January 2026 - New Year, new telly and films
Heated Rivalry - This is a pretty enjoyable slow-burn romance between ice hockey players, developing over a 10 year period. Is it any good? ‘I mean, yes, I think so, probably’. There's a lot of snobbery about the romance genre, but this is interesting, not just because of the work itself, but also the way it has captured the zeitgeist and pulled together lots of live debates into one place. So, this is a slightly longer essay than usual, feel free to skip past. Firstly, what is this about? This is a Canadian word of mouth success that blew up in the US and Canada before Christmas and left networks around the world scrambling to get in on the action, arriving in the UK in January. Most of the early noise was about the spicy sex scenes but it settles down into a proper old school yearning romance. In addition to the character development and recognition of self, which is always central to a solid romance, there are the external pressures of being rival sports personaliti...