Crave is pushing hard for the second season of ‘More Than Rivals’. The popular series featuring hockey, romance, and homoerotic tension has already earned a string of well-deserved awards, and after such a gala of qualities, we’re left sitting and waiting for more. Because episodes aren’t filmed or edited on their own, no matter how unfair the wait may seem.
Fortunately Crave is in a mood today to give us what we need. The production company has announced two pieces of news to start making us comfortable with the idea that the wait isn’t going to be long at this point. On one hand, they officially announced the expansion of the cast with the new star couple to keep an eye on, both for the romantic tensions that may arise and for the problems they will bring to our protagonists. On the other hand, and perhaps more interesting for many of us, is that the premiere of the second season will arrive in the coming spring of 2027.
The Tension Rises
The casting expansion not only tells us who to keep an eye on for the future, but what we can expect to be adapted in this second season. The new actors will be Justice Smith as Harris Drover, a cheerful and lively boy, and Charlie Gillespie as Troy Barret, a bully seeking forgiveness and redemption for his high school days. Together they will star in a love story like few others that will lead to questions about forgiveness and the boundary for saying where enough is enough.
The hiring of both actors is interesting, because their story does not become relevant until the fifth book of the saga that the series adapts, Game Changers. Both are the leads of ‘Role Model’, which follows Harris’s life as Community Manager of the hockey team he ends up adoring. It is easy to imagine how they will fit their dynamics with Shane and Ilya, but it also makes us wonder about the direction of the series in the future if characters like these come into play already.
The Future of Shane and Ilya
After adapting ‘Heated Rivalry’ and wanting to jump straight to the sequel instead of following the chronological order of the books, we could imagine Crave betting on continuing the story of Shane and Ilya in a standalone way, though we now see that isn’t the case. The tricky part may be adapting the third book in which they star, ‘Unrivaled’, which so far author Rachel Reid has delayed on a couple of occasions. Will they imagine new settings for the characters regardless of the novels or will they wait for their publication?
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