Will Heated Rivalry Season 2 Stay Faithful To The Books? The Show's Creator Weighed In

Hudson Williams looking into the camera while a mic is held up to his mouth in Heated Rivalry. — (Image credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max)

Like most people who watched Heated Rivalry with an HBO Max subscription and fell in love with Shane and Ilya, I was almost immediately head over heels for this hockey romance. So, without hesitation, I started reading the books this series is inspired by. Now, with Season 2 on the way, I’ve been wondering if it would remain as faithful to the source material as Season 1 did. Well, the show’s creator, director, writer and executive producer, Jacob Tierney, answered that question.

With Jacob Tierney hard at work writing Heated Rivalry Season 2 and reaffirming that they’re on track to start shooting this summer, Variety asked if the upcoming book-to-screen adaptation would be “faithful” to Rachel Reid's novels. In response, the writer/director/EP said:

I’m not going to bail on that now.

I know that I was shocked when I read Heated Rivalry and realized the show almost feels like it was copied and pasted right from the book. It is, and I do not say this lightly, an incredibly faithful adaptation.

Even with the inclusion of Scott and Kip’s story from the book Game Changer, Season 1 of Heated Rivalry adapts Rachel Reid’s first two novels with minimal changes and additions. Obviously, some differences always happen. However, overall, this program follows the same plot as the books that inspired it.

So, I was hoping that’d stay true going into Season 2, and it seems like it will.

We know that Season 2 will continue to focus on Shane and Ilya, meaning it will follow the events of The Long Game. It’s also highly likely that parts of Reid’s book Role Model will be incorporated, too. Much like the role Scott and Kip (who are the focus of the book Game Changer) play in Season 1, Troy and Harris (who are the focus of Role Model) are vital to The Long Game; in fact, the two books have an overlapping timeline.

So, I am fully expecting to see scenes from both books (including the spicy ones, this is a sexually explicit HBO show we’re talking about). And it seems like that’s Tierney’s intention, too.

Therefore, we should be able to expect a plot that sees Shane and Ilya pursuing the plan they set out for themselves at the end of Heated Rivalry. That way, they can be closer while they work out how to have their relationship while facing the pressure of being hockey stars. I am hopeful that we’ll get to see Troy and Harris’s romance play out, too, seeing as it is important to our lead characters, especially Ilya.

Now, we’ll just have to stay tuned to see if this happens. Based on Season 1 and Jacob Tierney’s comment, I’m feeling confident that it will. So, get excited, folks! The Long Game is coming, and it sounds like we can count on it being faithful to its source material, just like Heated Rivalry was.

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows Ted Lasso and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to Fire Country, and she's enjoyed every second of it.

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