Heated Rivalry was slapped with a R rating for one very brief moment

Over the past month, there’s been one TV series the internet is obsessing over, and that’s Heated Rivalry.

The Canadian romance has sparked a frenzy for its story about two closeted hockey players, whose attraction to each other morphed over the years from raw sexual desire to tender love.

But there’s no denying that what has fans’ pulses racing is their steamy sex scenes, present in every episode.

Intimate, horny portrayals of LGBTQI+ characters are still a rarity, and Heated Rivalry’s abundance of them has made it notable.

However, while there have been extended beats of frenetic hands clamouring for rippling torsos, bulging biceps and sculpted derrieres, what the show has not featured is any full-frontal nudity.

Except for one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.

It happens about three-and-a-half minutes into the show’s second episode, and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) is in a hotel room on a single bed. His teammate and friend Hayden Pike is on the other bed. They’re both on their phones.

Shane is texting with his clandestine lover and public rival Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), and after a few flirty messages, he sends a dick pic. For a very brief flash, an erect penis is seen on the screen of Shane’s phone.

That’s the only phallus you’ll see in this entire series, which is surprising given the hoopla around the show’s supposedly explicit sex scenes. Especially now that full-frontal male nudity is far more common on screen than it was a decade earlier.

But that brief flash was enough to get that second episode, titled Olympians, slapped with a R rating in Australia.

The rating for the show is shown in the corner of the start of the episode when streamed on HBO Max, a little black box with a R 18+ and the disclaimer of “high impact nudity”.

A spokesperson for the Classification Board confirmed it was the dick pic or as they put it, “a photo of male sexual arousal”, that pushed it over the line into R territory.

To clarify, a R rating is warranted when “sexual arousal depicting erectness” is shown, as opposed to full-frontal male nudity in other contexts.

For example, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, actor Jason Segel is shown in the nude, including his exposed phallus. But the appendage was flaccid and the scene was comedic, so that movie only had a MA 15+ rating.

Whereas, the TV series Euphoria, which sometimes featured dozens of penises in just one scene, was classified as R 18+. That series was also deemed to have high impact themes, language and sex, in addition to nudity.

Sex and nudity are assessed separately by the classification board.

In fact, in the other five episodes of Heated Rivalry, the classification board deemed its nudity as either mild impact (which is only the third rung out of a possible six) or non-existent.

Which kind of debunks the idea that Heated Rivalry had a lot of nudity. At the Golden Globes Awards ceremony, Williams and Storrie joked on stage that everyone had seen them naked – well, not quite, according to our classification board.

Five out of six episodes did rate as “strong impact” for sex scenes.

Heated Rivalry creator Jacob Tierney, who adapted the show from the books by Rachel Reid, told Vulture that he didn’t think full front nudity added anything, which is why there weren’t penises in the show.

“These are sex scenes, not nudity scenes,” he said.

The production worked with intimacy coordinator Chala Hunter, who said in that same Vulture article, “I wanted to make sure we were representing queer sex – specifically gay male sex – in a way that felt authentic to the community.”