'Heated Rivalry' Star Hudson Williams Lands a TIFF World Premiere With 'Yaga'

Eight months ago Heated Rivalry landed on HBO Max — November 28, 2025 — and, per Deadline, skated on quietly before becoming a phenomenon anyway. This September its breakout gets a world premiere at Toronto.

Yaga, the Crave series starring Hudson Williams and Carrie-Anne Moss, will premiere in the Primetime program at the Toronto International Film Festival, Deadline reported when TIFF announced its television lineup on July 23. The festival runs September 10 to 20. To be precise about the billing: Yaga is one title among several in the strand rather than a bookend — Netflix's Below opens Primetime and Mike Flanagan's Carrie closes it.

Worth knowing what a Primetime slot involves before anyone books a flight. The Canadian Press reports the strand screens one or two episodes of each series alongside conversations with cast and creators. It's a first look, not the whole thing, and we haven't seen a screening date announced for Yaga specifically.

What *Yaga* actually is. A contemporary reworking of the Baba Yaga legend, adapted by Kat Sandler from her own stage play — Deadline describes it as reimagining the myth as a contemporary mystery thriller. Williams plays Henry Park, heir to a powerful fishery, whose disappearance drives the plot. Noah Reid, of Schitt's Creek, plays the private investigator hunting for him, with Clark Backo as a local detective and Moss as a university professor. Out reports eight episodes and an October arrival on AMC+ in the States, with no specific date set yet.

On the question every Heated Rivalry viewer will ask: Out puts it plainly — the show “isn't focused on a steamy same-sex romance” — while adding that there is still plenty in it for those fans, including a kiss between Williams and Moss. Out frames it as part detective series, part supernatural thriller. Our own view is that the TIFF booking is worth taking as what it is — a real credit in a real festival strand — rather than as a substitute for the show you're actually waiting on.

Now the part everybody actually wants. Season two of Heated Rivalry is targeting spring 2027, likely April, according to Deadline's running account of the production. Creator Jacob Tierney told Gayle King on CBS, per that same account, that shooting begins in August once the writing is finished. The season adapts The Long Game, the sixth of Rachel Reid's Game Changers books, which picks up Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov a decade into a relationship they've kept hidden — Ilya wanting to go public, Shane wanting to protect his game.

Tierney has been candid that the register changes. “It really is different, and the challenge, from an adaptation standpoint, is you're in much more serious territory,” he said at BookCon this year, in remarks Deadline cites from Entertainment Weekly. “There's still lots of flirting, and there's lots of sex, but it's this kind of danger. This kind of ‘hotel room, adolescent sex' stuff is largely gone.”

He has also said he told Reid from the outset that he wanted to take the couple seriously rather than play them “pulpy and soapy.” Our own view is that this is the whole reason the show works, and that a second season with the giddiness drained out of it is a more appealing prospect than a repeat of the first.

The other date fans are tracking. Unrivaled, Reid's seventh book, was scheduled for September 29 this year and has moved to June 1, 2027. Deadline reports that Reid's Parkinson's symptoms have worsened, making writing more difficult, and that she cited this in asking for more time. “There's nothing more important to me than Unrivaled being the best book it can possibly be,” she said. “The writing is going well. I just wanna make a good book, and I need a little bit more time to do that.”

Meanwhile, the diaspora. Per the same Deadline account, Williams is set to star opposite Dylan O'Brien in the thriller Apparatus. Connor Storrie — Ilya himself — hosted Saturday Night Live, with Williams turning up in a cameo, and is attached to A24's Peaked, whose cast includes Molly Gordon, Emma Mackey and Dua Lipa. Tierney has a Netflix series order of his own, a drama about Alexander the Great and Aristotle.

That is a great deal of movement out of a single season of television, and our read is that it's what happens when a gay love story gets made properly rather than positioned carefully: the audience shows up, and the industry follows it. September will be the first look at whether the leading man travels.