Katie Notopoulos: Heated Rivalry Internet Takeover - January 20, 2026
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What makes the TV show Heated Rivalry unexpectedly popular?
Smart, sharp, and slightly unhinged. Late night's fresh perspective. The Last Show with David Cooper. What is gayer than hockey? Well, according to a new show, heated rivalry, nothing. And not only is this show so hot right now, unexpectedly hot, it is creating deeply enthusiastic fans that are taking over the internet. Let's talk about it here with Katie Natopoulos, a technology and culture correspondent at Business Insider, who's written on this show recently. Katie, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So this show has become really popular, kind of out of nowhere. The actors in it aren't hugely famous. What do you think the explanation for that is?
Yeah, the show has become massively popular. Off the top of my head, I know that there's sort of all these stats of it's had a tremendous amount of watch time on HBO, which is the U.S. distributor or whatever. And it sort of came out of nowhere. It didn't have a lot of promotion behind it initially.
How has Heated Rivalry created a passionate fanbase online?
The actors are unknown, so it doesn't really have any big stars in it. The books had been around, so there was like a low-level sort of fan base of this going into it. Yeah. You know, I think partly it's sort of hit at a time, you know, over the holidays when a lot of people had some free time. And people just love this show. It's, you know, it's romantic. It's sexy. It's fun. It's a happy story. I don't want to give a spoiler alert there, but I don't think that's much of a spoiler. It's based on romance novels. And I think people who aren't used to consuming romance novels might be surprised at how, like, uncomplicated they are in a certain way. Things go well for the main characters and there's not a lot of side plots.
It's mainly about the romance. And it's a very sexy and appealing show in that way too. And people are just loving it.
I mean, hockey's kind of violent. It's a bunch of dudes body checking each other. It's not so far fetched that a romance could emerge from that. I have promised my girlfriend I will watch it, so don't spoil anything. Let's talk about the audience that it's found. There are lots of shows with audiences that are super big on them. I like the show Severance. I like the show. I like a lot of different shows and their fandom. It can be hugely popular, but it doesn't like spill out into all corners of the Internet. It doesn't spill out to everybody else's feed. And that's what seems to be happening with content for heated rivalry. Explain this to me. If I'm on Twitter minding my own business and I don't watch the show, I am likely to see videos of it.
Absolutely. I mean, I will say that I did watch the show and then I started seeing a lot of content about it. But I feel like other people I know who haven't even watched it, it's like it's taken over their TikTok feeds, their Twitter or X feeds, Instagram. It's just like nonstop clips and all these things. And it's sort of what the people who are fans of it are calling heated rivalry psychosis.
I got to have a psychologist on to talk about that.
And I think part of it is that for a lot of these fans and the fans are a mixed bag of people, but largely a lot of straight women. Right. Which is its own thing of like it's a little, you know, to some people, it's a little bit of a head scratcher as to why straight women would find this show about a romance between gay men so appealing. But I also think it's not that complicated. It's not. I think we can all figure it out, right?
Yeah, it's not a difficult one. If the genders were reversed there, nobody would be scratching their heads on that.
Yeah, and I think that women really like this show, and it's been really, like, appealing to them. And it's, you know, it almost reminds me, you know, I was a teenager when Titanic came out, right? And... That was such like a beautiful romance, you know, between a man and a woman or whatever. And people were really like obsessed with it. And it's almost in a similar way of like it's this beautiful romance story and people are just obsessed with the romance of it. There's, you know, another big element here, which is that there's –
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