heated rivalry, episodes 1-3

Heated Rivalry is a harlequin romance through and through. The premiere is very erotic, surprisingly funny, and endearing. It's impossibly sexy, so I will be continuing to watch, but it may not be much more than the material it's drawn from—which isn't a problem, but it's good to set your expectations going in. That is, Rozanov is a dominant top and Hollander is a submissive bottom: Will they break these roles? Who knows, and not that need to.

I was most impressed with how the show presents intimacy and eroticism between the characters. For some reason, it feels refreshing to see intimacy and sex between two men in this way. Part of this is that the audience is intended to gaze and gaze for awhile; another part, though, is the time and space given to a character's expression of pleasure (equally given to both roles!) and what the characters do to elicit that pleasure. The characters touch one another and the camera looks at the characters touching one another in a particular way. It is erotic, though not pornographic nor perfunctory.

I keep coming back to the fact that Heated Rivalry only has six episodes. I wonder if it'll be renewed. (I can't imagine there's not more source material in the book series.) Regardless, for the remaining three episodes, I wonder if we'll see more relationships; I wonder if Tierney is working with vignettes of gay relationships. Hollander and Rozanov are one kind of relationship, Scott and Kip another.

A lot of the reactions to episode three were to mark out how Scott and Kip's relationship is "better" than Hollander and Rozanov, how the series is "better" without the smut. I think that misses the point and someone's reaction to the episodes side by side is more telling about that person than the quality of the show. There's a better reading here, anyway, when thinking not quite comparatively, but what these kinds of relationships—aborted, single-sided, imperfect—reflect about the gay experience. Shouldn't we be talking about how relevant these relationships seem, even though the series is set a decade in the past?

Anyway, is a house boy so different from a regular hookup? Is Rozanov sending Hollander away at the ice skating performance so different than Scott running away from the gallery?