Pucker Up! Why We Love ‘Heated Rivalry’ and ‘Off Campus’

It might be summer now, but hockey romance shows have been heating up the ice on television screens for months. Heated Rivalry, a show about two elite male hockey players on opposing teams who fall in love, and Off Campus, which follows a group of college hockey players and their love stories, have been at the top of many people’s watchlists.

But these shows aren’t just fluffy romances. Heated Rivalry has opened up conversations about the lack of LGBTQ+ acceptance in the hockey world. Off Campus might center on a fake dating plotline between a university hockey captain and a music major, but it also follows the leads of the show coping with past trauma from sexual assault and domestic violence.

What is it about these shows that makes viewers love them? And how are they an entryway into talking about taboo topics in the sports world? Tufts Now spoke with admitted Heated Rivalry fan and Associate Professor of Sociology Jill Weinberg about the popularity of these shows.

Why do you think these shows are so popular right now?

As a sociologist who studied sports, sex, and a little bit of gender, I’m not surprised these shows would be popular. You have a really interesting tension. On the one hand, you have these hyper-masculine spaces that orient attention toward the body in the physical conditioning side of sports. At the same time, you have male characters who are willing to display emotional vulnerability and earnestness.

In Off Campus, the show’s central male character exhibits an emotional intelligence towards the female protagonist’s feelings. Similarly, with Heated Rivalry, people say “Why is it that so many heterosexual women are watching it?” And I think one reason is that it plays into emotional tension as well as these gendered expectations. Both of these shows were based on books written by female authors, so that is something really interesting to think about.

There is also this shared community aspect. Even if these shows may not be the top on your queue for HBO or Amazon Prime, you have a lot of friends who are watching, and there are a lot of shared social events, people dissecting the plot and the characters. Belonging to the conversation attracts people to watch so they can also comment on it or see what it’s all about.

In “Off Campus,” Hannah Wells makes a deal with college hockey captain Garrett Graham to be her fake boyfriend to make her crush jealous, in exchange for tutoring lessons. Photo: Liane Hentscher/Prime

Both shows deal with difficult topics like the struggles of being a gay athlete, sexual assault, and abuse. How do these shows serve as an entryway into talking about these taboo issues in the sport world?

Fiction lowers our defenses to these real topics that are very serious. Having sports as a vehicle of entry with likable characters, and dare I say, the steamy plot lines, allows a viewer to approach these more serious topics. When you have topics embedded in storylines and characters you come to love, you start to process these topics through a lens of empathy. If these were just romances between ordinary people, and viewers learned about issues of queer identity, domestic violence, and abuse through those relationships, the show would likely offer a heavier, and perhaps less palatable, viewing experience.

Do you think the popularity of these shows is unique to the hockey romance element, or could it extend to other sports? 

I kept thinking about the imagery of the hockey uniform while watching these series. The characters occupy high-stakes, intensely physical environments, and the layers of padding, helmets, and protective gear function as a kind of armor. The uniform becomes a useful metaphor for their emotional lives off the ice. On the rink, they are shielded from physical harm; off it, they often carry a different kind of armor, projecting toughness and emotional control to protect themselves from vulnerability. Much of the romantic tension in these stories comes from watching that armor gradually come off, allowing intimacy, care, and emotional openness to emerge.

I also wonder whether it would be believable to see the same types of storylines for American football or basketball. Hockey, although really popular in the Northeast, is still not one of the more dominant sports in the U.S., so having that distance from the sport may help viewers believe these things can happen. If we saw the same plot play out with the New England Patriots, we probably wouldn’t have the same reaction.

Do you think these shows will have an impact on sports culture?

In the short term, we have seen a lot of conversations. I even remember the NHL commissioner publicly praising Heated Rivalry, while one of its stars, Connor Storrie, hosted Saturday Night Live shortly thereafter. The cultural acceptance is there, right? These shows make audiences more sympathetic to these types of issues, and more attuned to the reality of queer identity, abuse, and sexual violence, problems that go far beyond a sports context.

But I’m still pretty cautious about what impact would look like with professional sports associations and leagues. 

I hate to say it has to be institutional or top-down, but we’ve seen it a little bit with the NFL, where they had clear policies about domestic abuse and violence, but it was used more as a punitive strategy than anything else. Nevertheless, it was something that people really wanted to see from the league—to hold players accountable for very visible acts of violence against women.

When it comes to the issues of queer acceptance, it’s important to note that there aren’t any openly gay athletes in the NHL, NBA, or NFL. Most of the athletes who have come out as gay have done it after retirement.

As a sociologist, I always say that sports is a microcosm of society, so it’s encouraging that we’re seeing more broadly conversations around these topics, even if with these more heated shows, pun intended.