The week before the 2024 presidential election, two people told me to watch Rivals, a new limited series on Disney+ and Hulu. One recommendation came from Vogue’s British living editor, Liam Hess, whose peerless taste in all cultural matters is a truth universally acknowledged among staff. “Are you a Jilly Cooper fan?” He slacked me one Sunday afternoon. “Idk why you could be. I’m bingeing the Rivals adaptation.” Another came from a British family friend, who emailed out of the blue to say she was thinking of me and “my Graham” (my husband) because the lead actor in Rivals looks just like him: “It’s wonderfully trashy, completely addictive,” continued the very proper sexagenarian.
Speaking of sex, coitus is the raison d être in this carnivalesque adaptation of Cooper’s 1988 novel of the same name, part of the Rutshire Chronicles series, recounting the goings on of toffs, tarts, and power-grabbers in a fictional county in the Cotswolds. Deemed “The Horniest Show of the Year” by The Daily Beast, the screen version of the “bonkbuster”–as Cooper’s bestsellers were known–is executive produced by Cooper and her literary agent Felicity Blunt, and spares none of the 1980s camp, excess, and libidinousness that made the books so delectable to so many. The first episode opens with climaxing on the Concorde and ends with a montage of various characters between the sheets (or across a desk) with other people’s spouses, setting the tone for the rest of the series.
Nominally, the story is about two rivals. On one end is the petty bourgeois turned artisto-by-marriage Lord Tony Baddingham (a delightfully peevish David Tennant), who is as nefarious as his Dickensian name suggests, scaling for power and prestige as the managing director of a commercial television station. Across the aisle is rakish, titled, and ravenous Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), an Olympic show-jumper turned Thatcherite Minister of Sport, who, together with Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a hot-blooded Irish broadcast journalist lured from the BBC to the countryside, forms a competing station.
But really, the show is about the romps and relations between everyone and everyone else’s wife. There is no subtlety here; it’s the hedonistic, orgiastic version of pasta thrown against the wall, though in this case, make it trifle and champagne. In a cultural moment when subdued, probing prestige TV is king, Rivals, like Rupert and Declan, gives a middle fingers to it. It was exactly the escape I needed in early November.
It’s also blissfully British, in the Disneyfied way that we Anglophile Americans like to imagine England, with Darcy stalking the moors, the sun reliably shining for the foxhunt, and the butler always knowing best. Rivals presents a Britannica buffet: affairs start around teatime, dogs abound (in fact, one Labrador’s affection is the key to uncovering an illicit liaison), and people play tennis naked, save for a strand of pearls.
If you are prone to clutching yours, this show is not for you. Otherwise, you really should watch Rivals.
