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S08.25: Heated Rivalry Read-Alikes with Christopher Rice

March 10, 2026·1 hr 44 min·8 clips

Rice went from bracing for subpar gay media to 'licking my television like a dog bowl' after the first episode of 'Heated Rivalry'.

1. Fated Mates hosts Sarah McClain and Jennifer Prokop welcome back Christopher Rice to discuss the Heated Rivalry TV adaptation and recommend read-alikes for fans. 2. Christopher Rice is a novelist and co-host of a podcast with Eric Shaw Quinn; hosts describe him as their best-ever guest and note he is one of a very small number of openly male voices in M/M romance. 3. The episode argues that Heated Rivalry succeeded because everyone involved — from director Jacob Tierney down to the grips on set — took the erotic source material seriously, and that this seriousness is what allowed it to break into mainstream cultural conversation. 4. Rice describes arriving skeptical: he hadn't read Rachel Reid's novel, was not a hockey fan, and was monitoring the show from a distance as he saw male bookstagrammer communities slowly building around the full series. 5. The first scene — Shane introducing himself to Ilya while smoking outside the rink — immediately signaled that neither actor had misgivings about playing queer, and by the water bottle scene Rice was texting his co-host Eric Shaw Quinn that the show had 'done it.' 6. Rice posted on Threads that he had committed to watching the show as a critic and consumer of gay media, and by the end of episode one was 'licking my television like a dog bowl and panting on all fours.' 7. He argues the show delivered two things simultaneously: expertly done M/M romance at an elite level, and a filmmaking blueprint demonstrating how an erotic romance can be put on screen — something he says has not consistently been achieved before. 8. Host Jennifer Prokop cites a New York Times essay by Wesley Morris, who opens by writing 'as a man who loves men, as a man in love with a man, I was surprised by how little I wanted to watch a man fall in love with a man on TV' — then describes being unexpectedly moved by the show. 9. Rice traces a parallel to Brokeback Mountain as the last cultural moment of this scale for queer male love on screen — but distinguishes them: Brokeback was a tragedy, and at the time of its release the queer male community had no framework yet for a happy ending at that scale. 10. Rice recounts that New York City's mayor announced during a snowstorm that Heated Rivalry was available free from the New York Public Library, and that Jenna Bush Hager — daughter of George W. Bush, who attempted to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage — interviewed author Rachel Reid on the Today Show. 11. Producer Jacob Tierney was offered a major American streamer's budget on condition that Rose be the lead of episode one, that there be more women characters, and that there be no kissing until episode six — demands Tierney rejected by walking away and taking the show to Crave. 12. Rice explains Tierney's logic: when you option a book, you are optioning its fans; changing the source material destroys the asset you paid for, and what Crave understood was that the fans of the book would become 'electrified cheerleaders' for the product if the show served them. 13. Rice describes a generational divide in how queer men receive M/M romance: younger readers who grew up with queer YA and trans voices in YA fiction are far more receptive; Gen X and older millennial queer men are more likely to be suspicious or contemptuous. 14. He argues the biggest erasure of male M/M romance readers has come from loud queer male voices on the internet who are outside the genre, do not fit the experience into their binary narrative about fetishization, and repeatedly talked over the men actually in the space — including omitting Rice from attribution in a 20,000-word piece for which he gave a two-hour interview. 15. Rice's central historical argument: coming out of the AIDS epidemic, queer men were psychologically unable to grant themselves a romantic happy ending, and female M/M romance writers were 'willing to imagine happier endings for us than we were willing to imagine for ourselves.' 16. Jennifer Prokop argues that the show's fidelity to the text — scene by scene, dialogue line by dialogue line — is what drove the book back onto bestseller charts: viewers could move from screen to page with zero friction, unlike most romance adaptations where the experiences diverge significantly. 17. Rice and the hosts discuss Hollywood's tendency to 'fix' romance by adding male resistance and making heroes jerks, rooted in a misogynistic assumption that men are always the most emotionally reluctant party — a formula Heated Rivalry actively inverts through its female characters advancing rather than obstructing the men's relationship. 18. The conversation is discursive, essay-like, and wide-ranging — more a cultural theory seminar than an interview, with all three participants building on each other's points across long uninterrupted stretches. 19. Romance readers with interest in M/M fiction, queer cultural history, or the mechanics of how a niche genre property breaks into mainstream media will find this episode directly rewarding. 20. Listeners who have not seen or read Heated Rivalry and have no background in M/M romance or queer cultural criticism will find much of the conversation difficult to follow.

As heard by us

A warm, recommendation-first listen for Heated Rivalry fans who want the next romance.

Fated Mates keeps things warm and easygoing here, and Christopher Rice's return clearly has the hosts in a good mood. The talk is playful without drifting too far, and it gives the episode a bit more shape than a loose chat.

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Why you'd press play

If Heated Rivalry has you hunting for the next romance companion piece, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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