Just How Big Is Heated Rivalry? Really Big

324 million HBO streaming minutes, by the time the season one finale aired in December

Heated Rivalry isn’t only making waves in Canada. More than 10.6 million people have streamed the show on HBO Max, its American distributor.

39 million streams of Wolf Parade’s “I’ll Believe in Anything” on Spotify

“I’ll Believe in Anything” soundtracks one of the show’s most pivotal romantic moments. Wolf Parade released this song in 2005, on their album Apologies to the Queen Mary. No other song on that album has cracked 8 million streams, and most have garnered between 1 and 3 million.

3.2 million people following Hudson Williams on Instagram

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney has just 1.9 million followers on the platform. Carney can’t keep up, but Williams’s co-star can. Connor Storrie, who plays Ilya Rozanov, also has 3.2 million followers.

332,000 current saves on Spotify’s official Heated Rivalry playlist

The playlist contains seventy-three songs and has a four-and-a-half-hour runtime.

61 days taken to “release the fleece”

In episode two, released on November 28, Shane Hollander attends the 2014 Olympics in a red-and-white Team Canada fleece. Two months, many enthusiastic online comments, and a change.org petition later, Canadian clothing manufacturer Province of Canada had just four words for the public: “We’re releasing the fleece.”

33 percent of Canadian viewers rewatching the average episode

Crave released a collection of rewatch statistics in January, showing us that viewers of Heated Rivalry just keep coming back for more—especially to episode five, which has been rewatched in Canada more than any other episode in the series.

21 named characters played by Canadian actors

A relatively low-budget queer hockey romance filmed across Southern Ontario and Quebec? It’s nothing if not Canadian. And it’s led by Canadian talent, offscreen and onscreen—with a few notable exceptions, like Texas-raised Connor Storrie.

6 books in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series so far

Books from the Game Changers series also occupy six out of ten spots on the Toronto Star list of bestselling Canadian fiction, making every single book in the series a bestseller. Following the success of the show, a seventh book is coming out this fall.

5 episodes Prime Minister Mark Carney said he has seen

At a media event in January, Carney celebrated the show as an example of Canadian soft power. He also referred to Hudson Williams, the actor who plays Shane Hollander, as his “new best friend.”

2 seasons of Heated Rivalry that have been confirmed so far

The first season adapts book one and book two of the series. Season two will adapt the sixth book in the series, which continues to follow Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s relationship.

0 NHL players who have ever come out as members of the LGBTQ+ community

Other professional leagues have been home to openly gay hockey players—such as the Ontario Hockey League (OHL), where Brock McGillis played, and the American Hockey League (AHL), where Luke Prokop plays (Prokop is under contract to the NHL but hasn’t played a game in the league yet). Not to mention the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), which currently has over thirty openly queer players. The NHL has some catching up to do.

Read more from our Heated Rivalry Series:

• Heated Rivalry Holds Up a Mirror to My Deepest Self • Heated Rivalry Is Millennial Optimism Porn • Heated Rivalry Proves Hockey Has Basically Always Been Gay • The Queer History Behind the Heated Rivalry Soundtrack • The US Is Trying to Annex the Ultra-Canadian Heated Rivalry

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