Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz reunited on the Emmys stage on Monday, September 14, in what was reported as their first joint public appearance in nine years.

READ MORE: Everything we know about the Boyfriend Material TV series so far

I’ve loved Buffy The Vampire Slayer since I was 12 years old, so this felt like such a special thing to happen.

The former Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-stars, who played Buffy Summers and the vampire-with-a-soul Angel, presented the award for outstanding lead actor in a limited or anthology series or movie, which went to Matthew Rhys for The Beast in Me.

Before they got to the envelope, the pair leaned straight back into their old on-screen romance for a bit.

Boreanaz recapped Buffy’s premise, calling her “a teenage girl chosen by fate to fight vampires, demons, forces of darkness” who “falls in love with a vampire with a soul, carrying around a couple 100 years of regret”.

Gellar noted her character’s love interest was “241 years old”, joking it was “more like a May-December 1787 romance”.

Then Boreanaz turned earnest for a second. “I always thought that Buffy and Angel were endgame,” he said.

“Well, I guess we won’t find out,” Gellar replied.

It was a pointed line. Hulu quietly cancelled Buffy: New Sunnydale, the planned reboot that would have seen Gellar’s Buffy training a new generation of slayers, before a single episode aired. Gellar has previously said the project fell over under an executive who was “not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series”.

The reunion wasn’t all jokes, though.

“David and I would like to acknowledge that it has been a tough two years for our beloved cast and crew,” Gellar said, turning the moment into a tribute.

Buffy has lost three of its own since 2025. Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s sister Dawn, died in February 2025 aged 39. Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander Harris, died in March 2026 aged 54; his family said he passed away in his sleep of natural causes. Anthony Head, who played Watcher Rupert Giles, died in June 2026 aged 72; his daughters said he passed away due to complications from pneumonia.

It’s the kind of loss that would have been unthinkable to the cast during the show’s original run, when Buffy was, famously, all but ignored by the Emmys despite the acclaim it built over seven seasons and a devoted fanbase that has only grown since. A reunion on the Emmys stage, even nearly a quarter of a century later, landed as a small piece of the recognition the show rarely got at the time.

On the red carpet beforehand, Gellar wore a hot pink backless gown to Boreanaz’s classic suit, and the pair posed for photos together ahead of the ceremony. When a photographer asked for a kiss, Gellar laughed it off: “I don’t think his wife will appreciate that.”

Boreanaz has been married to Jaime Bergman since 2001.

Nine years after their last joint appearance, and with a reboot that never made it to air, it turns out the hardest thing in the world for Buffy and Angel is just to live in it.

READ MORE: ‘It’s the most important thing in the whole world’: Michelle Brasier’s ultimate Buffy love letter

WARNING: This piece discusses plot details, character arcs and endings for Blindsided (Fake Boyfriend book four) and the Winning You novella (book 4.5, part of the Fake Boyfriend Breakaways collection). If you’d rather go in blind, bookmark this for after you’ve read them.

Four books into Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series, and Blindsided is the one that got me the most — even if it doesn’t quite knock Deke off the top spot. It’s a close second, and after six years of two men aggressively not talking about their feelings, I’d say it earns the placing.

Who are Miller and Talon?

Shane Miller and Marcus Talon are new leads rather than background characters graduating from an earlier book, which makes Blindsided a bit of a structural departure for the series. They’re college best friends turned NFL teammates on the Chicago Warriors — the same team Matt Jackson plays for in Trick Play. Talon left for pro ball six years before the book opens; Miller buried what he felt for his best friend under his own drive to get drafted. Now Talon has taken a trade to Chicago specifically to play alongside Miller again, and Miller has no idea how to be near him without giving himself away.

Like the previous books before (and the Puckboys books), both men narrate, and the book’s blurb lays out exactly how long they’ve been circling each other.

READ MORE: Two Australia-based authors, one hockey league and 10 books of chaos — here’s where to start with the Puckboys series

Miller: “When Talon left to play pro ball six years ago, the hole in my chest confused me. I focused my heartache into making my own NFL dreams come true, and by the time I was drafted, the longing I had for my best friend was buried deep. Now he wants everything to be like it was in college, but we can’t have threesomes and be reckless like we once were. The media storm would be enough to break both our careers. That’s not my biggest concern though. The torch I had for him burns brighter after so long apart, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Marcus Talon is straight. I need to stay away from him.”

READ MORE: Starting ‘Fake Out’: the origin story behind Puckboys’ most polished PR power player and kicking off Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series

Talon: “Years ago, Miller and I made a pact that we’d win a Super Bowl together. When I’m offered a position on his team in Chicago, I don’t hesitate. I move across the country to chase a dream that’s a decade old. Only, now that I’m here, he’s avoiding me every chance he gets. If he was anyone else, I’d cut my losses. But this is Shane Miller — the guy who makes everything better just by existing in my universe. The guy I’d do anything for. The guy who’s more to me than a brother, a friend, or even a teammate. I’m not going to let him get away.”

Miller and Talon have had their share of threesomes and foursomes over the years, but never with each other — not since college, anyway. Now they’re on the same NFL roster and it’s starting up again, minus the touching, plus a lot of loaded looks.

READ MORE: Trick Play, the Fake Boyfriend book that introduced Matt Jackson

The twist Finley doesn’t mention until the thank-yous

Here’s the thing I didn’t clock until I got to the author’s note: Blindsided doesn’t actually contain the fake boyfriend trope. Two best-friends-to-lovers NFL players, six years of pining, zero fake dating required — and it works so well I didn’t notice its absence until Finley pointed it out herself. It’s confirmed on her own site, too: “unlike other books in the Fake Boyfriend universe, this entry does not contain a fake boyfriend trope.” Four books in, and the series can apparently carry itself without its own gimmick. I loved that more than I expected to.

READ MORE: Trick Play was book two of the Fake Boyfriend series — here’s how it went

READ MORE: Deke: the Fake Boyfriend book that finally made me pick a favourite

The Damonverse continues

The found-family sprawl keeps expanding. Maddox gets a cameo, and we learn it’s been about a year since he and Damon got together — a small detail, but it made me disproportionately happy to check back in on them. Ollie (from Deke) and (supporting Soren) turns up for a press event and Ollie’s partner Lennon Hawkins, the journalist from earlier books, interviews Miller and Talon directly. Damon King keeps quietly collecting queer sportspeople onto his client roster, one at a time.

The most affecting crossover is Matt Jackson’s. With Matt, Talon and Miller all on the same Warriors roster, Miller and Talon’s coming out inevitably lands on Matt too, and Finley uses Blindsided to keep exploring what Matt’s post-coming-out life looks like, rather than treating Trick Play‘s ending as the end of that story.

READ MORE: Deke, the Fake Boyfriend book my favourite so far

Winning You, and the accents that got away

Blindsided is followed immediately by Fake Boyfriend Breakaways’ final novella, Winning You (book 4.5), following Marty and Luce. I went in expecting a direct follow-on from Blindsided and got something else entirely: Winning You has very little to do with book four, and works much more as a prequel to book five. It took me an embarrassingly long time reading it to stop trying to connect it back to Miller and Talon.

What I didn’t expect, and loved, was the setting. Winning You is set mostly in Australia, which means actual Australian English on the page for once in a series that otherwise lives entirely in the US. Marty is a physicist; a nice Back to the Future nod given his name, and he picks up the nickname “Doc” for it. Luce teases Marty as “the devil” early on, then can’t resist the follow-up: “Which is funny, coming from me,” the first hint that Luce is short for Lucifer. Marty gets one of the better jokes in the series when Luce introduces himself: “Loose? Not really a great name if you’re a bottom.” Marty also turns out to be a big fan of Radioactive, the band Jet (Matt’s younger brother from Trick Play) fronts. He’s referred to as Jay throughout Winning You, which is the confirmation that “Jet” has been a nickname all along.

Winning You started life in the Heart2Heart anthology before it was extended and folded into the Fake Boyfriend Breakaways collection, released in September 2019. When I noticed that the lead characters were Aussie, I had to check out the audiobook. The audiobook is narrated, like most of the series, by Alexander Cendese and Iggy Toma … and was … a little disappointing. I was hoping the narrators would attempt to give Marty and Luce Australian accents the way Novi got a Russian accent in Puckboys book nine, Stubborn Puckboy, but no such luck. Both are performed American, which gets a little grating whenever someone says “MAL-BORN.”

Finishing Winning You means I’m officially done with Fake Boyfriend Breakaways: Rebound, It’s Complicated and now this. I loved all three, but this one might be my favourite of the set, purely for the novelty of an Australian setting inside an American series.

Where Blindsided sits in the series

Blindsided was released in March 2019, slotting in as book four of five, ahead of Hat Trick. Between Deke, Blindsided and the Breakaways novellas, this reading order has turned out to be far more interconnected than I expected going in.

Next up: Hat Trick, book five, which finally gives Jet Jackson his own story and is paired, if my notes are right, with hockey player Soren.

READ MORE: Starting ‘Fake Out’, the origin story behind this whole reading project

deke, noun

/diːk/ — a deceptive move or fake used to trick an opponent out of position, most famously in ice hockey. The word is a Canadian abbreviation of “decoy”.

It’s a fitting title for book three, because the entire Fake Boyfriend series runs on exactly that: people faking one thing to get the thing they actually want. Naming this one after the move itself might be the most honest title Aussie author Eden Finley has given the series yet.

Deke was published on January 5, 2019, and after three books and a bonus novella into my read, it’s my favourite of the series so far.

READ MORE: Trick Play was book two of the Fake Boyfriend series — here’s how it went

Who are Ollie and Lennon

Oliver “Ollie” Strömberg is a 24-year-old winger for the New Jersey Dragons. He’s out to his family, but not to the NHL, and his parents. They’re a close family who have lived around Boston their whole lives but think he can’t be happy until he’s out to everyone. He’s the youngest of five brothers, grew up in Milton, Massachusetts next door to the Carmichael family (more about them later), started his career with the Boston Beavers, and is best mates with his old Beavers teammate Tommy Novak. He’s also a member of the Gay Brigade and (as we’ll discover in the Puckboys series) Queer Collective, and a client of sports agent Damon King.

The book’s blurb sets him up from his own head: “Word of advice: don’t come out to random guys in public restrooms. Even if they’re charming and adorably nerdy and offer to help. My family believe I can’t be happy if I’m not out to the world. I have a bitter ex-boyfriend and an unstable NHL career to show for it. A fake boyfriend seems like an easy and quick solution to get my family off my back, and this guy is volunteering. I take him up on it without asking his name.”

Lennon Hawkins is the other half of the pairing, a sports journalist who was covering football for Sporting Health Magazine before getting reassigned to the hockey beat. He’s not supposed to see Ollie again, and Ollie’s not supposed to find out he’s a reporter. Lennon later gets let go from the magazine, picks up a part-time PR gig with the Dragons, and freelances for Sports Illustrated before eventually joining them full-time. Like Ollie, he’s a member of the Gay Brigade.

His side of the blurb: “Word of advice: learn how to introduce yourself properly. In my defense, I don’t recognize Ollie Strömberg right away. I cover football, not hockey. I’m not supposed to see him again, and he’s never supposed to find out I’m a reporter. That all changes when my editor reassigns me. It’s a lesson I should’ve learned by now. Nothing’s changed since high school. Jocks still hate nerds. But even worse, athletes hate journalists. Especially ones who know their secret.”

A bathroom, a bad decision and a stolen name

The set-up is a classic: Ollie comes out to a stranger in a public restroom, panics about his family’s dinner pressure, and talks the guy into playing fake boyfriend for the night. He never asks his name. He should have. When Lennon turns up on the hockey beat weeks later, both men realise exactly who they’ve been dealing with, and the two jobs that hate each other most — athlete and journalist — end up stuck together anyway.

The detail I keep coming back to is the name Ollie made up on the spot: Clarke. It sticks. Ollie’s family keep calling Lennon “Clarke” long after the fake relationship stops being fake, which feels like the whole book’s thesis in miniature: the deke was supposed to be temporary, and none of it stayed fake for long.

The bonus story: It’s Complicated

Book 3.5, It’s Complicated, is the second novella in the series, and it might be my favourite piece of bonus content Finley’s written so far. It follows Max Strömberg, Ollie’s brother, and his childhood best friend Ash Carmichael, who grew up next door to each other in Milton and, by this point, live together above their tattoo shop.

The novella picks up just after the New Jersey press conference that closes out Deke, and plays out over the following seven months. Ash had been engaged to Taylor at one point, and was Ollie’s boyfriend for a stretch before that, which makes Max’s long-buried feelings for him exactly as messy as they sound. It was published on September 26, 2019, and also appears in Finley’s short story collection Fake Boyfriend Breakaways.

Finley admits in her author’s note that she never actually planned to give Max and Ash their own story — it was reader demand that talked her into it, and she says she’s grateful readers pushed. I couldn’t agree more. Knowing what happens to Ash adds so much texture to the earlier books, and it shows a side of him — and of Ollie and Lennon’s relationship — that I wasn’t expecting to get. Maybe it’s the boy-next-door thing, but Max and Ash might be creeping up on my favourite pairing in the whole series.

What’s next

Next up is Blindsided, book four and if Deke is any indication of where this series goes once it stops being about the fake part and starts being about the boyfriend part, I’m not in a rush to finish it.

READ MORE: This is where I started with the Fake Boyfriend series — the Fake Out origin story

WARNING: This piece discusses plot details, character arcs and endings for Trick Play (Fake Boyfriend book two), the Rebound novella and its bonus scene. If you’d rather go in blind, bookmark this for after you’ve read them.

I’m back with book two of Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series, and this time the two people I was quietly rooting for in the background of book one get their own story.

READ MORE: Starting ‘Fake Out’: the origin story behind Puckboys’ most polished PR power player and kicking off Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series

Who are Matt and Noah again?

We already met both of them in Fake Out. Matt Jackson was the college friend Maddox was hooking up with before Damon showed up. Noah Huntington III was Damon’s beautiful, obscenely rich best friend — the one Damon nearly set Maddox up with, before deciding he wanted Maddox for himself.

Matt is an NFL tight end for the fictional Chicago Warriors, and Trick Play opens with about the worst possible way to have a football career end: getting photographed in a compromising position at a gay bar. He’s outed involuntarily, his agent goes into damage control, and the fix on the table is becoming “the poster boy for gay football players” whether Matt wants the job or not. He doesn’t. He just wants back on the field.

Noah, meanwhile, is the son of Noah Huntington II — a former New York governor, now a sitting senator and he’s biracial, old money, and living in a Manhattan townhouse he inherited from his grandfather. He also founded Rainbow Beds, a charity providing housing for LGBTQIA+ youth, which tells you plenty about the gap between how Noah shows up in the world and how his own father actually sees him.

That gap is the hook. Noah’s best friend Damon — yes, that Damon, now Matt’s agent and, per the blurb, Matt’s first-ever client — talks Noah into playing fake boyfriend to Matt. “It’s supposed to be a win-win,” Noah says in the book’s blurb. “I get to stick it to my politician dad who thinks no one is good enough for the Huntington name, and Matt’s reputation of being the bad boy of football dies.”

Matt isn’t exactly sold on his half of the deal either. “If only my fake boyfriend wasn’t Noah Huntington III,” he says in his own blurb, “the most arrogant, entitled rich guy in the world.”

Neither of them plans on it turning into anything real. Obviously, it does. “What I don’t expect is to start caring for the guy,” Noah says. “That’s not part of the plan. Then again, neither is fooling around with him on my private jet.”

Matt is also a member of the “Gay Brigade” — Finley’s version of the found-family device I flagged when I worked through the Puckboys series (their NHL Queer Collective is basically the same idea, a decade of books later).

READ MORE: Two Australia-based authors, one hockey league and 10 books of chaos — here’s where to start with the Puckboys series

It’s a nice reminder Finley was already building this kind of queer athlete support network back in 2018, well before she started co-writing Puckboys with Saxon James.

The novella hiding inside it: Rebound

Here’s the bit I wasn’t expecting going in: Trick Play has its own spin-off, a novella called Rebound, and it forms part of the book Fake Boyfriends: Breakaways Specifically, it kicks off on the New York-to-Bermuda cruise that features in Trick Play, then plays out over about two months back in New York.

Rebound belongs to Aron Roe and Wyatt Black. Aron was Noah’s on-and-off hookup for about a year before this book (they’re still friends), and Wyatt has been quietly carrying a college crush on Aron since their Newport University days, back when Aron friend-zoned him without a second thought. A few drinks later — scotch, then tequila, not that anyone’s counting — Aron decides Wyatt is exactly the rebound he shouldn’t be having.

It’s a small, contained story, but it’s stitched firmly into the same universe as everything else. Noah, Damon and Aron’s old college girlfriend Skylar all turn up, all four of them friends from their Newport days. If you’re the kind of reader who wants every corner of a series filled in, Rebound is very much for you.

The bonus scene, and the book I’m reading next

Trick Play also comes with a bonus scene available at EdenFinley.com, told from the point of view of someone we haven’t properly met yet: Jet Jackson, Matt’s little brother.

Jet is a member of the Gay Brigade too, and the lead singer of a band called Fallout. The bonus scene is set after the Super Bowl (Trick Play itself runs from the end of a football season through to that Super Bowl), at an LGBTQIA+ charity benefit hosted by his now brother-in-law Noah, and it’s Jet’s nervy live debut of a deeply personal new song about growing up with Matt in a homophobic household. He spends the whole performance fixated on a tall stranger up the back of the room just to steady his nerves, and then the guy leaves before the song is even finished.

It’s a small scene, but it’s clearly doing set-up work. Jet is the lead of book five, Hat Trick, which is now next on my list. For anyone who’s been following along since the Puckboys pieces, Jet actually already got a cameo over there too, turning up in Clueless Puckboy. Small world, one author.

READ MORE: Heated Rivalry season two: the new castings, and the theory behind that shaved head

Where Trick Play sits in the series

Trick Play was first published in June 2018, with Rebound following two months later that August. They sit second and second-and-a-half in a five-book main series that runs Fake Out, Trick Play, Deke, Blindsided and Hat Trick, plus, it turns out, three novellas tucked in along the way.

Two books in, and Finley is already doing what she’d later do across all 10 Puckboys books: recurring friend groups, cameo after cameo, and a found-family network that keeps expanding sideways as much as it moves forward.

Next up: Deke, book three, then Blindsided, before I finally get to Jet’s book. If Trick Play is any indication, the connections are only going to get more tangled from here, in the best way.

I’ve come to the Fake Boyfriend series completely backwards, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

By the time I picked up Fake Out, the first book in Eden Finley’s series, I’d already spent ten books in the Puckboys universe and met Damon King as a fully formed adult: sharp suit, sharper instincts, the guy who corners struggling party boy Oskar Voyjik’s new PR manager Lane Pierce in Shameless Puckboy and offers him a job at King Sports Agency. He’s polished. He’s a little intimidating. He clearly has his life together.

READ MORE: Here’s where to start with the Puckboys series

So starting Fake Out and meeting a much younger, much more chaotic version of that same man has been genuinely fun. This is Damon before King Sports even exists.

The set-up is classic Finley: Maddox O’Shay fled his hometown of Clover Vale, Pennsylvania, for New York five years earlier after telling his childhood sweetheart he was gay to escape a marriage he didn’t want. Now he’s been invited back for her wedding, and he needs a fake boyfriend to bring with him — which is how he ends up bribing Damon, his best friend Stacy’s brother, into spending forty-eight hours pretending to be in love with him. Damon only agrees because Maddox can get him a meeting with a potential client. This is a man building King Sports one favour at a time, years before we see him running it.

The baseball injury that ends Damon’s playing career and pushes him into sports agency work in the first place is mentioned early, which retroactively explains a lot about the guy who later builds an entire agency out of representing NHL players who can’t safely come out. He’s protective of his clients in Puckboys because he’s lived the “career-ending, life-altering moment” version of professional sport himself.

What I didn’t expect was how much of the wider universe is already seeded in book one. Stacy King who is Damon’s sister and Maddox’s best friend since their university days, works alongside Maddox at Parsons Media, a New York ad agency, which is its own neat little world-building beat. Maddox’s brother-in-law Tommy Novak (married to his sister Jacie) is best friends with Ollie Strömberg — who I already knew from Puckboys as a member of the NHL Queer Collective. Two books, two authors, one wedding-adjacent family tree.

Fake Out also debuts couples who get their own books later in the series: Matt Jackson and Noah Huntington III (who go on to headline Trick Play), Aron Roe and Wyatt Black (Rebound), and Ollie Strömberg, who gets his own book in Deke before he’s ever the established Puckboys regular I met first. It’s the same trick Finley and her co-writer Saxon James pull off in Puckboys: everyone’s already in each other’s orbit before they’ve earned their own spotlight.

Which brings me to the flowchart. If you’ve ever tried to explain the combined Eden Finley/Saxon James universe to someone who hasn’t read any of it, you’ll understand why fans needed an actual diagram to map it out. The one going around — nicknamed “the Sadenverse mess,” and for good reason — colour-codes every series by author: Finley’s solo work (Fake Boyfriend, Famous, CU Hockey, Mike Bravo Ops, Headstrong) on one side, Saxon James’s solo series (Divorced Men’s Club, Frat Wars, Accidental Love, Dating Disaster, Football Royalty, Can’t Say Goodbye) on the other, and the books they’ve written together (Puckboys, Up in Flames, Bastard and the Heir) sitting in between as the join. Dashed arrows loop back and forth across the whole thing for the character cameos that don’t respect series boundaries at all — Fake Boyfriend curling into Puckboys being exactly the kind of crossover that got me here in the first place.

It’s a lot. It is, genuinely, a mess. I look forward to making my way through the series... eses, plural, apparently indefinitely.

Next up: Trick Play, then Rebound, Deke, Blindsided, Hat Trick and the Final Play novella — and, somewhere well beyond that, the rest of the complex Sadenverse.

A24’s UK arm has optioned the television rights to Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, according to Deadline, which broke the news on April 29. If you’ve read the book (and if you haven’t, get onto it), you already know why Hollywood came calling. Here’s everything confirmed, rumoured and denied so far.

The story so far

Boyfriend Material follows Luc O’Donnell, a 28-year-old disaster with a washed-up rock star for a father and a tabloid-wrecked reputation, who recruits uptight barrister Oliver Blackwood to fake-date his way back into the public’s good books. Published in 2020, it’s the first book in Hall’s now-completed London Calling trilogy, and it built its audience the old-fashioned BookTok way — word of mouth, then a lot of it.

READ MORE: My review of Boyfriend Material, the book that started it all
READ MORE: My review of Husband Material ahead of the release of Father Material
READ MORE: My review of Father Material, the final of Luc and Oliver’s adventures

Who’s behind it

A24 UK holds the TV rights. Beyond that, the studio hasn’t named a writer, showrunner or director, and there’s no word yet on whether Hall himself will have any hand in adapting his own book for the screen. A24 has increasingly gone looking for its next series in the BookTok pile, and Boyfriend Material‘s built-in, rusted-on readership makes it an obvious pick.

What we don’t know yet

No broadcaster or streamer. No writer or director. No casting. No release window. In short: almost everything is still to be decided, and there’s no timeline yet for when any of it will be.

READ MORE: Rereading ‘10 Things That Never Happened’: the Christmas rom-com I think I’ll read every year

The buzz that got it here

The book’s numbers speak for themselves — it was named a best book of the year by outlets including Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads and The Washington Post, and it’s stayed a BookTok and Bookstagram fixture for six years running. Fans haven’t waited for an official casting call either: there’s already a dedicated fan-casting page for Luc and Oliver on myCast, and Louis Partridge’s name keeps coming up in fan edits doing the rounds on TikTok. None of that is official casting — it’s fans getting ahead of themselves, which is usually a good sign for how much a book is loved.

Australian readers have plenty of reason to be invested too: Boyfriend Material has stayed a steady seller here since 2020, and copies are easy to find through Booktopia, QBD and Dymocks if this news has sent you (back) to the source material.

Hall himself has been cagey. Asked directly about a TV show during a Q&A in June, he said: “I’m afraid I do not have information on this. I am not in control of this — that’s happening kind of in the background. The TV industry is a really, really complicated industry, and for my own mental health I just kind of don’t think about it, because nine times out of 10 it doesn’t happen. You can make a pilot for something and it won’t happen. So never say never — there have been some signs that have looked promising, but I have no control over it. It is definitely better for me if I put that out of my mind until it happens, or definitively doesn’t happen.” (Watch the full answer here, from the 29:25 mark.)

Worth noting

Adaptation delays are the rule, not the exception, for queer rom-com bestsellers: Red, White & Royal Blue took four years to get from page to screen, and Heated Rivalry took about two. If Boyfriend Material follows a similar path, don’t expect an announcement any time soon, Hall’s own “don’t think about it” approach is probably the healthiest way to watch this one too. In the meantime, the full London Calling trilogy is out now, along with the Material World spin-off, if you need something to hold you over.

Father Material, published in June (2026), is the third book in Alexis Hall’s London Calling trilogy, and going in, I knew it would probably be the last time I got Luc and Oliver as the main event. Fake dating got them together in Boyfriend Material. A wedding that wasn’t tested them in Husband Material. Father Material asks the harder question: what do you do once you’ve already got the life you fought for?

Years into their relationship and thoroughly domestic, Luc and Oliver watch their friends hit milestone after milestone — careers, weddings, babies — while they adopt a dog named Spud and decide, almost by accident, that their hearts and their home have room for something more. That something turns out to be Jasmine, known as Jas, a teenager they take in as foster carers. It is, unmistakably, a book about what it takes to become a parent when biology was never going to be part of the plan.

READ MORE: My review of Boyfriend Material, the book that started it all
READ MORE: My review of Husband Material ahead of the release of Father Material
READ MORE: Rereading ‘10 Things That Never Happened’: the Christmas rom-com I think I’ll read every year

There’s something quietly perfect about Luc, of all people, ending up here. His own father, washed-up rock star Jon Fleming, was barely a presence across three books; Luc spent Boyfriend Material convinced he wasn’t worth loving because of it. Watching him choose, deliberately, to be the steady adult in someone else’s life — the thing he never really had — is the kind of full-circle ending this trilogy earned rather than one it simply reached for.

I loved having the chance to spend time with Luc and Oliver one more time, and I loved that Hall uses that time to show real growth — not just in each of them individually, but in how they operate as a couple. This is a trilogy that started with Luc barely able to admit he wanted to be loved and Oliver too buttoned-up to say he already did. Watching them figure out, together, how to be steady for someone else, after two whole books of learning how to be steady for each other, felt like the only place this story could have ended up.

Small spoiler ahead. Jas arrives as a sulky teenager with walls built up for good reason, and Hall doesn’t rush her past that. I’ve seen the comparison made online that Jas feels a lot like Ellery from Hall’s How to Bang a Billionaire — a similarity I loved the moment I read it, even if I can’t fully vouch for it myself. What I can vouch for is that Jas never feels like a plot device bolted on to give Luc and Oliver a reason to grow up. She feels like a whole person, which is exactly what a foster kid deserves from the book she’s in. Hall is careful to show parenthood in more than one shape here — not a replacement for the family Luc and Oliver might have had “the traditional way”, but its own real thing, with its own clashes and adjustments and unglamorous, fierce love.

And then there’s the joke that had me laughing out loud on a reread: Bridge, Luc’s best friend since book one, giving birth on an actual bridge. It’s such a small, daft, very Hall thing to do — the kind of literal pun he’s been sneaking into this series since he named Luc’s charity CRAPP — and it’s exactly the levity this book needs alongside everything it’s asking of its two leads.

Looking back across all three books, it’s a genuinely satisfying arc to have followed: a fake relationship that becomes real in Boyfriend Material, a wedding that has to fall apart to mean anything in Husband Material, and now a family that looks nothing like the one either of them grew up with, and works precisely because of that. Odile is still around, still chaotic, still one of my favourite characters in fiction; Bridge is still the best friend a disaster like Luc could ask for, bridge births and all.

I cried at the end, saying goodbye to these two. Six years after I first met them in a Sydney lockdown, watching Luc O’Donnell go from certified disaster to someone genuinely, quietly father material undid me a bit. I’m only half joking when I say I’m holding out hope for a future Grandfather Material somewhere down the line. In the meantime, I’m hoping Luc and Oliver turn up as a cameo somewhere in a future Material World book, the way Jonathan Forest did before he got his own. I’d take five pages. I’d take one.

Luc and Oliver forever.

Meanie Jonathan Forest got one scene in Husband Material. It was enough for Alexis Hall to give him his own book. 10 Things That Never Happened, published in October 2023, is the first instalment of Material World, the spin-off series that grows out of the London Calling trilogy, and it might be my favourite thing Hall has written yet.

Sam Becker manages the struggling Sheffield branch of Jonathan’s bed-and-bath retail chain, and when he’s summoned to London for what he’s sure is a firing, he panics, trips, bumps his head — and lets his boss believe he’s lost his memory. Guilt-ridden Jonathan takes him home to recover. What starts as a lie to dodge an awkward conversation turns into something neither man planned on.

It helps that Sam is easy to love from the first page. His full name is Samwise Eowyn Becker — a dead giveaway about the kind of parents he had, and the kind of person he’s grown into: loyal, a little self-effacing, the one who actually notices when someone on his team is struggling. His Sheffield store is billed as a “grumpy-sunshine” pairing waiting to happen, and Sam’s crew, Claire and Des especially, feel like a found family long before Jonathan does.

I went in sceptical of the amnesia trope, expecting a fairly straightforward “bump on the head, forgets everything” set-up. That’s not what this is. Sam’s amnesia is a lie from page one, which means the tension isn’t “will he remember” but “how long can he keep this up, and what does he actually learn about Jonathan — and himself — while he’s pretending not to know anything at all.” Hall gets real surprises out of that structure, and I’m glad I gave it the benefit of the doubt.

Before the story even starts, Hall includes a short author’s note that tells you everything about how carefully this book is written: “I’m aware that a lot of my readers are international and, therefore, might not be super familiar with specific UK dialects. The narrator of this book is from Liverpool, and in my head, his narration has a noticeable Scouse accent. If you want to know what that sounds like, check out Wayne Rooney, Cilla Black, Mel C or The Vivienne” (RIP The Vivienne). It’s a small thing, but it set the tone for a book that clearly loves its narrator’s voice.

Hall bills this one, in his own words, as “a standalone Christmassy fake amnesia romcom,” and the Christmas setting earns its place. So much of what won me over happens away from Jonathan altogether: Sam folding himself into Jonathan’s genuinely chaotic family, Nanny Barb and Aunt Jack and Uncle Johnny and all, in a way that says more about who Sam is than any scene with Jonathan alone could.

READ MORE: My review of Husband Material, where Jonathan first turns up

I’ve seen people online say they’re confused about what the “10 things” of the title actually are. To me it’s not a mystery — it’s the book’s five parts, each one a pair: losing his job and losing his memory; going home and meeting the boyfriend; trimming the tree and facing the past; keeping his head and keeping his heart; coming clean and saying goodbye. Ten things, five parts, and the whole shape of the book laid out before you’ve read a word of it.

Jonathan starts the book about as insufferable as his own staff think he is — and by the end, I loved watching him tone it down, layer by layer, without ever losing what makes him him. Sam’s arc won me over just as much: sceptical, self-deprecating, quietly brave when it counts, and never quite as foolish as the lie he’s telling makes him look. I went in unconvinced by the premise and came out completely sold on the love story — grumpy-sunshine done properly, with a boss/employee dynamic that could have felt uncomfortable and instead felt earned.

Honestly, I think this is going to become one of those books I reread every Christmas. My review of Father Material, the London Calling trilogy’s final word on Luc and Oliver, is still next — but I suspect I’ll be back in Sheffield and London with Sam and Jonathan again long before next December rolls around.

Straight off the back of Boyfriend Material, I went into Husband Material, book two of Alexis Hall’s London Calling trilogy, published in August 2022. If the first book was about Luc O’Donnell convincing the world he could be someone’s boyfriend, the second is about him convincing himself he can be someone’s husband — and it turns out that’s a much harder trick.

Two years on from the fake-dating scheme that started it all, Luc and Oliver are a real couple heading to a run of other people’s weddings, and Luc panics his way into an accidental proposal. The book is structured like Four Weddings and a Funeral — three weddings, a funeral and a wedding and that structure is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, for better and for worse.

The better: I loved spending more time with Luc and Oliver actually together, facing grown-up problems instead of tabloid ones. What does marriage mean to two men who grew up with wildly different templates for love? Does commitment need a ceremony to count? Hall trades the will-they-won’t-they of book one for something harder to write and, when it lands, more rewarding: two people who already love each other, trying to work out if they want the same life.

Oliver gets just as much of that scrutiny as Luc does, which is where the book earns its keep. He spent book one as the steady, uptight one holding Luc together; here, it’s Oliver’s turn to unpack the “good son” performance he’s been running his whole life, and his parents’ quiet, well-mannered disapproval turns out to cut deeper than any tabloid headline ever did to Luc. Watching the golden boy of the couple turn out to be just as flawed as his disaster boyfriend is one of the book’s best tricks.

READ MORE: My review of Boyfriend Material, the book that started it all

The worse, and my only real complaint: Husband Material spends a lot of time with the wider cast. Bridget’s wedding opens the book, complicated by her fiancé Tom going missing before the ceremony. Miles, Luc’s ex who sold him out to the tabloids in book one, turns up at his own wedding with a new partner. The CRAPP crowd gets big set pieces of their own. All of it is fun, but every chapter spent on someone else’s drama is a chapter not spent on Luc and Oliver, and they’re the reason I picked the book up.

That said — Odile is still one of my favourite characters in fiction, and Bridge remains the best friend every rom-com hero deserves. I’ll take a crowded book with great side characters over a lonely one any day. I just wanted a little more of the two people on the cover.

Spoiler warning for the ending. The finale of Husband Material is genuinely divisive among Hall’s readers online — some feel short-changed by where Luc and Oliver land, having built up to a traditional wedding for 300 pages. For me, it’s the perfect, logical conclusion for both of them. Hall spends the whole book asking what Luc and Oliver actually want, as opposed to what a wedding day is supposed to look like, and the ending answers that question truthfully rather than neatly. I’d rather an ending that’s right for the characters than one that’s right for the genre. Plenty of readers wanted the big traditional wedding they’d been promised across three other people’s ceremonies; I wanted Luc and Oliver to stop performing a version of commitment that belonged to somebody else’s love story, and that’s exactly what they get.

One more thing worth flagging for anyone rereading: keep an eye out for Jonathan Forest, who has a brief cameo in Husband Material. He goes on to headline 10 Things That Never Happened, the first book in Hall’s Material World spin-off series, opposite a bed-and-bath store manager named Sam Becker. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment on a first read, and a genuine treat to spot on a second one — the kind of detail that makes rereading Hall’s backlist feel like its own reward.

My review of Father Material, the trilogy’s already-published final word on Luc and Oliver, is next. After the chaos of Husband Material — and everything it made me want for Luc and Oliver — I’m ready to see how Hall closes this saga out, and whether the “logical conclusion” I keep defending holds up as the ending of the whole story, not just this one book.

I read Boyfriend Material for the first time in 2020, during Australia’s first COVID lockdown. Six years on — and with A24 confirmed in April to be developing the novel for television — I picked it up again, this time as homework ahead of Father Material, the concluding book in Alexis Hall’s London Calling trilogy. No broadcaster, cast or release date has been announced yet, but the news that Luc and Oliver are headed for the screen felt like the perfect excuse for a re-read.

For anyone who hasn’t met them: Lucien “Luc” O’Donnell is a 28-year-old disaster with a washed-up rock star for a father and a reputation in tatters, thanks to one very compromising tabloid photo. To save his job at a beetle conservation charity with the unfortunate acronym CRAPP, he recruits Oliver Blackwood — a barrister so upright he practically squeaks — to play his boyfriend for a season of excruciating public appearances. It is meant to be fake. It does not stay that way.

I came to Boyfriend Material fresh off Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, and told myself I already knew the tricks: a flawed-yet-perfect lead, a fake-dating trope worked half to death, an ending you could see coming from the back cover. Every reason to roll my eyes was sitting right there on the page. I loved it anyway, cover to cover.

What got me… what still gets me…; is Luc and Oliver’s chemistry, all opposites-attracted with barbed banter and unearned tenderness, and the sheer generosity of the supporting cast. Odile O’Donnell, Luc’s ex-actress mother, is one of my favourite characters in fiction, full stop: a woman who treats chaos as a love language and somehow steals every scene she’s in.

It also helped that Boyfriend Material refused to flatten queer life into one shape. Alongside Luc and Oliver, there’s a gay couple mid-way through adopting a child, a straight couple who have decided, loudly and against family pressure, that they don’t want kids, and two women whose decades-long friendship matters more to them than any romance ever has. Nobody in this book is punished for wanting a different version of happiness to the person next to them.

On that “flawed-yet-perfect lead” cliche specifically: Luc narrates his own low self-esteem and covers it with a cruelty that, on paper, should have been unbearable to spend 300-odd pages with. It wasn’t. Hall earns the softening, and by the time Luc lets Oliver see past the jokes, the cliche stops feeling like one at all.

Revisiting the book six years later, ahead of Father Material, was a joy I hadn’t expected. Rediscovering just how complicated Luc’s life is. Going back to the absent father, the messy exes, the self-loathing he papers over with one-liners — hit differently on a second read. So did his friendship with Bridge, which does as much heavy lifting for Luc’s arc as the romance does.

Boyfriend Material matters to me for a simple reason: it opened the door to Alexis Hall, now one of my favourite authors working today, through the rest of the London Calling trilogy and beyond. It was followed by Husband Material in 2022, and this year by Father Material, which closes out Luc and Oliver’s story — my review of that one is still to come. Christina Lauren, the New York Times and USA Today bestselling duo, called Boyfriend Material “hilarious, witty, tender, and stunning” on its release, and it went on to be named a best book of the year by Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads and The Washington Post. Six years on, I’d argue that praise still undersells it.

If you’d rather listen than read, BookTube reviewer Tori’s take on the audiobook (narrated by Joe Jameson) is worth seeking out. She credits narrator Joe Jameson with giving “all the different characters” distinct, “amazing, beautiful and unique” UK accents, and lands on the same thing I keep coming back to: a genuinely healthy, communicative queer relationship at the centre of a genre that doesn’t always offer readers one.

Rereading Boyfriend Material before Father Material felt less like homework and more like catching up with old friends — the kind you didn’t realise you’d missed until they were back in the room. That’s the part I wasn’t expecting from a re-read six years on: not just remembering why I loved this book, but falling for Luc and Oliver all over again.

I judged this book entirely by its cover, and I’m not sorry.

I found Joshua Hortinela’s debut, Hate You to Love You, completely by accident on a casual browse through my local Dymocks. It had its own table: Dymocks’ book of the month, given over entirely to one title, which isn’t something I’d seen the chain do quite like this before, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I was mid-vow at the time. I’ve got an epic to-read list and a strict no-new-books rule to match it. But I was drawn to this cover, so I picked this one up anyway.

Turns out I love queer romance and had somehow missed this one entirely. Not for much longer.

Hate You to Love You is out now through Atria Australia, Simon & Schuster’s romance imprint (RRP $24.99) and Hortinela’s first novel after close to 10 years working as a bookseller.

The premise

The book follows Carlos Reyes, a writer in the middle of a full-blown quarterlife crisis.

Carlos is a hopeless romantic – a character type I will never tire of – and his running commentary of favourite rom-com films is a genuine joy to read.

But he’s heartbroken, too. He’s three years out from a break-up whose real reason isn’t revealed until much later in the book (no spoilers from me here), and he’s still grieving his father, who died in circumstances the book doesn’t rush past.

The once hopeless romantic is now just... hopeless. Carlos can’t find his mojo, professionally or otherwise.

Then the opportunity of a lifetime lands: the chance to write a career-making profile on Claudia Leighton, a blockbuster author turned recluse.

The catch is Claudia’s publicist for the tour. It’s Elliot Simpson – arrogant, insufferable, and the man who broke Carlos’s heart. Weeks on the road with him is the price of the gig.

READ MORE: Tobias Madden proves friendship deserves its own love story in Quite the Pair

Why it’s so Sydney

What I loved most is how much of this book is actually Sydney. Dymocks gets a mention. So does Gleebooks, which I now need to visit before my book ban makes that awkward. The Rover, Surry Hills, Newtown — it’s all here, and it’s all real.

As a queer Australian who’s grown up reading mostly American and English fiction, getting to picture these actual streets in my head while I read isn’t something that happens often for me. It mattered more than I expected.

The tour eventually takes Carlos and Elliot further afield too, through Dublin, Edinburgh and London, so readers chasing the European leg get that as well.

Carlos and Elliot’s dynamic carries the most of the fun and games of the book. I loved being inside Carlos’s head, and I loved watching these two circle each other.

My one gripe: I can’t picture a publishing house funding an international junket for one digital journalist writing a single article, for anyone. But this is a rom-com doing rom-com things, and I was happy to suspend my disbelief, that’s probably my own bias from digital publishers always getting the short-end of the junkets stick.

Hortinela himself is a bookseller and a well-known face on Bookstagram (which yes, now I’m finally following), and it shows in how lovingly this book handles the industry.

If you want comparisons, trade reviewers have already pitched this one alongside Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall and Rachel Reid. Good company for a debut to keep.

READ MORE: I made Toby’s Kinky Lemon Meringue Pie from Alexis Hall’s For Real

The verdict

And the cover. I need to talk about the cover. Now that I’ve finished the book and know these two characters, there’s so much told in their expressions alone; you can see exactly where their journey is headed.

I blasted through Hate You to Love You in two days, and I think you will too. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s joyful, and it’s exactly the kind of book I want more of on Australian shelves.

I’m already looking forward to whatever Hortinela writes next. Go support an Aussie queer author: buy this one.

READ MORE: Just how many MM hockey romance novels exist? The number is wild

When I heard Quite the Pair was being billed as Tobias Madden’s first book “for adults”, I did a double take.

I discovered Madden through his debut, Anything But Fine, and devoured the whole thing in a single weekend. I finished it obsessed with whatever he was going to do next.

That obsession sent me into Dymocks, in the middle of Sydney’s CBD, to ask a staff member for a copy of Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell, Madden’s second novel. I was mildly embarrassed to be walked straight downstairs to the children’s section.

It was only then I learned Anything But Fine, Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell and Wrong Answers Only are all shelved as young adult fiction. Regardless, I loved all three, and they hold a special place in my heart.

READ MORE: ‘Love is hard to tackle’: why After the Siren is the AFL romance we needed

I love Madden’s writing, especially as an Australian queer author. Up until now, his gift has been for beautiful romances between young men.

Quite the Pair is different. It’s still a love story, but this time the love belongs to two best friends, Austin and Sydney.

Austin and Sydney’s simultaneous breakups send them back into each other’s orbit and into a shared New York City apartment, where they pledge to break their toxic patterns over a 12-month lease.

I loved the dynamic between the two of them, and I loved how real it felt. Gay men can, without being too stereotypical, be kind, loving and devoted to our “hags” but every so often, we can take them for granted, too.

That’s exactly what Quite the Pair captures. Sydney is the fixer, the people-pleaser; Austin is, at times, the occasionally self-absorbed single gay man leaning on her.

I was so drawn to Sydney’s story that I found myself rooting for her hardest of the two.

I also loved how the story is told: through first-person thoughts between the two protagonists, but also through artefacts; letters, voicemails and videos, tracing Austin and Sydney’s friendship across the years.

READ MORE: Just how many MM hockey romance novels exist? The number is wild

New York City is practically its own character, and Madden, who now lives there himself, writes it with the kind of affection that transports you straight into it.

Madden grew up in Ballarat before a career in musical theatre took him to New York. He has described Quite the Pair as “a tale of second chances, life in New York City, musical theatre, corporate jobs, dating, sex, gay stuff, and finding yourself (again or for the first time) in your thirties”, and called it “a love letter to friendship and all the incredible women in my life”.

I also loved the small cameo from Sydney – the town, not the character – towards the end of the book.

Speaking of cameos: one of my favourite things about Madden’s first three books was the way characters crossed over between them. I remember a surprise appearance from Anything But Fine‘s Luca, Jordan and Amina in Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell.

Madden has said in interviews that he’s a sucker for a cross-novel cameo, so I went in hunting for one in Quite the Pair. I’m assuming there wasn’t one, given this book is aimed at an adult audience rather than his young adult universe – though if there was, I missed it.

I don’t know Madden at all, but I’m so proud of him for writing this book. It was a joy to read and a little sad to finish, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Quite the Pair is out now through Penguin Books Australia, RRP $34.99.

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There’s a moment in chapter nine of Alexis Hall’s For Real where Toby is baking a lemon meringue pie in Laurie’s kitchen, and things get kinky.

Laurie, our slightly older sub, has clamps on his nipples. There’s an anal hook involved. And somehow, in the middle of all of that, Toby the Dom (not to be confused with Dom the Dom) is still thinking about curd consistency and whether his meringue is going to weep.

It’s one of the most talked-about scenes in Hall’s Spires series: a kink scene and a baking scene, running at exactly the same time, neither one interrupting the other. Grace, one of the side characters, later calls the pie “foodgasmic” when she gets her hands on a slice. Having now made the thing myself, I get the enthusiasm.

I don’t have a boyfriend. I definitely don’t have an AGA. I’ve always wanted an AGA, the wildly expensive British cooker (and I’m told wildly impractical), that lives in Laurie’s kitchen and that every home baker with a For Real hangover has since coveted. What I do have is a normal Sydney apartment oven, a bowl of lemons sitting on the table (thanks Dad), and an afternoon with nothing better to do than find out if a book’s most iconic dessert holds up outside the page.

Short answer: it does. Completely.

The pie itself is a classic lemon meringue with a shortcrust base, a proper lemon curd filling, and a meringue piled on top and torched until it’s freckled brown. What makes it Toby’s pie, rather than just a pie, is the one trick he lets slip mid-scene: don’t let the curd cool down before you top it with meringue.

READ MORE: My favourite Alexis Hall book is finally an audiobook, and it was worth the wait

Most lemon meringue recipes tell you to let the filling set before you go anywhere near it with egg whites. Toby does the opposite. He keeps the curd warm, so when the meringue goes on, the heat cooks it gently from underneath as well as from the top. I followed his lead, and it worked exactly as advertised with no soggy, weeping gap between the curd and the meringue, just one pie that held together properly, layer to layer.

It was also, genuinely, delicious. Sweet where it needed to be, sharp where it needed to be, the kind of dessert that tastes more complicated than it is. Which is the other thing about this recipe: it’s simple. A handful of ingredients, no obscure techniques, nothing that sends you to a specialty grocer. Which might be the most romance-novel thing about the whole scene, the most iconic pie in queer romance fiction right now is one that anyone with an oven and a bowl of lemons can actually pull off.

READ MORE: ‘For Real’ flips the kink romance script and it might just be my favourite Alexis Hall book

Like Laurie in that scene, I was “powerless and playful” making my way through it. Minus the hook and the clamps, obviously. Just me, a mixing bowl, and a fair amount of laughing at myself for how invested I’d gotten in the outcome of a fictional character’s dessert.

If you want the actual recipe with measurements, method, the lot, it’s included in full in the reprint of For Real, book three of Hall’s Spires series, alongside Waiting for the Flood and Glitterland. I’m not going to republish it here. Buy the book, support Alexis, and bake it properly.

This isn’t the first time one of Hall’s books has sent me down a rabbit hole, and it won’t be the last. Between this, the Spires series and his Material trilogy (waiting to make Odile’s special curry), I’ve got a running list of scenes I want to eat my way through.

Ask a romance reader how many gay hockey romance novels exist and even the devoted ones struggle to answer.

The reader-curated Goodreads shelf “Best M/M Hockey Romances” currently sits at 439 books. A second list, tracking new releases only, added 214 titles in 2025 alone.

The genre has exploded since Heated Rivalry – adapted from Canadian author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels – became a hit for streamer Crave, with HBO Max carrying it here in Australia.

READ MORE: All the new faces joining season two of Heated Rivalry

Australian readers are very much part of the trend. Romance fiction sales in Australia have grown at an average of 49 per cent over three years, with sports romance – ice hockey titles among them – driving much of that growth, according to the ABC.

Dedicated romance bookstores have been opening around the country to keep up.

Local authors are getting in on it too. Darcy Green’s After the Siren, released in 2025, follows two queer men on a fictional AFL team, arriving not long after Mitch Brown became the first current or former male AFL player to publicly come out as bisexual.

READ MORE: ‘Love is hard to tackle’: why After the Siren is the AFL romance we needed

So who are the big names driving the numbers? Reid’s Game Changers series – Game Changer, Heated Rivalry, Tough Guy, Common Goal, Role Model and The Long Game – is up to six novels, with a seventh, Unrivaled, due in 2027.

American author Sarina Bowen’s Him universe, several titles co-written with Elle Kennedy, now runs to at least seven books: Him, Us, Good Boy, Stay, Epic, Top Secret and My Kind of Guy.

Then there’s the campus hockey world built by Eden Finley and Saxon James. Their CU Hockey series runs to nine books, and its spin-off, the Puckboys series, is already up to 10 – with the final book, Charming Puckboy landing in 2026.

READ MORE: Here’s where to start with the Puckboys series

Track the year-by-year Goodreads lists and the growth curve is stark: 54 new MM hockey romance titles catalogued in 2022, 108 in 2023, roughly 148 in 2024 and 214 in 2025. The 2026 list has already reached 134 – with months of the year still to go.

The genre even found its way into New York politics this year. Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged New Yorkers to stay home and read during a January snowstorm, name-checking Heated Rivalry – and e-book checkouts of the novel at the New York Public Library jumped 529 per cent almost overnight.

Publishing insiders point to a straightforward explanation for why studios keep coming back for more: built-in fanbases. “What’s exciting about BookTok is that it is not to be manipulated ... you can’t predict what might pop,” talent agent Mirabel Michelson said, per The Ankler.

Heated Rivalry is no longer the only hockey romance on screen, either. Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus series – following her college hockey team but told through male-female pairings – premiered on Prime Video this year, and Netflix’s Finding Her Edge joined the wave in January.

As for why hockey specifically keeps producing romance hits, authors and critics point to the same ingredients: enemies-to-lovers rivalries between teammates or opponents, the built-in intimacy of a locker room “found family,” and a real-world backdrop of athletes slowly coming out that gives the fiction extra weight.

The appetite shows no sign of slowing. Heated Rivalry season two is currently filming for a 2027 premiere on HBO Max, adapting The Long Game as its source material.

Between Reid’s seventh Game Changers novel, the Puckboys series and whatever BookTok decides to champion next, anyone who thought 439 books was the ceiling for this genre should probably think again.

I finished After the Siren and immediately wanted to hand it to every friend I have who loves a good sports romance.

Darcy Green’s novel follows Theo Bestavros, an AFL player chasing redemption after a career setback, and Jake Cunningham, a teammate carefully protecting a public image that leaves no room for the truth about his sexuality.

Forced into shared training sessions, the two go from mutual needling to genuine friendship, and then into something neither of them planned for. The tension that carries the book isn’t manufactured. It’s Jake’s fear of coming out publicly running headlong into Theo’s need to protect the comeback he’s fighting for, and Green lets that conflict breathe rather than rushing to resolve it.

What struck me most is how beautifully Australian the whole thing feels. The AFL setting isn’t wallpaper, it’s the engine of the plot, and Green writes the sport with the kind of specificity that only comes from someone who actually loves it.

That grounding in something so unmistakably local, paired with a genuinely tender queer love story, is a combination Australian romance hasn’t had nearly enough of.

READ MORE: Everything you need to know about Eden Finley and Saxon James’ Hockey Romance Series

The romance itself is the reason to pick this one up. Theo and Jake’s dynamic moves from prickly banter to real vulnerability in a way that feels earned rather than rushed, and by the back half I was fully invested in watching two guarded people let each other in. It’s playful and joyful in places, as Penguin’s own description of the book promises, but it doesn’t shy away from the real cost of Jake’s decision, which is where the emotional weight lands hardest.

READ MORE: Heated Rivalry season two adds two more stars as filming begins

It’s worth noting After the Siren has already been optioned for a screen adaptation by Mad Ones Films, which tracks: this is a story built for that treatment, with a clear three-act shape and two leads whose chemistry would translate straight to screen.

After the Siren by Darcy Green is out now through Penguin, RRP $24.99.

WARNING: This article discusses the plots, character arcs and [top-line] endings of all 10 books in the Puckboys series, including who ends up with who. If you’d rather go in blind, bookmark this for after you’ve read them.

Ten books, one hockey league and more queer romance tropes than you can throw a puck at — the Puckboys series by Eden Finley and Saxon James is about to get its proper moment in actual bookshops.

The two Australia-based authors originally self-published Egotistical Puckboy, the first book, back in February 2022, reportedly starting the series as a creative project during pandemic lockdowns, according to a report from Books+Publishing.

Since then, the series has sold more than 1 million ebook and audiobook copies through Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, and built up a genuine BookTok following in the process.

UK publisher Canelo Romance has now bought the world English print rights to all 10 books, with with first six books, starting with Egotistical Puckboy officially hitting shelves in paperback for the first time distributed in Australia and New Zealand through Hardie Grant.

Books six to 10 finally get paperback releases October 27, 2026, but are currently available in e-book and audio formats. (Note, the 10th book Charming Puckboy was first released earlier in this year, so you might find it in book stores already)

Canelo editorial director Emily Bedford said she “devoured” the series on Kindle Unlimited and “couldn’t be more thrilled” to help bring it to print.

Eden Finley described the books as being about “journeys of self-discovery, questioning societal expectations and, most of all, acceptance,” while Saxon James said “queer love and joy deserves its space in the market.”

If you’ve been mainlining Heated Rivalry, this is your next obsession — same closeted-athletes-falling-for-each-other energy, considerably more books to get through. The books are definitely in the spirted of Heated Rivalry, but a beautiful masterclass in world building.

READ MORE: Heated Rivalry season two adds two more stars as filming begins

So what actually is Puckboys?

Each book follows a different couple within the same sprawling NHL universe, collecting players who form the NRL Queer Collective. The back half of the series mostly connects back to one hockey dynasty: the Kikishkin “Kiki” brothers, three siblings — Connor, Easton and Lachie — who each get their own book.

Several characters also cross over from Finley and James’s earlier CU Hockey series, and by the back half of the series, the out players and their partners have banded together into a group they call the NHL Queer Collective, which becomes its own running plotline.

It’s low-angst, high-heat and very funny, and the couples largely stay in each other’s orbit from book to book, so there’s a real hangout-show quality to reading it in order. Here’s every couple, in order.

Book 1: Egotistical Puckboy — Ezra and Anton (February 10, 2022)

Ezra Palaszczuk is Boston’s cocky, partying NHL forward, best friend to Westly Dalton (of the CU Hockey series) and the son of a Polish immigrant father who had his own five-year NHL career.

Anton Hayes is Philadelphia’s disciplined winger, who has kept his sexuality out of the tabloids for his entire career — until one night with Ezra threatens to blow it all up.

The official blurb sums up the dynamic best: Ezra says Anton “rivals me for most egotistical puckboy in the league,” while Anton says Ezra has “an ego bigger than Massachusetts... and okay, maybe he’s the sexiest man I’ve ever known.”

It’s rivals-to-lovers with real bite. Ezra and Anton spend most of the book insisting they can’t stand each other while doing very much the opposite, and it sets the tone for the entire series: filthy banter first, feelings a close second.

Book 2: Irresponsible Puckboy — Tripp and Dex (May 11, 2022)

Tripp Mitchell and Dex Mitchale play together for Las Vegas and share a surname close enough that fans have taken to calling them “the Mitchell brothers,” despite being no relation.

Tripp is gay and hopelessly in love with his straight best friend. Dex is straight, terrified of commitment after a string of failed relationships, and comes up with an “irresponsible” solution to his fear of settling down that puts both his career and his friendship with Tripp on the line.

It’s a marriage-of-convenience plot layered over years of oblivious pining, and it’s the book that made me the most nervous for two characters I already loved by page one. And the joke of the two brothers who are married that continues through the remaining books never had me not laughing.

Book 3: Shameless Puckboy — Oskar and Lane (October 27, 2022)

Oskar Voyjik is San Jose’s biggest party boy, tattoos and all, and after a very public alleyway mishap caught on CCTV, the team assigns new PR manager Lane Pierce to fix his image.

Lane moves in to keep Oskar on a tighter leash, but the more he tries to reform hockey’s resident wild card, the more he uncovers the sensitive person underneath.

This is the “fake babysitter, real feelings” book of the series, and it’s also the one where the stakes feel highest: Lane isn’t just risking his heart, he’s risking his entire career if the lines he’s crossed become public.

Book 4: Foolish Puckboy — Aleks and Gabe (April 13, 2023)

Fresh off a divorce, Seattle’s Aleksander “Aleks” Emerson wants fun, dating and absolutely nothing serious — then he meets firefighter Gabe Crosby, who, in the book’s words, is “a disgrace to the Crosby name” because he doesn’t even like hockey.

Gabe takes newly single Aleks under his wing (and into his bed), fully intending to keep things casual while he works towards the family life he actually wants.

It’s the softest entry so far, all drunken confessions and accidental domesticity, and Gabe might be the most quietly endearing love interest in the whole series.

Book 5: Clueless Puckboy — Quinn and Vance (October 5, 2023)

Buffalo forward Ayri “Quinn” Richard — best friend of Asher Dalton from the CU Hockey series — has a groin injury he’s mortified to admit to, which means regular, extremely awkward treatment sessions with team trainer Vance Landon.

Quinn is desperate to hide his feelings for Vance. His body, unfortunately, keeps giving him away.

This one leans hardest into comedy, and Quinn’s sheer, blushing cluelessness makes him one of the most purely charming leads in the series.

Book 6: Bromantic Puckboy — Bilson and Miles (April 18, 2024)

After multiple failed marriages, veteran Cody Bilson trades Seattle for Nashville hoping a fresh start will cure his “attachment problems.”

Nashville’s beloved rookie goalie Miles Olsen — straight, adored by the whole team, and a devoted maker of friendship bracelets — decides the best way to stop Bilson chasing after women is to redirect that energy somewhere else entirely.

Both men insist, repeatedly, that they’re straight. The book has other ideas. It’s the series’ most overtly comedic “bi-awakening” entry, and Miles in particular is an absolute delight.

It was reading this book that I started to become dubious. Are we really to believe that two straight bros are happy to hook up, only to fall in love. But honestly, by the end of this I was sold. Love is love.

Book 7: Forbidden Puckboy — Easton and Knox (September 19, 2024)

Easton Kikishkin, the middle of the three hockey-playing Kikishkin brothers and an out NHL player for Colorado, has been in love with his big brother’s best friend since he was 12.

Knox Addison, a hockey referee, has spent a decade hiding exactly those feelings, terrified of what it would do to his friendship with eldest brother Connor if anything happened.

A week spent together at a charity match forces the issue. It’s a slow burn with genuine ache to it, made trickier by the fact that Knox keeps getting rostered to referee Easton’s games well after the pair get together — a running joke the series never quite lets go of.

Book 8: Possessive Puckboy — Connor and Parker (March 27, 2025)

Connor Kikishkin is the eldest, most protective brother and Colorado’s biggest star, and his world tilts when the team is bought out by a new owner: Parker Duchene, the billionaire he mercilessly bullied in high school.

Parker says he bought the team to honour his late father — and, as he puts it, because “emotionally playing with one of my many high school tormentors is a nice bonus, too.”

This is the messiest, most morally tangled entry in the series, built on genuine hurt rather than simple misunderstanding, and it’s all the better for it.

Book 9: Stubborn Puckboy — Novi and Colby (August 2025)

Radimir “Novi” Novicov is a star NHL player for Anaheim, originally from Russia, closeted for his entire career and with two years left on his contract before he plans to quietly disappear from public life.

Colby Kessinger played alongside Novi 17 years earlier, before an almost-kiss ended their friendship and sent Colby’s own playing career off the rails. Now Colby is back as Anaheim’s assistant video coach — working for the team, and for the man who once broke his heart.

It’s the series’ most quietly devastating entry, dealing directly with the reality that some players still can’t safely come out, and it earns every bit of its slower, more emotional pace.

Book 10: Charming Puckboy — Lachie and Sam (April 16, 2026)

Lachie Kikishkin, the youngest brother, is the NHL’s projected next generational star and, according to teammates, has an uncanny knack for finding stray animals — earning him the nickname “Disney princess.”

Home in Colorado for the off-season, Lachie keeps running into Sam Trevors, a nurse at the local animal hospital who used to mock teenage Lachie’s constant rescue missions and never noticed his obvious crush.

Grown-up Lachie has other ideas. It’s the sweetest, fluffiest entry in the series, and closes out the main run with the kind of hopeful, everybody’s-happy energy the whole series has been building towards.

The NHL Queer Collective

By the time the series catches up to itself, the out players and partners have formed their own found family: Ollie Strömberg, Caleb Sorensen, Foster Grant, Asher Dalton, Westly Dalton, Ezra Palaszczuk, Anton Hayes, Tripp Mitchell, Dexter Mitchale, Oskar Voyjik, Aleksander Emerson, Ayri Quinn, Cody Bilson, Miles Olsen, Radimir Novicov, Lachie Kikishkin, Easton Kikishkin and Connor Kikishkin.

It’s a nice structural trick: every new book adds another member to a support network that already has years of in-jokes and shared history, so later instalments feel lived-in rather than repetitive.

My only sadness is we never got to see if Ezra’s wish of having a Queer Collective Player in every single NHL team came to fruition.

How it all wraps up

A bonus scene attached to Charming Puckboy, narrated by Lachie, catches up with the wider cast after the main series ends, and it’s worth flagging for anyone invested in the ensemble.

Lachie is traded home to Colorado to finally play alongside brothers Connor and Easton, with partner Sam relocating too. At his first game in Colorado colours, Knox — still, somehow, getting rostered to referee Easton’s games years into their marriage — drops the puck against a Buffalo side captained by a retiring Quinn, who’s stepping away to become a stay-at-home dad.

Colorado wins, and the celebrations move to the Queer Collective’s end-of-season gathering, where Ezra and Anton deliver the night’s big news: they’re not splitting up, as the group briefly fears, but retiring together at season’s end.

With the Collective suddenly down to a handful of active out players, Ezra runs an impromptu, lip-sync-battle-style contest to choose his successor as captain, and the group ultimately votes Lachie into the role. It’s a nice full-circle moment for the series’ youngest lead, and hopefully a signal that Eden Finley and Saxon James see plenty of life left in this universe yet. Fingers crossed for a [another] spin off series.

The verdict

If you want angst-free, extremely horny, genuinely funny queer sports romance with a cast that keeps circling back on itself in satisfying ways, *Puckboys* is an easy series to recommend, and an even easier one to binge.

Egotistical Puckboy and the books 2-6 are currently out in paperback, through Canelo Romance, distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Hardie Grant. Books 7 to ten till be released October 27, 2026.

Exclusive: Comedian and actress Michelle Brasier, you’ll know her as Lindy in Network 10’s Ghosts Australia, as Viv Nicholson in the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man, or as one half of cult comedy duo Double Denim — has declared Buffy the Vampire Slayer “the most important thing in the whole world.”

Full disclosure: I’ve been obsessed with Brasier’s comedy for years, and it turns out we share exactly the kind of unhinged Buffy devotion that only fellow Scoobies understand.

READ MORE: Comedian Michelle Brasier on keeping her brother’s ashes in a sandwich bag

Brasier didn’t hold back on what the show means to her generation.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer is so important to the culture,” Brasier said. “It created millennials.”

“It’s the most important thing in the whole world,” she added.

She was just as passionate about Sunnydale’s resident Watcher.

“Giles is a queer icon,” Brasier said. “Giles is so important to us.”

Fashion got its moment too.

“Buffy had the best outfits,” she said. “Cordelia had the best outfits.”

For Brasier, the show’s legacy runs deeper than the wardrobe. She said Cordelia joining Buffy’s gang “taught us that weird girls could be witches and could be powerful.”

“And just because they were shy didn’t mean they didn’t have any power, through Willow,” she said.

“And we learned that hot girls could be smart and could be helpful, through Cordelia and through Buffy.”

Add in the show’s “quippy” dialogue, and Brasier says it all adds up to a defining aesthetic.

“The outfits and the quippy writing ... it shaped what is known as ‘90s camp for me,” she said.

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Brasier, grew up in Wagga Wagga, NSW, before moving to Melbourne in 2007 to study musical theatre, graduating from Ballarat’s Arts Academy at Federation University in 2010.

She cut her teeth at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with the 2014 Game of Thrones parody Winter Is Coming, before launching solo show Space Tortoise in 2016.

Her main gig, though, is Double Denim, the comedy duo she formed with Laura Frew, which picked up a Golden Gibbo nomination at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) for their self-titled 2017 show, Best Newcomers at Sydney Comedy Festival for Double Denim Adventure Show in 2018, and the MICF’s Moosehead Award in 2020.

Brasier has also earned acclaim for her solo theatre work, including Average Bear, Reform and Legacy, and has crossed over to the screen more recently, playing Viv Nicholson in 2024’s Better Man, appearing as Lindy in Ghosts Australia, and popping up in The Greg Larsen Show — on top of a memoir, My Brother’s Ashes Are in a Sandwich Bag, shortlisted for both the 2025 Russell Prize for Humour Writing and the inaugural John Clarke Prize.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s seven seasons are streaming now on Disney+ in Australia, so if Brasier’s enthusiasm has you Googling “am I secretly Team Giles”, you know what to do this weekend.

Heated Rivalry season two has confirmed two more castings, with The Half of It’s Daniel Diemer and former Britain’s Got Talent star Shaheen Jafargholi joining the hockey drama as production officially gets under way.

Diemer will play Ryan Price, a former Toronto Guardians enforcer and defenceman, while Jafargholi takes on Fabian Salah, an indie musician based in Toronto.

Jafargholi is also known for playing Shakil Kazemi in EastEnders and nurse Marty Kirkby in Casualty.

Both characters are drawn from Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novel The Long Game, according to student outlet The Post Athens, making Ryan and Fabian the show’s third central pairing after Shane and Ilya, and Harris and Troy.

The castings were confirmed by Canadian streamer Crave on Instagram on August 17 — the same day filming officially began on the new season.

Series creator Jacob Tierney has also flagged a tonal shift for season two.

“It really is different, and the challenge, from an adaptation standpoint, is you’re in much more serious territory ... this kind of ‘hotel room, adolescent sex’ stuff is largely gone,” Tierney said, according to The Post Athens.

Actor Francois Arnaud, who played Scott Hunter in season one, has reportedly been spotted filming in Los Angeles, though his return has not been officially confirmed by the show.

Meanwhile, fans have been distracted by a very different season two mystery.

Connor Storrie, who plays Russian hockey star Ilya Rozanov, went viral after debuting a shaved head on set, prompting fans to nickname him “baldnor”.

Australian LGBTIQA+ outlet QNews reported one fan theory suggested Storrie’s character catches lice this season, forcing the buzz cut.

Diemer and Jafargholi join a growing list of season two additions.

READ MORE: All the new faces joining season two of Heated Rivalry

Emily Hampshire, Edvin Ryding, Robert Naylor, Sabrina Jalees and Priyanka were announced as new cast members earlier this month, alongside previously confirmed additions Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie.

Hudson Williams and Storrie return as the show’s original central couple, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, with the Harris and Troy storyline also continuing into season two.

Heated Rivalry season two is set to premiere on HBO Max in the Southern Hemisphere autumn 2027, with Australia among the regions getting access alongside the United States, Europe (excluding the UK, Ireland, Spain and Turkey), Latin America and parts of Asia including the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Heated Rivalry has locked in five new cast members for its second season, led by Schitt’s Creek alum Emily Hampshire.

The series based on Rachel Reid’s bestselling Game Changers book series, revealed the additions on Friday, August 14.

Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek, Marvel’s VisionQuest) joins as Vanessa, with Young Royals breakout Edvin Ryding stepping into the role of Luca Haas.

Mile End Kicks actor Robert Naylor rounds out the new additions as Wyatt Hayes, while comedian Sabrina Jalees (I Used to Be Funny, Black Mirror) takes on Farah Jalali.

Canada’s Drag Race alum Priyanka (Drag Brunch Saved My Life, Meet Me Next Christmas) completes the new line-up as Tarek.

The five join a previously announced season two cast that includes Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie, who are playing Harris Drover and Troy Barrett respectively. The pair’s romance is drawn from Reid’s fifth Game Changers novel, Role Model, my favourite in the series and marks the show’s second central couple alongside Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.

The casting has divided fans online. In Reid’s books, Harris is described as stocky, with his body type central to his arc and insecurities, and some readers have said online they’re disappointed the show isn’t reflecting that in Smith’s casting, arguing it removes rare heavier-set queer representation from the story. Others have welcomed seeing more of Reid’s hockey universe make it to screen at all.

Reid appears to have addressed the reaction obliquely on Instagram, referencing the scepticism that initially met the casting of Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as Shane and Ilya: “Thinking about all the people last summer who told me the casting for Ilya and Shane was wrong and bad…” She didn’t name specific critics or say directly whether she expects Smith and Gillespie to win sceptics over.

Season one leads Williams and Storrie are also back, reprising their roles as rival hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.

The first season followed Hollander and Rozanov’s journey from secret rookie fling to years-long entanglement of love, denial and self-discovery, bound together by rivalry and ambition neither of them fully understood.

Season two is set to premiere on HBO Max in the Southern Hemisphere autumn 2027, with Australia among the regions getting access alongside the United States, Europe (excluding the UK, Ireland, Spain and Turkey), Latin America and parts of Asia including the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Series creator Jacob Tierney returns as writer, director and executive producer, with Mike Goldbach joining as co-writer for season two.

Brendan Brady and Jayme Alter Wilson are executive producers, Lori Fischburg and Liane Cunje are producers, and Rachel Reid, author of the books the series is adapted from, serves as consulting producer.

Heated Rivalry is produced by Accent Aigu Entertainment in association with Bell Media’s Crave, with the participation of the Canada Media Fund, and is distributed internationally by Sphere Abacus in more than 130 countries.

In a separate development, Dylan Walsh, who plays Shane’s father, David Hollander, has stepped back from Cameo after a fan-requested video of him discussing season two went viral. In the clip, Walsh said: “Getting ready to go back up to Canada and shoot some more episodes… I think we’re doing 12 this time,” appearing to reveal a bigger episode order than the roughly six-episode seasons Tierney has previously described. Walsh’s Cameo profile now shows him unavailable until August 2027, with a message reading: “Stepping away because a video went viral that got me in trouble.”

With the book series’ loyal fanbase watching every casting reveal closely, expect the reaction to these new names, and the leaked details, to be just as heated as the title promises.

Rosie O’Donnell says she’s coming back to The View for its 30th season. The show says not so fast.

READ MORE: Rosie O’Donnell says she’ll return to The View for its 30th season

Whichever version turns out to be true, O’Donnell’s comments have got me thinking about the bigger question. If The View really is opening its doors for a proper 30th-season reunion, who else actually turns up?

Full disclosure: I have loved this show for years, and the idea of a proper reunion season has me far more excited than is probably normal for a panel show that doesn’t even air in Australia. Season 30 kicks off in September, and I have thoughts on every single person who has ever sat behind that desk.

A quick disclaimer before we start: everything below is my own speculation. Nobody at ABC (US) has released a guest list, and until they do, this is one very invested fan working through the odds, host by host, in the order they joined.

Meredith Vieira, 1997–2006

Definitely. Vieira was the show’s original moderator, and left on good terms to take over Today before landing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. There’s no bad blood here, which makes her one of the safest bets on this list.

Star Jones, 1997–2006

Absolutely, and there’s already precedent. Jones’s 2006 exit was messy at the time, but she’s since made peace with the show and returned for its 20th-season special, so a 30th-season appearance feels like a formality.

Debbie Matenopoulos, 1997–1998

Without a doubt. The original panel’s youngest member left under famously awkward circumstances in 1998, but she’s been back plenty of times since, including for that same 20th-season special. Whatever the fallout was, it clearly didn’t stick.

Joy Behar, 1997–2013, 2015–present

No odds needed here. Behar never really left (besides that brief time she was fired only to return two years later), and come September she’ll be sitting at the desk hosting everyone else’s reunion, not attending her own.

Barbara Walters, 1997–2014

The View’s co-creator died in December 2022, aged 93, so she won’t be walking back through those studio doors. Expect her tribute to be one of season 30’s most emotional moments regardless.

Lisa Ling, 1999–2002

I think it’s likely. Ling has stayed close to journalism since leaving, and I could see her showing up out of respect for Walters if nothing else, though a packed documentary filming schedule could easily get in the way.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, 2003–2013

This is the interesting one. Since Hasselbeck’s exit, there has been real tension with her fellow ex-hosts, and whether she turns up probably comes down to one person: Rosie O’Donnell, who she famously clashed with during O’Donnell’s first stint on the show. History between the two runs deep, but a reunion would be must-watch television. Hasselbeck did sit in Alyssa Farris-Griffin’s seat for a week earlier this week, so it’s not impossible, but I expect she won’t be sharing the screen with O’Donnell any time soon.

Rosie O’Donnell, 2006–2007, 2014–2015

Yes, by her own account, anyway. O’Donnell has already said she’ll appear “in whatever way they want,” even if the show itself is yet to formally confirm it. I can’t wait to see her share the Hot Topics table with Whoopi again.

Whoopi Goldberg, 2007–present

Goldberg is the show’s moderator and will be running the 30th-season celebrations, not returning to them.

Sherri Shepherd, 2007–2014

I’d imagine she’d jump at it. Shepherd’s own daytime show, Sherri, has just been cancelled after four seasons, which frankly feels like a travesty given how good she was at it, but it does free up her calendar considerably.

Jenny McCarthy, 2013–2014

Unlikely. McCarthy has been openly critical of her single, unhappy season on the panel, and she’s kept busy with her own career since. I’d love to see it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Nicolle Wallace, 2014–2015

Unlikely, though I’d welcome it. Wallace has built a serious second career anchoring political coverage since leaving, and that’s a demanding schedule to work a reunion into.

Rosie Perez, 2014–2015

Genuinely not sure on this one. Perez’s brief stint isn’t something I get the sense she looks back on fondly, but her short-lived run deserves recognition, and I’d love to see her get it.

Raven-Symoné, 2015–2016

I think so. Raven has spoken warmly about the crew and about Goldberg specifically, and that kind of loyalty tends to bring people back.

Michelle Collins, 2015–2016

Genuinely uncertain, but I’d love to see it. Collins has already joked online that she’s still “waiting for my call” after O’Donnell’s comments went public, and her on-screen friendship with Behar was one of the underrated pairings of that era.

Candace Cameron Bure, 2015–2016

Unlikely. Bure’s conservative public persona has only sharpened in the years since she left, and she’s also busy fronting her own network’s slate of films.

Paula Faris, 2015–2018

I think this one’s likely. Faris left on relatively low-drama terms and has stayed visible in journalism since, which makes a reunion appearance an easy yes. Faris currently works as the founder and CEO of CARRY Media, a media organisation she launched to advocate for working mothers.

Jedediah Bila, 2016–2017

I have a soft spot for Bila, but I think this is unlikely. When she left the show, she indicated she’d be back, yet in nearly a decade, she’s made just one appearance, returning to The View in November 2021 to promote her book Dear Hartley, an appearance that turned tense after a heated on-air clash with her former co-hosts over Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Bila remains outspoken on her YouTube channel and social media, which doesn’t exactly point toward a friendly season 30 cameo, but I’d genuinely love to be wrong here.

Sara Haines, 2016–2018, 2020–present

Haines is a current co-host, so like Behar and Goldberg, she’ll be on the other side of this reunion, not part of it.

Sunny Hostin, 2016–present

Hostin is part of the current panel and will simply be at the desk when season 30 begins.

Meghan McCain, 2017–2021

Absolutely not, and honestly, that’s what would make it so good. McCain has criticised the show at every opportunity since leaving (a favour her former co-hosts have returned in kind), and I would get an enormous kick out of watching that reunion play out on live television.

Abby Huntsman, 2018–2020

Uncertain, but I’d say likely. Huntsman’s exit wasn’t acrimonious, and she’s stayed connected to the media world since, so there’s no obvious reason to rule her out.

Ana Navarro, 2022–present

Navarro is on the current panel, but she’s also reportedly the one who first floated the reunion idea to O’Donnell, according to O’Donnell’s own representative. So if anyone is quietly campaigning for a proper 30th-season blowout behind the scenes, it’s probably her.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, 2022–present

Another current co-host, and another one who’ll be hosting rather than returning.

So: a handful of definites, a few genuine toss-ups, one delicious “absolutely not”, and at least one host I’m personally hoping proves me wrong. If even half of this panel actually shows up, The View’s 30th season is going to be appointment viewing.

Season 30 is set to premiere in September. Who actually returns remains to be seen. But I’ll be watching, as always.

I’ve been watching The View for years and I love it. It’s not currently airing in Australia, but full episodes are uploaded daily to The View’s official YouTube channel - well worth a watch if you want to see the drama for yourself. Big shoutout too to Behind the Table, [the show’s companion podcast on YouTube], which I also never miss.

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