“You know me, Marge. I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my homosexuals FLAMING!”
-Homer Simpson, S8E15, “Homer’s Phobia”
When I first started this foray into gay television six months ago, I was a young man. I was in my “early-mid 20s.” Now I’m in my “mid-to-late 20s.” I am old. My knee hurts and I get a sporadic ringing in my right ear sometimes before everything goes silent for several minutes. I catch myself dozing off in my easy chair like an old dog, waking myself up from dreams where I chase rabbits across an endless plain, towards a perpetually setting sun. I pull my pants up higher and higher every day, and every minor annoyance makes me feel like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino – scowling, befuddled, and simmering with a barely contained rage at the Way Things Are.
I don’t understand what anything means anymore. Teens reference internet figures like Clavicular, and ChudTheBuilder, and some fellow named IShowSpeed, and I don’t know what they mean. Whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent type? All of this is to say – I’ve finished Heated Rivalry, and, Buddha-esque, it has led me down a twisting, gnarled path of self reflection. Instead of a bo tree, I sat on a free couch that my girlfriend’s cat used to sharpen his claws, and instead of enlightenment, I was left with more questions.
Whatever the opposite of a bodhisattva is, I have become that in the process of watching this strangely paced, weirdly written show that is tangentially about hockey but more directly about what it means to be a capital-M man in the End of History. Or maybe it’s not about that at all and the black mold infestation in my apartment has finally gotten to me.
I’ve also been watching Love Island at my girlfriend’s insistence and boy, the psychosexual acrobatics on display in that carnival of excess could fill a dissertation with room left over for a deep-dive column series. “Brief Interviews With Hideous Foids,” or something. I miss David Foster Wallace. Joke’s on her, though – I have four seasons of Eastbound and Down queued up once they finally figure out who’s found love and who gets the money. I’m still a little unclear as to how the whole thing works but one of the contestants is literally named Sincere, and one is a perpetually smiling cop from Pennsylvania who I just KNOW turns his bodycam off when the subject of the traffic stop is a hot girl.
But I digress. This show has eaten up six months of my life, and I’d like to get it done. I hear a new season is coming out, and Rachel Reid has to put a new wing on her Girl Library, but this is probably where Heated Rivalry and I part ways, so let’s go out with a bang. Literally.
We open on Scott Hunter giving a speech at the Major League Hockey awards, thanking his coach, his team, and of course, his smoothie hunk Kip, while decrying the perceived epidemic of homophobic locker room talk. And look, if me and my buddies want to quote the “Did you get that thang oiled down?” barbershop video to each other ad nauseam, who’s to say that that pushes the boundaries of political correctness or good taste? It’s a locker room. The cis hetero man must police his behavior to the sticking point, even in single gender confined spaces where the rules are looser and the talk flows freer. I don’t know – in all fairness, I was on the debate team in high school, which is a notoriously “anti-locker room” activity, and I refrain from talking or making eye contact with anyone at the gym nowadays because I’m justifiably ashamed of my own horrendous physique and would frankly like to exist as a poisonous cloud, or as Robocop. More on that later.
Ilya and Shane are heading north, or west, or whatever direction the famous cottage is. Boys’ trip! I laughed, imagining recutting this into a Van Wilder/Road Trip/National Lampoon style bro comedy where you never let on that the stars are gay until the last five minutes. I think it could be done. This is like the time me and my buddy went bear hunting in Kachemak Bay, but I imagine these fellows are on the hunt for a different kind of bear. Hello!
I have to say it – these apartments and cabins in the show all look alike. Gays in the Heated Rivalry universe seem to have a taste for exposed wood beams, brushed concrete floors, open floor plans, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a lot of natural light. The two make a vow to “just be honest” with each other for the duration of the trip. I don’t know how much more honest they could be about anything. If anything, they should be less honest. We should all know less about each other, is my belief.
Shane grills a bunch of dry-ass burgers, but at least he does it on a propane grill. Hank Hill would approve, and perhaps even be understanding of his lifestyle. Ilya is startled by the haunting call of a loon, and Shane reassures him that it is a bird. They have loons in Russia, I checked, but let’s concede the point for now. Ilya refers to it as a “stupid Canadian wolf bird” which is a phrase you may see bedecking the sweatshirt of your most HR adjacent female friend, or perhaps on a pair of socks selling for 37 dollars at your loudest local coffee shop that sells 13 dollar rainbow sugar cookies.
Ilya gets real about his mother’s death and then the two get freaky. These gays, I tell you man, I’m tired just watching. And it seems disrespectful to the point of a cabin – a cabin is for drinking whiskey and smoking a bad cigar and staring at a glacier or the beach or a mountain and being dimly aware that for the first time in months, you aren’t feeling anything at all. A cabin is to find tranquility, not to be turned into a damned sex hut. Go to a bungalow for that. Or a cabana. Get real.
The two later discuss their future, and try and figure out how to make their lifestyle work with the rest of their world, and later confess their real-life actual love for each other. It’s supposed to be a sweet moment, but it was lost on me. I think I’m allergic to intimacy. Not to steal from my close personal friend Nick Mullen, but he has a bit about wanting to be a sentient poisonous cloud of toxic gas, drifting through space, devoid of corporeal form. The thing I feel is similar. Where’s the romance TV show for that kind of brain disease?
Side note – every time Rozanov tries to be sweet and intimate, it sounds like when Jay and Silent Bob make their Russian metalhead friend sing his song in “Clerks.” Would you like some making fuck, BERSERKER. It’s off-putting.
But oh-oh – those floor-to-ceiling windows are about to get our boys in trouble! Mid shirtless makeout sesh, Hollander’s dad walks in and sees the two lads. They see him, and he takes off like Wile E. Coyote leaving a dust cloud in his wake. Shane panics and the two head over to Mom and Dad’s to come out properly. And the parents are totally fine with it, and even say they suspected Shane was probably batting for the same team a while ago. Which – not to generalize or downplay the plight of closeted members of the LGBT community, but Shane’s parents are wealthy Canadians from Montreal. Was there ever really a doubt that they wouldn’t support their gay son?
The show ends with Shane and Ilya driving off into the sunset to pick up dinner and beer for a parents’ dinner. That’s it. Roll credits. Maybe the real Heated Rivalry was the friends we made along the way.
I don’t know how to process this show. I don’t think I have any real take that I haven’t already articulated in this column series. It was not a show that was written with me as the target audience, and I would not have watched it were it not for Jeff throwing money my way. As a piece of romantic media, I’m sure it’s fine if you like that sort of thing. I happen to like Tierney’s other comedic work on the first couple seasons of Letterkenny, so it’s not like he’s a one trick pony, but Heated Rivalry did nothing for me. Maybe it did for you. Maybe you got to live through me, watching this show for the first time. Maybe if you hit the comments, I will email out the substance abuse version of my review of Episode 3, where I pretend to be in gambling rehab and my fake cousin in a frat writes the column. That one was sent back to the drawing board for being too weird, which is saying something.
For the Landmine, I have been your TV correspondent. Thanks for the memories.
Jacob Hersh was born and raised in Anchorage. He recently graduated with a law degree from the University of Idaho and is now studying for the bar. He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer.