Warning: Mild spoilers about the season finale to follow.

It is 9PM on Christmas and I am sitting in my hotel room in Providence, Rhode Island, trying to write something about the season finale of Heated Rivalry. Or, really, the entirety of Heated Rivalry thus far, as organic a television phenomenon as has arisen in recent years, a buzzy hit that came from out of the blue and sent certain cohorts of viewers reeling into a heart-eyed, horned-up tizzy. I am just such a viewer.

I wanted whatever I wrote about this show to be something big. Or, at least, meaningful in some way. Because I am trying to get a newsletter off the ground and I figured people would want to click on something about this show. But also because Heated Rivalry has itself been big and meaningful to me these past few weeks, a sort of happy (or mostly happy) emotional crucible that I, like many others, have ventured through on the way toward what we hoped was some kind grand statement or perfect moment. I think the finale episode, “The Cottage,” delivers on that: it’s sexy and sweet and surprisingly avoids the narrative pitfalls—the carefully orchestrated setbacks—I kind of thought had to eventually plague a show like this. (If, indeed, there has been a show like this before.) 

Because I loved the finale, and loved the whole run of episodes, I thought some gushy piece about how fun it’s all been would flow naturally out of me. But here in this chilly little room, with the cars beeping down I-95 just past my window, I am suddenly feeling a clench of embarrassment for ever having had such high ambitions for a piece covering a Canadian romance about hockey hunks who fall in love. I am newly worried that, whoops, I have yet again fallen into the trap of fantasy, that I have once more lost my critical faculties and am dumbly blind to the myriad ways that Heated Rivalry panders, or fails in its representational duty, or just plain isn’t well made.