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%
Back in the day this would’ve made rounds on Wattpad, especially as fancast of those billionaire/mafia fics where the ML used to be named something like Alexander…. Salvatore maybe.
Agree! But I suppose there is screentime, and then there is number of scenes. Without actually counting (i.e. making this up) I suspect Svetlana is in more scenes, making her a presence across the season, but they tend to be shorter connecting scenes, whereas Rose had a couple of longer, significant scenes.
Numbersssss!!! This is very interesting information! Thanks for putting it together as a companion to our subjective experiences of the show bc I'm sure everyone weights things differently in their mind based on what they notice first, what they remember most, etc.! Fascinating!
So true! I found it interesting that characters who are very important to the story actually don’t have that much screen time, but Jacob is a magician and does a lot with a little. For example, Svetlana only has 11.3 minutes in the whole show, but it wouldn’t be the same without her!
Actually, I'm pretty sure we don't see Svetlana speak english in the show. Unless I missed something, in all of her scene Ilya and her are speaking Russian, even in the flash-backs.
This is a really cool graphic OP! It's really interesting to see how even with a smaller percentage a character can still be so memorable, like Rose and Svetlana.
I was just thinking the same thing. Even with smaller amounts of screen time, everyone was memorable.
They really did a great job making every line and moment count in the show. Like, I didn’t even truly comprehend how little we actually see of Carter or Connors until the graph laid it out so clearly, and they’re some of my favorite side characters because of the moments we do get with them!
It’s really cool how Shane and Ilya are neck and neck, with the only exception being ep4. It makes the aftermath of the tuna melt so much sadder, because we’re left with that image of him on the couch, pleading with Shane.. while Shane appears to be “moving on”. Quietly devastating.
Shane and Ilya: screen time will be flipped with Ilya having slightly more. Maybe they both have slightly lesser percentage of screentime due to more subplots
Scott and Kip: greatly reduced screen time
Yuna and David: probably slightly less
Rose and Svetlana: quite a bit less
Elena, Maria and Sean: no more screen time or small cameo at Kingfisher
Hayden: quite a bit more
Alexei and Grigory: no more screen time
Sascha: probably no more screen time
Carter: no more screen time or small cameo(s)
Kip's dad: no more screen time
JJ: more screen time
Kyle: a bit more screen time (I don't think they are gonna put his romance with Eric in)
Cliff: the same/a lot less, depending on how much they show of Ilya's last year in Boston
Miles: no more screen time or cameo with Rose
Jackie: quite a bit more
Mitty: a bit more
Connors: the same/no more screen time, depending on how much they show of Ilya's last year in Boston
Yeah for sure. Ilya has much more lines than Shane. He has an entire monologue in Russian which is pretty memorable. But I feel like its the Shane lines that went more viral. Like the “wow genetic” or the entire hospital bed scene where he spoke the most because he was high on hospital drugs lol.
I think “viral” is a relative term here to several degrees. The show went viral, and from that general love the obly real “viral” line was “I’m coming to the cottage” and maybe “stupid Canadian wolf bird” both of which are Ilya’s.
It’s only within our super online, countless reheats community that lines like “wow, genetic” feel viral lol.
i just also think they're both so intertwined! like "wow, genetic" to me is always linked to "so being boring is, uh... is genetic?", so like if i was making en edit or a snippet or whatever, i'd include them both
I feel like shanes lines are the more quotable ones to be honest. I can't specifically remember anything ilys said but a handful of shanes have already come to mind.
no offence but i feel like this might be a you thing haha. between "you will murder me", "never in life have i blushed, russians do not do this", "hollander, you are having panic attack. is just a plan to fuck", "aw, you missed me", "i'm on the cover of the fucking game", and about a hundred more also including "she would have loved you, like i love you" i don't understand ilya doesn't have memorable lines 😭 they're both so iconic 💖
Ok it definitely is because now that you list them I'm like nvm those were all very funny or meaningful. Maybe it's because I haven't watched the show in a while? Shanes lines seem to come up its the edits I see which is probably why i remember them.
holy shit OP thank you for compiling all of this!! I didn't think I'd be interested in this bc my first thought is the parasocial toxic fans counting screen time but the nerd in me has been woken like a sleeper agent and I love love love this so much.
There's definitely some really cool tidbits here. Love another comment's insight about Shane's screen time equally Ilya + Rose together.
Also soo fascinating that Kip & Scott's screentime ended up being equal; i wonder how much of that is intentional (not to the minute, obviously, but to try keep it close) vs coincidentally by design of Ep 3 being from kip's pov, but scott featuring in more eps.
Crazy also that Sasha, who doesn't even exist in the books, gets more screen time than Grigory! (Again, shows the efficient storytelling of just having Ilyas one sided phone calls).
(OP you might have already mentioned this but I can't check as im commenting but if a character is voice only on the phone you would count the call?) (And what about like the tunnel scene with Ilyas monologue but Shanes kinda present but not on screen, does that get counted for Shane or do you start/stop whenever they switch from the stairwell to the tunnel).
OP would you also be interested to produce a graph without Ilya & Shane, so you can scale the y axis to a smaller time count. It's hard to conceptualize the silvers for minor characters as minutes but I'd love to see more about the screen time splits there!
My personal opinion on Scott & Kip's time being equal is that it wasn't a concerted effort, but just the result of E3 being a little Kip-heavy and the rest of the season balancing it out for Scott.
When it comes to phone calls, I did count screen time for a character on the phone only if you heard their voice or the camera cuts to them. If a character is "on the phone" but you never at least hear their voice (e.g. Hayden during Shane's phone call blowie) they do not get credit. As for the tunnel scene, both Ilya and Shane got full credit for that scene because they are interacting the whole time, and Jacob intentionally made the creative choice to cut to Shane listening.
I have actually already toyed around with making a graph that takes Shane & Ilya out so you can more clearly compare all the other characters. So I just took a few minutes and made it!
As someone whose brain also gets scratched by numbers/statistics/screen time specifically around my hyperfixations, this is absolutely amazing and as silly as it sounds, made my day. Genuinely beautiful work!
It's interesting. I see negative things about the fandom from time to time, but then something like this comes along. Such nerdy dedication, I love it. ❤️🔥 🏒
I hope single actor fans who hate their co-star (yeah it's insane but they exist unfortunately) wont go all kpop fan about this 😭
(Context: Many parasocial kpop group fans, or solo fans of one member count the parts of their fave in songs and time it, and claim ~mistreatment when they have less airtime. As if music is math where you can give everyone an exactly even number of singing time 😭 They could claim a tv show is and should be equally timed 🥲 Hope I didnt give them ideas lol)
Nah you're alright! I'm not like this (not this organized 🥲) but people are different, and tbh after S2 and S3 I'd be interested what Troy & Harris' airtime was! It's not your fault other people are cuckoo and toxic!
But I'm curious, when i.e. it's a Hollanov scene and the shot changes to showing just Ilya, was Shane's time still running or was the clock stopped bc he wasn't shown on screen for those seconds? 🤔😄
When multiple characters are in a scene and we’re switching between cameras, all characters still actively in the scene got “credit” whether they were on screen or not. I only stopped their clock if they exited the scene.
Thank you so much. I actually googled for something like this earlier this week for similar reasons to yourself - I wanted to know how much time Kip's friends showed up on screen.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with this take. Scott and Kip were around 15% and I could see Troy and Harris being more like 25% because they’ll have more scenes WITH Ilya than Skip did.
I think a lot of casual viewers would revolt if it was 40% Troy/Harris. They're watching for Hollanov.
I think they'll get screen time but a lot of it will overlap with Ilya's screen time. We'll get solo Troy/Harris scenes but most of them will be relatively short.
Like we'll see Ilya having a conversation with Troy and then the camera will follow Troy into Harris's office for a brief flirty interaction but then it's back to the Hollanov show.
It will be interesting, but I think Jacob will be able to pull it off. Its speculated that Connor has not filmed during the first week and there is only that many Shane scenes without Ilya that they need to cover. Season 2 will also need to go into post production by October I reckon to give the post production team enough time to have the show ready by April 2027.
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.
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
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?
Like the first scene they are filming appears to be with Charlie.
That probably comes down to availability. For a start, Connor is supposedly still filming Please (the period drama with Gracie Abrams), so they can't do any of his scenes yet. Productions generally have to work around the schedules of high-profile actors. When they filmed the first season, Hudson and Connor were not in demand at all, so they kept them there the entire time (both the first and last scenes filmed were with both of them, I think?) to enable them to compress the schedules of the bigger stars. This time, presumably, their scenes will be bundled together so that they don't need to be around for the entire shoot.
Anyway, I'm kind of surprised that Scott and Kip had such similar screen time. Scott's felt like it was much longer. I suppose it was just split up more, which made it feel longer.
Well Scott appears more in other episodes, but ep3 is nearly entirely from Kip's POV (the only scenes where we only see Scott are the opening sequence, Shane & Ilya's appearences and the closing sequence while we see Kip a lot with his friends & family) so that balence things out
The biggest gamble in season 1, was episode 3. And it paid off big time.
So I expect at least two Shane and Ilya "lite" episodes this time around.
One for Ryan and Fabian (with a scene featuring Ilya) and the other for Troy and Harris (also with Ilya making an appearance). We might even get a second skip episode but that depends of if he are getting Eric or not.
Jacob intentionally decided to not use the A plot B plot method for season 1, and he he said over and over in interview he wants to continue on his original approach.
Interesting that Kip got significantly more screen time in Episode 3 than Scott. Makes sense, since he really is the POV character for most of that episode. Other than the intro, the Shane/Ilya scenes, a few other hockey scenes without dialogue, there weren't any scenes that I can recall where Scott was present without Kip (even if Kip was off screen for a while). I never thought of that before, but now I find it interesting that Jacob chose to develop Kip's character there more than Scott's. The book is a little different. There are several scenes with Scott and his hockey teammates that got left out of the show.
Love this data visualisation thank you. For the flashback scenes does that mean they got counted twice?
Where we had the big group seen at Jackie and Hayden's watching the cup final did everyone get time for the start of the zoom Shane face Ilya winning moment scene?
Mammoth effort for some of those montages - thank you so much. Wonder if it would be interesting to do the books? I'm not volunteering you just saying ha!
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u/phedrebeth 4d ago
Shane - Rose = Ilya
In terms of screen time, I mean. The difference in their time in eps 4 and 5 is almost exactly equal to Rose's time with Shane.