Spoilers ahead for Heated Rivalry and Half Man
Heated Rivalry is an uplifting, emotional rollercoaster of a show about complicated love between two complicated men with a happy ending. Half Man is a bleak, stressful rollercoaster of a show about complicated love between two complicated men with a bleak ending.
In Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, the main characters are Mario and Luigi, two Italian plumbers. But they have weird evil versions of themselves named Wario and Waluigi. Mario and Luigi are more circular, more welcoming whereas Wario and Waluigi are more angular (well, their mustache are, at least), more off-putting—that’s what these two shows are to each other.
Richard Gadd created, wrote, and stars in Half Man as Ruben—a complicated, sometimes charming, wildly dangerous, and violent man. Gadd rose to fame with the other show he created, wrote, and starred in, Baby Reindeer, where he played a complicated man with complicated feelings being stalked by a customer at his bar. Half Man starts right out the gate with intense homoeroticism that quickly becomes rancid and violent. I couldn’t tell if the two men at the center of the story were going to fuck each other, kill each other, or both—and the answer to that is still complicated.
Jacob Tierney, of Letterkenny fame, adapted Rachel Reid’s hockey romance book series, into the show Heated Rivalry. It became a moment in pop culture, if not the moment in pop culture, of the last year. The show starts out wildly sexy and stays sexy, but it becomes wildly emotional too. The series never feels twee, yet is full of queer joy. It takes the storytelling serious and is both sexy and emotional.
Stuart Campbell is the standout for me in Half Man, truly nailing young Ruben. The way he plays a younger “straight” guy who would draw in a young, anxious closeted queer man, is impressive and accurate. He’s awful and pretty upfront about how awful he is, but he has small moments of love. He’s charming when he’s not being violent, and he cares for Niall both (played in flashbacks by Mitchell Robertson and by Jamie Bell as an adult). The issue here is that Ruben's version of “caring” for someone is quite rotten. Niall knows Ruben cares, but also knows Ruben is dangerous—Niall gets him more than almost anyone else.
Connor Storrie is the standout for me in Heated Rivalry, truly bringing depth to the character of Ilya, a character who could have easily fallen flat. He is the dream man, he is chaotic, he is charming, he’s also really fucking hot with a fat ass—a dream for sure. Most of the characters in the show think Ilya is an asshole but we know he’s misunderstood. Ilya also has trouble with expressing his feelings, also due to his family life. Shane (Hudson Williams), of course, gets this and understands him more than most everyone else.
In Half Man, Ruben is the chaotic, magnetic, dominant one who charms everyone around him while Niall is the submissive, quiet, depressed one—in the same way Ilya is to Shane in Heated Rivalry. Niall is Shane’s Wario and Ruben is Ilya’s Waluigi. Ilya and Ruben light fire under Niall and Shane’s asses in similar yet different ways. But we love to see the two different versions, one love story that seems toxic but is lovely and another that is toxic but only gets worse.
In both shows, the men have top tier sexual chemistry from the get-go. Niall and Shane are both closeted men, both men obsessed with staying in the closet, both fearful of coming out. Ilya and Ruben are more confident, less caring about sexuality. And, when Shane and Niall both eventually come out to their love interests, it’s met with a “well, duh.”
Both shows showcase wildly different versions of obsession, queerness, lust, and love. But I cannot stress just how differently those themes are handled in each show. The first part of Half Man had me riveted in a lot of the same way Heated Rivalry did. Both shows have you wondering what will happen next. Will they? Won’t they? In one show they will and do, and in the other show, they won’t and die.
Shane and Ilya do get the perfect, fairy tale ending they deserve—two men in love, riding off into the sunset. Niall and Ruben also get the ending they deserve—two awful, destructive men, both dead. Two big endings for two big, near opposite pairings.
Both shows are fully worth the watch. Heated Rivalry lands the ending way more than Half Man, but I still enjoyed watching them. In both shows, I found myself relating to Shane and Niall, albeit I’m not closeted nor a star hockey player. But not every queer character needs to be 100% in line with your queer experience in order to be 100% relatable. That's why we deserve the entire spectrum of queer love stories.
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