The biggest queer show on the planet has lesbians hooked. Olympians are begging for a spin-off. Real-life sapphic hockey couples already exist. So why does the TV version keep getting cancelled before it gets a chance?
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Heated Rivalry is excellent. The chemistry between Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie has no business being that good. The cottage scene had us in a chokehold for a full week, and yes, we have rewatched the locker room confrontation an unreasonable number of times. We’re not above it. Nobody is.
The show has become the kind of cultural event that queer media almost never gets to be. Nine million viewers per episode. A second season was greenlit practically before the credits rolled. Its two leads carried the Olympic torch in Italy. Heated Rivalry didn’t just succeed — it detonated.
And lesbians are some of its biggest fans, which is both lovely and, if you think about it for more than five seconds, a little bit heartbreaking. Because while we’re losing our minds over two fictional men falling in love on the ice, the sapphic version of this story already exists in real life — and nobody’s making the show.
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The Real Life Sapphic Version
At the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, Swedish captain Anna Kjellbin and Finnish defender Ronja Savolainen competed against each other on rival national teams. Off the ice, they’re engaged. They met in 2019 playing in the Swedish Women’s Hockey League, announced their engagement in 2024, and now play on opposite sides of the PWHL’s Battle of Ontario – Kjellbin for the Toronto Sceptres, Savolainen for the Ottawa Charge.
Sound familiar? Rivals on the ice, lovers off it. Except this isn’t fiction – it’s two real women, openly together, competing at the highest level. And Savolainen’s quote about facing her fiancée is better than anything a scriptwriter could come up with: “I don’t care who’s in front of me… if it’s going to be her, I’m going to hit her. On the ice, she’s my enemy. That’s how it goes,” she told the Ottawa Citizen in 2024.
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They’re not even the first. American Olympian Julie Chu and Canadian Olympian Caroline Ouellette were rival team captains who faced off in Olympic finals, secretly dated for years, and are now married with two kids. The queer historian Amanda W. Timpson recently resurfaced their story on her Yesterqueers account, and it went viral all over again – partly because Heated Rivalry fans couldn’t believe the sapphic version had been real all along.
And here’s the thing that makes it sting a little: the PWHL currently has over 30 openly LGBTQ+ players. Women’s hockey doesn’t have the closet problem that the show’s male characters do. As Savolainen herself pointed out, “In women’s hockey, it’s more open to be gay.” The drama is already there. The love stories are already there. The only thing missing is the camera.
Meanwhile, on lesbian TikTok
In January, Renée Rapp reposted a TikTok of Hudson Williams with the comment “sorry but yum,” and the internet did what the internet does. The hashtag #lesbians4hudsonwilliams took off, and suddenly queer women everywhere were loudly, joyfully claiming a show about two closeted men playing hockey as their own.
Which: fair enough. But the trend also opened up a conversation that’s been simmering for years. Why do we keep falling for stories about men? Not because we’re confused about our own sexualities, but because nobody is making the equivalent for us — or when they do, it gets axed before the first season is cold.
A student journalist at Vassar, writing for The Miscellany News, nailed it. She described herself as a “proud sports-hating lesbian” who had somehow become a Heated Rivalry superfan, but couldn’t help noticing that the same energy simply doesn’t show up for stories about women. “The majority of mainstream LGBTQ+ media is about cisgender gay and bisexual men,” she wrote. And when she looked at the support gap between male-led and female-led queer shows, the pattern was undeniable.
She’s not wrong. And the receipts are brutal.
Cancelled Sapphic Shows List
A League of Their Own. First Kill. Everything Now. Warrior Nun. The Other Black Girl. Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. Paper Girls. High Fidelity. Everything Sucks. All of these shows centred queer women. All of them were cancelled, most after a single season. This list is less than half of the sapphic-led shows axed in this decade alone.
A League of Their Own is the one that stings the most, because the parallels with Heated Rivalry are almost comically direct. A queer sports show. Closeted athletes. Team dynamics, rivalries, and the pressure of living a double life. Created by queer screenwriter Abbi Jacobson, it even featured a storyline about a Black non-binary lesbian finding chosen family. Amazon pulled the plug after one season. Meanwhile, Heated Rivalry got its renewal before most people had finished bingeing.
Even Yellowjackets — one of the most successful sapphic-adjacent shows of recent years – was forced to wait over a month for its fourth season renewal, and then told it would be its last, despite creators originally planning five. It’s one of the lucky ones. It at least got to end.
Nobody’s saying the male version doesn’t deserve its success. But it’s worth sitting with the fact that queer women’s stories are consistently treated as dispensable while queer men’s stories are allowed to become phenomena.
Everyone is asking for it. Literally everyone.
The demand for a sapphic Heated Rivalry isn’t some niche internet wish – it’s coming from the show’s own cast, real-life Olympians, and basically every queer woman with a social media account.
At the GLAAD Awards on 5 March, Olympic gold medallist Amber Glenn — the first openly queer woman to represent the US in singles figure skating — was asked about Heated Rivalry and proceeded to lose her entire mind on camera. “I want yuri Heated Rivalry!” she yelled, referencing the Japanese genre that centres relationships between women. “Ask me, hire me. I can fall in love with my co-star, please!” When asked if she’d do a cameo in season two, she grinned: “Uh, yeah!”
She’s not alone. Sophie Nélisse, who plays Rose in the show itself, has said she’d love a sapphic spin-off exploring a romance between her character and Svetlana, Rozanov’s childhood friend. “I’m here for a little spin-off,” she told Young Hollywood. So even the cast is pitching it.
Meanwhile, Savolainen – the actual, real-life queer hockey player – said she’s watched the show and talked to Kjellbin about whether they’d do a TV version of their own story. Her answer? “Yeah, maybe for $5 million I would do it, and then I’d need to quit playing hockey because I would get so much chirp about it.”
What’s in the pipeline
The good news: the pipeline isn’t completely empty. In fact, there are three sapphic sports projects in various stages of existence right now.
Slo Pitch is the closest to arrival. A ten-episode sapphic softball mockumentary coming to Crave later this year – yes, the same streamer that launched Heated Rivalry. Produced by Elliot Page’s PageBoy Productions and starring Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek) and Jess Salgueiro (Frasier), it follows The Public Lass Brovaries, a six-time-losing queer softball team whose coach has just been dumped by her girlfriend – who’s now playing for a rival team. Beer, lesbians, and baseball. The show even shares cast with Heated Rivalry – Nadine Bhabha, who plays Kip’s best mate Elena, is a guest star and writer on Slo Pitch. The queer sports cinematic universe is forming.
Then there’s Cleat Cute, an adaptation of Meryl Wilsner’s sapphic soccer rivals-to-lovers novel, being developed by Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe’s production company A Touch More. It follows two players on the US Women’s National Team – the grumpy veteran captain and the sunshine rookie who replaces her after an injury. It’s spicy, it’s sporty, it’s exactly what everyone is asking for. No network is attached yet, but with Heated Rivalry‘s success, the pitch has never been easier to make.
And hovering in the background is the prospect of a Heated Rivalry spin-off itself. Between Glenn lobbying on live television, Nélisse pitching it in interviews, and the show’s own creator Jacob Tierney seemingly open to expanding the universe, it’s not the most far-fetched idea. Harrison Browne, the first out trans pro hockey player, already made a guest appearance in season one. The infrastructure is there.
However, Slo Pitch will only get a second season if people actually watch it. Cleat Cute will only get made if a network believes there’s an audience. And both of those things depend on whether the community that rallied around Heated Rivalry shows up with the same energy for stories about women.
This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. A writer at The Gamer put it bluntly: the overlap between Heated Rivalry‘s most enthusiastic fanbase – women, including straight women – and the audience that historically ignores sapphic shows is significant. The most popular queer ship in 2025’s fandom rankings was from Heated Rivalry. The highest-ranking lesbian ship came in fifth. The gap is not small.
It’s not about guilt-tripping anyone for enjoying what they enjoy. But if the argument is ‘we want more queer representation,’ then the follow-through has to include actually watching the queer representation that features women. Paying for it. Rating it. Making the numbers impossible to ignore.
The boys had their moment. It’s our turn.
Nonchalant x
This article was written by one of our creative team writers here at Nonchalant Magazine.
