Key Points
Heated Rivalry showrunner Jacob Tierney teased season 2 at a BookCon panel with author Rachel Reid.
“You’re in much more serious territory,” he said of adapting Reid’s book The Long Game.
He also teased the arrival of new character Troy Barrett, saying he is “quite damaged” on the series, which is “digging into that even harder.”
As he continues work on Heated Rivalry season 2, showrunner Jacob Tierney touched down in New York City for BookCon 2026, joining author Rachel Reid — the creator of the Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov romance saga — for a discussion about its hit TV adaptation.
During a moderated panel with host Versha Sharma, Tierney teased how he’s adapting Reid’s 2022 book The Long Game, the sequel story to 2019’s Heated Rivalry.
“Long Game is … so long and it’s so gamey, like eating venison,” Tierney joked before digging in more earnestly.
“It really is different,” he continued, “and the challenge, from an adaptation standpoint, is you’re in much more serious territory. There’s still lots of flirting, and there’s lots of sex, but it’s this kind of danger. This kind of ‘hotel room, adolescent sex’ stuff is largely gone.”
The show’s leads, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, will return as Shane and Ilya for season 2, which the team signaled will start filming this summer ahead of a projected spring 2027 premiere on Crave in Canada and HBO Max in the U.S. and international territories.
Connor Storrie as Ilya and Hudson Williams as Shane on ‘Heated Rivalry’
Credit: Courtesy Bell Media
The Long Game picks up 10 years into their relationship. Shane and Ilya’s love remains a secret, but Ilya has parted ways from his Boston team to play for the Ottawa Centaurs so that he can be closer to Shane. The pair have also launched their charity organization, which they spoke about at the famous cottage. While they are seeing each other more than ever, the potential price of going public with their romance weighs heavily on the couple, especially as Ilya wants them to come out of hiding much sooner than originally planned.
As Tierney put it at the Saturday afternoon panel, part of the reason for adapting Heated Rivalry, as opposed to Reid’s other books in the series, was to get to The Long Game, which he called “an emotionally sophisticated book that takes this couple seriously.”
One of his favorite scenes is — without giving away spoilers for those who haven’t read the books — an intense moment that happens between Shane and Ilya over Christmas. “I can’t wait to see that [on the show],” Reid remarked.
“What do you do after the rush of danger is gone and yet now you have to live in a relationship where you still aren’t communicating properly, much as you would like to?” Tierney pondered at the panel. “You can say you love each other, but as adults know, there’s so much more than that to make a relationship successful. And that is what they’re learning.”
Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie on ‘Heated Rivalry’
Credit: Sabrina Lantos/HBO Max
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“To the great surprise of absolutely nobody,” as he put it, Tierney also confirmed that “parts of [Reid’s 2021 novel] Role Model are gonna be in Long Game” — meaning we’ll see the arrival of Troy Barrett, a forward who is traded to play for the Centaurs with Ilya, and Harris Drover, the Centaurs’ social media manager. The pair front Role Model, which focuses on their love story, set during the events of The Long Game.
“There is an easy, facile way of looking at Role Model,” Tierney said. “It’s very ‘grumpy sunshine.’ It’s very ‘apple orchard.’ It can drift into things that you want, but Troy is a really damaged guy. And Troy is quite damaged on the show. I would say we’re digging into that even harder.”
Tierney already hinted that he and his new writing partner, Michael Goldbach, might split their adaptation of The Long Game across a second and third season of Heated Rivalry. He echoed that when asked to comment further at BookCon.
“It’s a lot of book,” he teased — but acknowledged that he’ll get into “a lot of trouble” if he confirms anything else.
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