DECEMBER 19, 2025

By Jason P. Frank

“My agent and I were reading the first episode, and I was like, God, this is so intense.” Photo: Samuel Fournier

Heated Rivalry has come out of the closet. The smutty gay hockey show is largely about closeted athletes Ilya (Connor Storrie) and Shane (Hudson Williams), but at the end of episode five, the series’ secondary couple goes public. As our protagonists watch from home, New York Admirals captain Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) leads his team to the Stanley Cup victory. Alone on the ice watching his teammates hug their families, he spots his ex-boyfriend Kip (Robbie G.K.) in the crowd and calls him to the rink. While “I’ll Believe in Anything,” by Wolf Parade, plays — the song that also soundtracked the beginning of their relationship — Scott kisses Kip in public for the first time, effectively coming out of the closet to his team and the world. It’s the first time Heated Rivalry has featured a public gay kiss, and watching it feels like a release of the tension that’s been building for weeks.

In both the series and real life, Arnaud is the out elder statesman of the cast, a 40-year-old serving as foil to the 24- and 25-year-old twunks in the lead roles. Arnaud is the kind of performer you’ve seen in tons of shows, perhaps without realizing it: He’s guested on Schitt’s Creek, Yellowjackets, and unReal and starred on Showtime’s The Borgias and Fox’s The Moodys. Arnaud has played both straight characters and queer ones, making him unique in a Hollywood firmament that prefers to slot its actors into sexuality boxes. But in a career filled with steady work, Heated Rivalry is his biggest break yet — for the first time, he’s at the center of a phenomenon.

Photo: Disney/Mattias Clamer

There are two separate (yet equally important) metrics for how to consider Disney+’s Percy Jackson series: how good this show is as a TV show, and how good it is that this show exists. On the first one, Percy Jackson earns words like “solid,” “entertaining,” and “promising.” It is not a runaway triumph nor is it a disaster. It’s an extremely watchable, often compelling all-ages fantasy series with performances ranging from excellent (Tim Simons, Leah Jeffries) to perfectly fine, and if the digital design of the cyclops kid never once stops being distracting, so what? The chariot race looks great and the battle with Scylla is convincing enough to make any 8-year-old viewer bury her head under a pillow for a bit. But the “it’s good this show exists” scale is where Percy Jackson really distinguishes itself. There are so few TV series being made for a generation of kids perfectly ready for longer screen stories with more suspense and emotional depth than Spidey and His Amazing Friends, who have instead funneled so much attention to algorithmic video streams and immersive gaming. From that perspective, Percy Jackson is not just a nice enough show; it’s an oasis in the wilderness. —Kathryn VanArendonk

2025 has been a big year for Shakespeare’s longest play. It was reenacted in a violent online multiplayer game in Grand Theft Hamlet, given a tragic domestic backstory in Hamnet, and updated to a present-day London featuring Riz Ahmed in Hamlet. But the new film from Summer Wars director Mamoru Hosoda offers the trippiest take on it of all — a gender-swapped adaptation set in a purgatory where the pink-haired princess of Denmark continues trying to avenge her murdered father in the space between life and death. The mythology behind the afterlife in Scarlet isn’t always parseable, but its concerns with figuring out how to exist in a world in which some people just enjoy inflicting cruelty are certainly on point. Plus, its otherworldly setting, an arid wasteland above which a massive dragon circles amid clouds that look like a turbulent ocean, has the eerie resonance of a dream. —Alison Willmore

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