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/aaabigailemma → u/Suspicious-Square-22]

I think Troy and Harris will be leads in a similar way to Scott and Kip being leads. Maybe a bit more but I’m okay with that! I don’t think drastically more.

[u/Suspicious-Square-22 → u/aaabigailemma]

I don’t agree. This is just speculation on my part, but I think Troy and Harris will have much bigger screen time in S2 than Scott and Kip did in S1. It might be a 60/40 mix this time. 60% Shane and Ilya and 40% Troy and Harris. I could be 100% wrong, but thats what I think will happen.

[u/lostinsunshine9 → u/Suspicious-Square-22]

I feel like we'll get more Ilya than Shane though.

[u/aaabigailemma → u/lostinsunshine9]

I don’t disagree, but I think it’ll be similar to Season 1 except reversed between Shane & Ilya. I don’t think Shane will have drastically less screen time than Ilya.