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Audie Cornish

00:00:00

I knew heated rivalry was a thing, but it wasn't until I saw Bravo's Andy Cohen, Late Night's Stephen Colbert, and our own Anderson Cooper live on TV making jokes about it.

'Andy Cohen - CNN New Year’s Eve Live 2026 clip

00:00:10

It's true.

'Stephen Colbert - CNN New Year’s Eve Live 2026 clip

00:00:12

But I'm a bossy bottom.

'Anderson Coooper - CNN New Year’s Eve Live 2026 clip

00:00:20

Has Heated Rivalry made everybody insane?

Audie Cornish

00:00:25

'So Heated Rivalry is the little gay hockey-sput romance that could, chugging its way to the top of the ratings, propelled basically by straight women who know the books they're based on, and gay men shocked by a show willing to depict not just queer sex, but love and intimacy on mainstream TV, which is just what creator Jacob Tierney intended.

Jacob Tierney clip

00:00:47

I think as queer people, we don't get, I don't think we get a lot of happy endings to our stories. And I don't think we a lot healthy sex in our stories between consenting people. I think there's a lot trauma, which is real, but I think it's also nice to see the other side of that coin where this is just unashamed, unabashed happiness and horniness.

Audie Cornish

00:01:11

And if you have no idea idea, what I am talking about. This is the assignment episode for you. I'm bringing on TV writer Ira Madison III. He actually wrote a piece for Them magazine called Our Men So Back? Notes on Masculinity's Return to Gay TV. Stay with us.

Audie Cornish

00:01:33

First, the basics, this is not an episode for kids, and this is your last warning. Second, it's spoiler free. And third, here's the plot. Yeah, I watched it for the plot, I mean, after the first three episodes I did anyway, I think. So it's a TV adaptation of a romance novel by Rachel Reid about closeted professional hockey players, Shane and Ilya, played by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.

Heated Rivalry trailer clip

00:02:00

And the two most talked about prospects in the world. Canada's Shane Hollander. Shane Hollander, I wanted to introduce myself. Okay. And Russia's Ilya Rozenov. You're an awesome player to watch. Yes.

Audie Cornish

00:02:13

And if you don't know these guys, you will because they're about to be everywhere. So I wanted to talk to Ira Madison about the how and the why of all this. Ira Madison III, welcome to The Assignment.

Ira Madison III

00:02:27

Thank you for having me.

Audie Cornish

00:02:28

So it sort of is a show that demands a response.

Ira Madison III

00:02:33

Yes.

Audie Cornish

00:02:35

And I wanted to start with that. Let's just start with the premise, closeted, gay hockey players who have a fiery, sexual love affair over the course of what? 10, 15 years. And that's what the books are about, series, and that's the show is about. But why do you think people respond to it?

Ira Madison III

00:02:59

What's so interesting about this show is that obviously people are responding to it because the men in it are hot, you know, Connor and Hudson are gorgeous. Um François and Robbie who play um Scott and Kip in the secondary storyline are gorgeous.

Audie Cornish

00:03:17

You're referring to by their first names as though you are friends. You do not know these people. Which is an important point, it's an important point here.

Ira Madison III

00:03:28

I do know François, personally, so...

Audie Cornish

00:03:30

What I got to rewrite the intro!That's the only thing I care about now.

Ira Madison III

00:03:37

They are gorgeous, you know? And I think Hudson Williams came in and was like, he's excited for season two because they didn't have time. It's such a small budget and it happened so quickly, right? That they jumped right into filming. And he was like I wish I had had time to work on my glutes a bit more and get my ass up in these, this shower in the sex scene, right, because from the jump. I feel like from the first episode, people were talking about, look at Connor's ass. So it's, they're hot. The story is sexy. It's a fun romance. And also it was inspiring things like that. You know, I feel, like my Instagram feed immediately jumped to fitness influencers showing how, what you need to be doing in the gym so you can work your butt out, you know? And I think that it's woken up. So many aspects of culture that I really haven't seen something like this in a minute, particularly since culture is so fragmented.

Audie Cornish

00:04:46

Yes, and I think you pointed out in your writing that it is, one of its episodes is like the second highest of all time, like...

Ira Madison III

00:04:53

On IMDB, the highest rated, like after the Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad, which is legendary here, you know, and even shows that were big like that. I compare the show to Sex in the City, a bit just in the fantasy of it. But also Rachel Reid, a bisexual woman who wrote the original Game Changers series that this is based on and being adapted by Jacob Tierney, a gay man. Reminds me a bit of, you know, Darren Starr and Michael Patrick King adapting Sex in the City and you know writing these women characters, you know it's sort of creating this fantasy world that people really want to be a part of and you see how much Sex in The City has permeated culture even to this day but it's reminding me a bit of now Mad Men didn't get the ratings that this show got which is actually a surprise to most people. Mad Men was actually not a high rated show, but it permeated culture, right? In the sense that Banana Republic had Mad Men clothing, like people were talking about Mad Men style in the workplace, you know, and people were discussing the episodes online. And I think it's been really a minute since we've had a television show where we can discuss it. In different avenues of culture, fitness, sex, women's interests, gay men's interests etc. Even the bigger shows like A Succession, or maybe Game of Thrones a bit, even those can only go so far within the culture.

Audie Cornish

00:06:34

'You know why? Because those shows are about power. And these shows that we like, and by we I'll say women and LGBT, are about feeling powerless. Like if you know what it's like to live with limitation, to me that was one of the things that I've been mulling over, which is this world of women who write gay romance and the world of woman who read it and like what it is that we're all responding to. Other than physiques okay and my number one theory is uh we know how to live in a world in which you are in a cage or limited in one way or another and number two intimacy which television movies they do very very very poorly authenticity is hard but intimacy is even harder and by the end of these episodes of this show what you are seeing is sex that is intimate enough that you look away because you feel like this is a moment I shouldn't see. Not because it's gay men, but because you're like, oh my gosh, this is like a real moment some people are having. And I realized I hadn't felt that since Spike Jonze, the movie Her, where there's a sex scene between the main character and his AI chatbot, and it's done completely in the dark. You're just listening to it. And I was in the theater like. I don't- I shouldn't be here!

Ira Madison III

00:08:00

I completely agree. I mean, for one, think about where we are in culture now. I mean I think, first of all, there's that, is having a boyfriend embarrassing article, right? That went viral this year. And it is the fact that trying to date, as a millennial, what I am, you know, Gen Z trying to date, it's like, oh, people older trying to date, it is a mess. You know, the acts are awful. You're constantly talking about how. Dates are bad, interactions are bad and intimacy is something that we don't even have in our own lives. There was obviously the little controversy that came out when Jordan Firstman from I Love LA just sort of said that this doesn't resemble real gay sex in a way and I found that that was actually so telling just from the perspective of what we expect as gay men. You know, you expect like this hookup that you have with this person. Maybe you'll never hear from them again, or maybe you'll run into them in your tight queer circles and, you know, maybe you will say hello or hi. And I feel like this show responds to loneliness that people are feeling right now.

Audie Cornish

00:09:12

'I'm so glad you're saying this I was thinking of like The Hunting Wives which is also glossy and fun and which also has same-sex sex and it is a completely different feeling like everything about it is so surface so performative so being a joke that it's just like only fans you know what I mean it doesn't just not for anything except...

Ira Madison III

00:09:34

'It doesn't commit to the romance. It wants to be desperate house-wise and it's just desperate.

Audie Cornish

00:09:40

'One of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this, well, there's many reasons, but what is I, you know, last year when Jonathan Bailey, who's the actor in Wicked, he was in Bridgerton, he got the Sexiest Man Alive cover for people. And he had said in an interview that as an actor, he was activated by Brokeback Mountain. So this movie comes out in 2005, he's a young man in college and he is like, I need to learn more about queer cinema and he like gets into this whole world. But it made me think of the fact that when that movie was being made, there was a lot made of the fact of the A-list actors who had turned it down for a variety of reasons. The names that came up are rumored at the time. Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, who allegedly thought it was too graphic in its depictions of sex. And it was a big deal. It was brave for these two straight actors to portray a pretty staid love affair between stiff cowboys, stiff upper-lipped. Sorry, this is the kind of episode where everything is going to be inappropriate. But it was. Everything about it was sort of prestige and glossy. And this is just like, people call it just hockey smut. You know, like, even,Jacob Tierney is like, yeah, like this is just a sexy, fun thing. But are we in a better position in the culture to embrace what it's doing and the people who are in it and the actors themselves? Like, I for once felt a distance between Brokeback Mountain and now.

Ira Madison III

00:11:28

Yes. I mean, first of all, Brokeback Mountain woke it up for so many gay men of a certain age. You know, I think, like, the final essay in my book is about Brokeback Mountain.

Audie Cornish

00:11:40

Oh, really? Why did you let me lecture you on Brokeback Mountain Ira Madison the third?

Ira Madison III

00:11:45

You were cooking.

Audie Cornish

00:11:45

You should have been like, shut up, Google me.

Ira Madison III

00:11:46

'You were cooking, you were cooking but Brokeback Mountain there's there's also the shame that's in it though too you know and it's glossy and it's prestige but it's also it's sad to watch you know it's a romantic tragedy you know. And this is not it it follows the tropes of like wrote male-male romance novels, like it has the halfly ever after or happy for now. I also think what's different too about this moment in time is these boys are everywhere. You have celebrities from the red carpet like Miley Cyrus recently who was like, I want to do the music for season two. Everybody is talking about Heated Rivalry. They're making their late night debuts. They are going to be presenting at the Golden Globes. Back then it was a little bit of I don't want to do this gay movie, you know, like, what's it going to do to my career?

Audie Cornish

00:12:46

What's it gonna do to my career? Yeah!

Ira Madison III

00:12:48

I remember Will Smith had talked about how he was playing gay for six degrees of separation back in the day. Meanwhile, these two come out in this show. It is a phenomenon instantly. People really need to understand how crazy the whole media blitz for this show is, too, because. When you're interviewing a celebrity, right, like like Timotheé Chalamet or Marty Supreme or Michael B. Jordan for Sinners, you get them on your cover. And that means that the other magazines aren't getting them on the cover because this show was only six episodes because it was such a media blitz because everybody was talking about it. Every outlet wanted a piece of the pie and every outlet did not care. GQ didn't care that New York Times just did something about it. You know, they didn't get it then. It doesn't matter anymore. It was everybody wanted their piece of Heated Rivalry. And the fans just continued to eat it up on social media.

Audie Cornish

00:13:51

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll be talking more with Ira Madison III about Heated Rivalry.

Audie Cornish

00:14:03

There's some cultural overhang here in our history that would make it hard, right, for a Jonathan Bailey to exist even 10 years ago. Because it's this idea that somehow no one will believe that a queer person could be a romantic lead of anything, that they needed to somehow be believable. Whereas to me, I'm like, it's called acting, like literally the point.

Ira Madison III

00:14:31

Right.

Audie Cornish

00:14:31

As long as you're convincing you're in, you know, like I don't really need to be the I don't t need that level of realism. And anyone who has watched Bridgerton knows that Jonathan Bailey was very good at looking like he's in love. You know, he could probably do it with a plant. He could probably just like a phone.

Ira Madison III

00:14:50

Girl, I'll be a plant.

Audie Cornish

00:14:52

Yeah!

Ira Madison III

00:14:52

Hahahaha

Audie Cornish

00:14:55

But just think about how we were in this age where it was like, it's not marketable, it's bankable, it'll hurt your career. And now it's like people ask them about their sexuality and like they don't wanna say, which is a twist.

Ira Madison III

00:15:08

It's so interesting.

Audie Cornish

00:15:09

The premise was that we as straight women would not believe these men could be romantic leads.

Ira Madison III

00:15:14

Right, and it all goes back to women as the Audience.

Audie Cornish

00:15:17

Super incorrect!

Ira Madison III

00:15:19

Yeah, I think that this is sort of that tipping point, you know, and I think that a lot of people have discussed whether or not a coming out story is retrograde and whether or not we're going backwards in queer representation. But I think it's actually a step forward. We haven't had gay romance on television. And in film, really, you know, we get a lot of realistic thing, indie things. We get stuff that is painful, traumatic. But what about the romance? And it's it's not just the romance, it's its drama. It's high drama. What's really different about Heated Rivalry is it is not at its core a comedy.

Audie Cornish

00:16:04

No.

Ira Madison III

00:16:04

It is a romantic drama. And that is just what we have not had.

Audie Cornish

00:16:09

Going back to Brokeback, which now I know you know about.

Ira Madison III

00:16:13

We all know about Brokeback, we're all on the mountain.

Audie Cornish

00:16:16

Yeah, but not in the footnotes, okay? So part of it was, at the time, the villains of that film, in a way, are the homophobia, but also the women.

Ira Madison III

00:16:27

'Mm-hmm.

Audie Cornish

00:16:28

'The thing about Brokeback Mountain that I remember and that people will notice on Rewatch is you have these women characters, Michelle Williams and Hathaway, and their characters are disgusted, ashamed. They feel as though they've been duped. And there's all of these emotions that fall into the trope of being gay, being bisexual is duplicitous by nature. And being closeted is about being duplicitous instead of it being seen as this struggle. And what happens in Heated Rivalry that I find fascinating and that I think other women might be responding to is we're not the villains of this show. And in fact, there are people who are allies not to pump themselves up, but to say to these men, I will be with you in whatever form our relationship needs to take. And they even models ways to have a conversation with somebody where you might realize like, well, wait a second, I'm not sure I'm the right partner for you or the right gender for you. And I don't think I've ever seen that on TV or anything, just like, how should you have that conversation where you don't want to be hostile, but you want to say, Hey, am I sensing something? Is there something you want to talk about? Is there's something you're struggling about in your life? And, um, That's what I re-watched, is the two scenes with their sort of female partners, so to speak.

Ira Madison III

00:17:59

Yes, Rose shout out to her for that great conversation she has with Shane and then but then also shout out too Elena who is Kip's best friend and champions him to be in a relationship with a man who is out of the closet.

Audie Cornish

00:18:17

The friend who goes to the hockey games and says, you might be amazing, but as long as you keep my friend in the closet with you, this is not good for you or for him. And I remember thinking, that is a very sophisticated conversation to be having on this like very random little Canadian TV show.

Ira Madison III

00:18:34

It's also very tender and also very, um, motivating as well, because it's not the friend going, this isn't a good relationship for my friend. You need to break up with him. This is, this is a good relationship for either of you. I want the best for you as well.

Audie Cornish

00:18:52

One of the things I want to end with is just, as a kid who grew up watching a lot of TV, as a person who writes about it, who writes TV, for you, what has been the most fun and what's been the emotional thing you have felt as this little cultural firestorm is kicked up?

Ira Madison III

00:19:13

One of the most fun things has honestly been the debate. I really actually enjoyed it.

Audie Cornish

00:19:20

Which one? Ha ha!

Ira Madison III

00:19:22

The debates amongst gay men about whether or not the show is good, whether or not the show is retrograde. The people who don't like it, I'm enjoying those takes as much as I'm enjoying the takes from people who do like it because that means it's part of the cultural conversation. In this day and age, media literacy is always shocking so I am happy that people are discussing the nuances of it. Yeah, like I said, it reminds me of when I was younger and was watching. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I'd be like discussing with friends, like this episode, this episode. You know, it's, you discuss that with the show you really love. So that's been the most fun part of it. And I don't know, like the sweetest part of it has just been just like watching it. I'm a, I'm romantic person. You know? Like I grew up on melodramas, Hollywood melodrammas. I'm watching it with my grandmother. I watch soap operas with my grandfather. I still watch Days of Our Lives to this day on Peacock.

Audie Cornish

00:20:20

Uh... still watch General Hospital. Respect.

Ira Madison III

00:20:21

Right, you know, and like Pedro Almodovar is my favorite director that and that is like big melodrama and I just, I'm just happy about the whole thing. The fact that it is a television show is important, you now, television is —

Audie Cornish

00:20:36

Yes! Thank you.

Ira Madison III

00:20:37

'—for the masses, you know, it is not an Oscar-winning film like Moonlight, which I love, obviously, but that is obviously going to be a film that is seen by a smaller section of Americans. There's the podcast, Empty Netters, right, which has been straight men recapping the show and having a fun time watching it. And yeah, I just want to know. Where the conversation is gonna be going. And also, season two of the show is going to be like, explode.

Audie Cornish

00:21:11

What I hear you saying, Ira Madison, is that you wanna know where the puck is headed. Hey!

Ira Madison III

00:21:19

'Yeah, you know, I want to see if the biscuit lands in the basket, okay? Yes. That looks-.

Audie Cornish

00:21:25

'We did- We did get through this conversation with surprisingly few sex jokes and for that I commend you.

Ira Madison III

00:21:32

I don't know hockey puns, so that's not my culture, so they were never going to be me.

Audie Cornish

00:21:39

That's not your ministry? That's what I was going to say, that's my ministry.

Ira Madison III

00:21:43

Yes.

Audie Cornish

00:21:45

Okay, well, thank you so much for doing this and tell everyone where they can find you. Is it a sub stack? Is it like, give us the, the context.

Ira Madison III

00:21:55

I do have a newsletter at iramadison.substack.com, but mostly check out my book, Pure Innocent Fun: Essays, it's in bookstores now.

Audie Cornish

00:22:08

Okay, Ira, thanks so much.

Ira Madison III

00:22:09

Thank you.

Audie Cornish

00:22:12

Thank you guys so much for listening, happy new year, and we will be back next week.

The Assignment with Audie Cornish