Still swooning over Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov? Join the team. Queer hockey romance “Heated Rivalry” has won over arenas’ worth of fans since its November 2025 debut, thanks to its steamy (and surprisingly emotional) story of a secretive relationship between two rival professional hockey players, played by breakout stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.
(If you’ve missed the first six-episode season, you can catch up on Crave in its native Canada, HBO Max stateside and Sky in the U.K.)
‘Fellow Travelers’
If you liked following the years-spanning clandestine coupling between Shane and Ilya, you’ll no doubt enjoy “Fellow Travelers,” a historical romance-slash-political thriller chronicling the equally risky and randy decades-long relationship between Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), two political staffers who fall in love at the height of the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare.
Adapted from the 2007 Thomas Mallon novel of the same name, the Peabody Award-winning miniseries sees Hawk and Tim cross paths as they navigate protests, purges, plagues and more during one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history, from the Vietnam War of the 1960s to the AIDS crisis of the ’80s.
Watch “Fellow Travelers” on Paramount+ now
‘Boots’
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Though sadly recently canceled after its first season, “Boots” is still well worth a watch, earning an excellent 90% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its witty and irreverent story about Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer), a closeted and directionless gay teenager from Louisiana who blindly follows his best friend (Liam Oh) into enlisting in the United States Marine Corps.
Set in 1990, when the military still excluded queer people from service, the charming dramedy “explores masculinity and queerness to powerful effect,” per Tomatoes’ critical consensus, led by Heizer’s “terrific performance” as a recruit undergoing both brutal training under the command of a tough drill sergeant (Max Parker) as well as bullying and homophobia during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era.
Watch “Boots” on Netflix now
‘A League of Their Own’
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While “Heated Rivalry” brings queer romance to the ice, “A League of Their Own” takes it out to the ballgame. The Prime Video adaptation of the 1992 film of the same name (albeit with entirely new characters and storylines) is about the formation of a World War II-era women’s professional baseball team.
“Broad City” star Abbi Jacobson (a co-creator on the series, alongside Will Graham) plays Carson Shaw, a wannabe slugger trekking to Chicago to try out for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. There, she meets other women who also dream of playing pro baseball (played by D’Arcy Carden, Chanté Adams, Roberta Colindrez, Kelly McCormack and Kate Berlant, among others) and makes connections that open up her world, both athletically and, yes, romantically.
Watch “A League of Their Own” on Prime Video now
‘Young Royals’
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“Heated Rivalry” creator Jacob Tiernay has publicly said that he used “Young Royals” — a Netflix teen drama about a Swedish prince who develops a relationship with a male classmate at his prestigious boarding school — as inspiration to help his actors build their believable chemistry for the hockey romance series. And it’s clear why: The angsty emotions and hidden desires between Prince Wilhelm “Wille” of Sweden (Edvin Ryding) and scholarship student Simon Eriksson (Omar Rudberg) are rife with tension and tenderness.
Over three seasons and 18 episodes, the LGBTQ+ romance addresses everything from internalized homophobia and drug addiction to class tensions and constitutional monarchy, but it gets both its youthful authenticity and yearning heart from that central courtship between Wilhelm and Simon.
Watch “Young Royals” on Netflix now
‘Looking’
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Slightly older and less sporty than “Heated Rivalry’s” Shane and Ilya (well, unless you count cruising through the Castro as a sport) are the lead characters of HBO’s landmark queer dramedy “Looking” — it centers on the lives of Patrick (Jonathan Groff), Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Dom (Murray Bartlett), three thirtysomething gay friends living, working and falling in love in San Francisco.
Their world is far friendlier to queer folks than the hyper-masc, hockey-rink bubble of the “Heated Rivalry” boys, but the “Looking” fellas still have to contend with all the messy realities of dating — especially Patrick, who is stuck between his feelings for soulful barber Richie (Raúl Castillo) and his attractive boss Kevin (Russell Tovey).
With beautifully naturalistic direction by Andrew Haigh (“Weekend,” “All of Us Strangers”) and nuanced performances from its ensemble cast, “Looking” sends up one of TV’s most intimate and authentic depictions of modern-day queerness.
Watch “Looking” on HBO Max now
