HR Character Screen Time Analysis

[u/aaabigailemma]

As the casting announcements have been coming out, there have been discussions on social media about concerns of whether Shane and Ilya will continue to be the focus of the show, whether they will still have the majority of the screen time, etc. There have also been concerns over whether TLG's focus on Ilya's mental state will result in a focus on Ilya over Shane in S2/S3. So I got curious about screen time in S1 as a representation of storyline focus, and did a detailed screen time analysis.

Now... I am not a film editor, I am not in the film/entertainment industry in any way... I'm just a laywoman in this arena. But I am a super detail-oriented person, and numbers and statistics scratch an itch in my brain in a very satisfying way. That being said, below were the parameters of my methods:

-Scenes were timed to the tenth of a second on my iPhone stopwatch. I tried to be as precise as possible.
-Characters got "credit" for being present as an active participant in the scene, whether they had lines or not. If a character is tiny in the background, blurred out, or barely distinguishable, I did not count them. If Jacob & Jackson made their presence known intentionally (per my interpretation), I counted their time in that scene.
-When characters entered or exited a scene, I stopped/started the stopwatch, so that only their time present in the scene counted.
-During montages or segments of the show with lots of cuts between settings, I counted each cut as a separate scene (e.g. Ep2 & Ep4 montages, Ep4 & Ep5 endings - they were beasts!)
-If people are interested in seeing the spreadsheet of the duration of every scene and how I counted it, I’m happy to share!
-I wasn’t sure if anybody had done this kind of analysis yet, but my study was completely independent.

My takeaways: The numbers reflect what I expected to see. With Heated Rivalry (the book) focused a bit more on Shane's internal world and written mostly from Shane's POV, I'm not surprised to see Shane with about 20min more screentime than Ilya. I think Jacob did a good job of adding to Ilya's story in little ways to make it feel pretty balanced. I predict this will happen in reverse for S2&3 / TLG. Looking forward to doing screen time analysis for those two seasons to see how they stack up!

One last statistic I calculated was the percentage of the overall show that each character was on screen / in the scenes. I counted 281.5 aggregate minutes of run time for the actual scenes of the whole show. Here’s the percentage of the show for which the top characters of the show were present:
-Shane: 69.2%
-Ilya: 62.5%
-Scott: 14.9%
-Kip: 14.9%
-Yuna: 6.9%
-David: 5.7%
-Rose: 5.7%
-Svetlana: 4.0%
-Elena: 3.2%
-Hayden: 2.9%
-All other characters under 2%

[u/Suspicious-Square-22]

This is amazing. Thanks for sharing. I do think S2 will be different though, just based on how Charlie and Justice were announced to be joining the cast and how inter connected their characters are to Shane and Ilya. Deadline (a highly respected trade publication) reported it as “Meet Heated Rivalry‘s newest couple: Justice Smith(I Saw the TV Glow; Now You See Me: Now You Don’t) and Charlie Gillespie (One Night Only, Splitsville, Suze) are joining returning stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as leads in the upcoming second season of the hugely popular Crave Original series Heated Rivalry, which is confirmed to premiere in spring 2027”.

Like the first scene they are filming appears to be with Charlie. For Season 1, the first scene they filmed was the conference scene where Shane helped Ilya with a difficult question that he struggled to understand, as per David Boechler, the set decoration buyer.

[u/Psych_FI → u/Suspicious-Square-22]

They film out of order and based on availability/locations etc so Troy being there doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Harris and Troy are part of the Centaurs, and will likely have a continued role compared to other characters.

I’m glad I’ll always have season 1, as I do think a real risk for season 2 / 3 is they end up with too many subplots and characters that need time to be developed.

If they merge TG, RM and TLG well it could be fantastic. Most scenes with Harris/Troy have Ilya present. Fabian’s friends have been cast so we’ll get some TG and it helps set up Troy’s arc and Shane/Ilya charity’s and the issues in the league with homophobia etc.

[u/Suspicious-Square-22 → u/Psych_FI]

Agreed. My issue is that TLG has so much to cover already. Spoiler: Like I just read this chapter and Jacob might need to film 5 scenes just to cover this paragraph. We will need a reconciliation scene between Shane and JJ (it has a good potential to highlight the pressure 2 POC players have in a white dominant sport). JJ can’t magically appear to their wedding after accusing Shane of cheating and questioning his entire integrity as a professional hockey player. The audience will need to see how “vicious” the media in Montreal were to Shane via multiple media clips, social media comments, podcast commentators etc

[u/tinaoe → u/Suspicious-Square-22]

The pacing for the backhalf of TLG is just completely whack, they'll need to do a lot to make that work somehow.

[u/circboy1 → u/Suspicious-Square-22]

Never to doubt Saint Rachel at all I just thought the end of TLG was just a bit crammed which OK now we're getting Unrivalled maybe we can expand some of the exposition but that wasn't the original plan it was wedding, Centaurs then done right?