#hrs2

Jacob Tierney for Deadline

"Who said I’m doing it all? There’s a lot of material," Tierney coyly told Deadline, suggesting that some storylines involving Shane and Ilya might continue into another subsequent season.

"The Long Game is like sex Scenes from a Marriage. I don’t want to say we are making Bergman here, but you’ve got your happy ending, you’re in love, you get to be in a relationship. But, as most adults know, you think that’s when it gets easy? It’s not. That’s when it gets hard. That’s when you have to make real decisions. That’s when real life can often smack you in the face."

"We’re continuing to take this relationship on a journey that will end happily, but along the way is full of ups and downs and realizing loads of shit about yourself, about your partner and about how you want to live and what it means to live as a queer couple in the world and what you want out of your privacy and your public life," Tierney said." We’re just continuing to give Shane and Ilya the seriousness that this love affair deserves while also continuing to exist within the confines of the genre that we’re in, which I love. I want them to be happy, but I also want to show that that’s not easy. Because part of what Rachel does so brilliantly in her writing is to give queerness joy, but also not pretend the world isn’t the world. It’s not like she created this world where it’s like, there’s no homophobia and hockey’s amazing, and anyone can come out. No. She shows it’s difficult, takes courage, guts, and sacrifice, and takes stepping up and saying things with your full chest. And that to me is a triumph. That’s what we’re trying to do here."

"We didn’t expect any of this attention or reaction from a public that might not exist at all," Tierney reflected. "We’ve learned a lot [since the show aired], and there’s a lot to think about moving forward in terms of the fandom and all that comes with it, negative and positive."

Jacob Tierney for Variety

"It’s different. It really is different," Tierney said during a panel alongside Heated Rivalry book author Rachel Reid Saturday at BookCon at the Javits Center in New York." And the challenge of it is, from an adaptation point of view, is that you’re in much more serious territory. A lot of the initial, there’s still lots of flirting and lots of sex, but this kind of danger, this kind of hotel-room-adolescent-sex stuff is largely gone. And so it presents really new challenges."

"Part of the reason you start off with Heated Rivalry, as far as adapting goes, is because you want to get to The Long Game," Tierney said. "Because The Long Game is an emotionally sophisticated book that takes this couple seriously. What I've always said about this show is there are a lot of books, Game Changer is in Heated Rivalry and obviously, as I think you guys all know by now, obviously parts of Role Model are going to be in [Season 2], to the great surprise of absolutely nobody. But Ilya and Shane are the heartbeat of this series, of my show. It's always going to be about Ilya and Shane, that is what is the trajectory that runs through it as their world xpands."

As Tierney confirmed, Reid's book Role Model, which is part of the overall Game Changer novel series but follows the relationship of hockey player Troy Barrett and team social media manager Harris Drover rather than Shane and Ilya, will be worked into Heated Rivalry Season 2.