know each other, particularly in the first few years of their relationship. That was the idea, to make sure the sex was the storytelling, that was the character development, because that’s when they’re being honest..

“When they talk, they’re kind of blustering – there’s a lot of obfuscation and a lot of showmanship and nonsense… when they’re having sex they can be vulnerable, they can be kind of sweet… all the stuff you want to be when you’re being real with another person.”

The Heated Rivalry-themed episode of Good Vibrations will be released on Friday 13 February and also features a conversation with original score composer Peter Peter about how Tierney convinced him to make his first TV soundtrack, and the process of coming up with music for specific scenes.

You can find all episodes of Roisin O’Connor’s Good Vibrations here.