If there is a statement you didn’t expect to hear, it’s that one of the best TV shows in a meaty while happens to be a comedy about an ensemble of ludicrous, salacious upper-crust Brits (and Hibs) slamming into one another genitals-first in a deliciously mischievous rat race. Such is the intoxicating charm of Rivals, the steamy televised take on Jilly Cooper’s bestselling Rutshire Chronicles (cue lascivious undertones in the title), a series of novels about the schemes and desires of a bunch so privileged they make your average tax evader seem like a pauper in comparison.
It’s a throwback to the 1980s we’ve sorely needed, a delicious panorama of this altogether different, strange era when prudes and libertines rubbed more than just elbows and life, unironically, still felt full of possibility. Starring a cohort of the UK + Ireland’s finest, including David Tennant, Aidan Turner, and Katherine Parkinson, Rivals is a pitch-perfect blend of airport novel lightness and a melancholy heaviness of heart.
The never-ending debauchery, backstabbing, and distinctly first-world grievances might keep you glued to your seat, but it’s the intensity of human feeling behind the lush backdrop of imaginary Cotswold estates that will win your heart over. It’s as good a time as any to catch up on the inaugural season and sink your teeth into the first half of season two, out now on Disney Plus and Hulu.
Rivals‘ first installment, released in 2024, plunged into the preposterous lives of the pastoral elites crotch-first, plotting the drama thickly from the first bare-chested close-up. Aristocratic MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) dominates the matinee scene of Rutshire’s fat cats, making a sport of riding horses and women. Adored by ladies and commoners, he is scorned by nouveau riche Tony Baddingham (eye-wateringly devious David Tennant), director of Corinium Television, who will do whatever it takes to spite Rupert—and gleefully.
Soon, the entire town is caught up in this heated rivalry, as Corinium’s TV star anchor Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) seeks independence and forms his own TV company, Venturer, with Rupert and plebeian millionaire Freddie Jones (an irresistible Danny Dyer). The incessant one-upmanship is complicated by Rupert’s and Tony’s calculated dalliances, Rupert’s love for Declan’s daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean), Declan’s turbulent marriage to Maud (Victoria Smurfit), and Freddie’s deep extramarital affection for Lizzie (a lovable Katherine Parkinson). That’s just the first base of foreplay.
Where season one galloped to set the pieces in motion, sacrificing character depth to ensure laughs, season two proceeds at a more measured pace, allowing for some much-needed introspection and gravity amid the melodrama. Doubling (down on) the usual six-episode run with 12 episodes, the first half of the season is now out, the second arriving in November.
After team Venturer poaches Corinium’s producer and Tony’s mistress, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), Lord Baddingham swears revenge on everyone. More than just readily ditching Tony’s business, Cameron also ditches Tony for Rupert, and twice the betrayal means ten times the calamity. Surely, Tony won’t go down easily, and his newest scheme involves no other than Declan’s wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit). Morality and ethics hit an all-time low as indecent proposals and juvenile conspiracies abound across the board. In these games without frontiers, someone will surely get hurt—and it’s usually those who least deserve it.
Through and through, Rivals remains an absolutely delightful watch, aesthetically and narratively. Smart enough to proudly embrace the pulpiest elements of Anglo soap operas and romance shlock (Dynasty comes to mind), the show surrenders to the cast’s and creative team’s basest instincts about satire. Comedy is anchored in excess: the estates are too big, the shoulders too padded, the faces too powdered, the hairdos and upper lips too stiff, and the buttocks too oily (don’t ask). It all looks devilishly good, though, and each scene is turned into an unapologetic romp by a sublime cast playing their roles with winning earnestness.
Hassell nails Rupert as a wide-eyed man-child with a generous heart, Dyer and Parkinson effortlessly give us the ultimate couple to root for (I nearly collapsed seeing Freddie tell Lizzie, herself a schlock writer, “I saw your book at W.H. Smith’s” with a glint of pride), and Tennant fizzes off the charts as degenerate Tony. Playing Lord Baddingham as if he were Macbeth, Tennant forces his impossible charm onto you, oscillating between breaking the fourth wall, hissing in French, and roaring until the ground shakes at the slightest inconvenience.
The supporting cast is no less impressive, and several get their due toward the mid-season climax, most notably Claire Rushbrook as Monica Baddingham, whose disenchantment with the insufferably narcissistic Tony leads to moments of heartbreaking introspection. As the lens zooms in, figuratively and literally, on the more, ahem, intimate aspects of some key players, their responses to relatably widespread relationship problems give us stellar television.
If season one is about workplace elbowing, machismo, and sex, season two is about emotions (and sex) and how they relate to our sense of self. Whereas early developments zeroed in on swinging dicks and a senseless jolly good time, season two offers a pleasingly feminine response to the patriarchy and its oppressive frivolity, fortified by the fact that some women—would you believe it—also make stupid, frivolous mistakes.
Maud leaves Declan behind, Taggie breaks away from Rupert, and Monica and Lizzie think about the lives they could have without their nasty spouses. Not everyone has good answers, but that’s precisely the point: change is complicated, and it’s often hard work and difficult decisions. Rolling in the mud and being uncomfortable is part of the human experience.
Rivals is a finely crafted program, crisply written and tightly directed, but it’s the acting and the typically British ability to switch from insouciant to combusting in a heartbeat that give it an emotional anchor beyond flamboyant scenery and cackling quips. This season, several repertory players get their moments in the spotlight, and each little act of defiance feels like a colossal victory due to the ensemble’s impressive chops. Unsurprisingly, past the power play fantasy, we learn that sex is always better when there are feelings involved, etc. No spoilers rules apply.
It would be naive to ignore that Rivals is a show inspired by a series of books about the ruling classes and the sexiness of their impossible excess, stories so deliberately flashy they popularized polo as a sport back in the 1980s. Nevertheless, in this case, the near-ubiquitous liberal bourgeois fantasy of solving all of one’s problems through status is mostly satirical, not aspirational. It also stands that mockery isn’t condemnation, and Rivals is far removed from the likes of Succession, but its haute aesthetic is perfunctory, a bit of a laugh, a flight of fancy with a touch of subversion. It’s not indicative of a moral stance; if anything, the message is that money is not a certain path to happiness or even respect, and it sure as hell won’t buy you love.
Morality-wise, Rivals is jocular and tart enough not to pretend it is above giving its audience a damn fun time by the telly, but the symbolism of its era weighs heavily on the pitiful reality of today. For better or worse, it is the aesthetic of the 1980s, not wealth, that serves as a political tool and a meta-commentary on the current state of visual narration. The stark, twofold contrast with this era of fear, loathing, and A24 entertainment elevates Rivals to instant canonical status.
On the one hand, Rivals is a hot-blooded protest against the oppressive environments and uncanny valleys of postmodern TV. Its vibrant palettes and kitschy details raise a middle finger to the new standards of muted monochrome and aesthetic opacity; its characters burst with energy and desire, unlike the en vogue, endlessly‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Lets You Pick Your Poison unraveling protagonists collapsing under the weight of “being in the world”. One scripted paranoid breakdown after another makes it hugely refreshing to see a show unconcerned with being a convoluted visual parable for contemporary middle-class pain and suffering. At any rate, depicting lives animated by faith in the future, rather than existence bereft of so much as the possibility of a better tomorrow, might just prove healthier for the soul and one’s politics alike.
Speaking of the ideological behind the emotional, Rivals is a surprisingly powerful reminder of a time just before the neoliberal telos fully kicked in, accelerating us toward what feels like the end of history, a state of hopelessness in which change appears impossible. More than anything, it reads as an ode to life and the journey to one’s self-fulfilment (and not merely in a financial or carnal sense), firmly opposed to the anemic, liberal lives of the 21st century, led in near-complete isolation, bookended by a manufactured desiring of things, not people or experience itself.
The 1980s were an aesthetically hilarious era of anything goes, replete with oxymoronic phenomena like chirpy synth-pop anthems with lyrics about homophobia or the threat of nuclear war. However, they were also a time when one could breathe their life more fully. No cell phones, no internet, and surely no erasure of third spaces. The people were always together, at each other’s throats or in each other’s pants, but the feeling of community was irresistible. You could not escape being among others, and, considering how lonely the post-COVID neoliberal world is, you’d do well to remember that things can, in fact, be different. That they were different, not too long ago, and better.
In this sense, Rivals pays great homage to the ’80s with passions running high. Everyone is after something or someone; folks love idling around in their free time and indulging in shirtless sports, booze, and debauchery, shame-free. Sex isn’t taboo or even “private”; it’s quotidian, done anywhere and anyhow. It’s also, refreshingly, middle-aged people who screw the most. Compared to the general sterility of the present day, demarcated by infinite “personal boundaries” and dehumanizing therapy speak, Rivals’ lack of inhibition marks a political statement: namely, that living in a vacuum means not living at all.
Affairs and corporate one-upmanship are messy, but they force you—just as they force Rupert, Tony, Declan, Maud, Cameron, Monica, Freddie, Lizzie, Taggie, and the rest of their paramours—to reckon with others and, consequently, reckon with yourself. In the world of Rutshire socialites, just like in our world up until recently, sitting on the sidelines (while endlessly unraveling) of one’s own life is not an option.
What could have been a simple fashion gag, then, becomes a worldview unto itself. By watching Lizzie’s attempts to break out from her histrionic husband James’ (Oliver Chris) shadow, Monica’s efforts to overcome Tony’s frivolity, or Maud’s treacherous road to a better career, we witness a fundamentally political confrontation, subjects learning about themselves and creating their own paths. This self-discovery, which necessarily occurs through human relationships, is painfully absent in much of today’s television. What we mostly get instead is highly aestheticized, “macabre” conflicts between a “troubled” individual and an ominous “system”, culminating in little more than a one-off success by the protagonist on a particular task, often accompanied by a “heroic” death.
All this is made better by the amount of humor Rivals generously pours into the inescapable awkwardness of desiring in the first place. A spectacular dinnertime scene involving rumors of an illicit child, with half a dozen characters taking turns hiding in a closet, shows how little is needed for sparks to fly. A single smirk or a scowl will have you howling with laughter; after all, little is funnier than others embarrassing themselves.
Breezy as it may be, though, Rivals is not blind to the darker side of the historical context it is set in; homophobia is ubiquitous, British hatred of the Irish is palpable, and the cruel patrician classes deride everyone who dares enter without being a direct descendant of an aristocrat. Funnily enough, this includes Tony Baddingham, who is at one point reminded that it’s his wife, Monica, who wields social influence, while he “merely” married into her family’s mansion.
Indeed, the show is acutely aware that its history, however optimistic, isn’t without problems. There is also a sense of foreshadowing of what’s to come: people becoming mere commodities or ciphers, private businesses running wild, or the most “effective” way of self-actualizing being by faking it.
That’s not to say one must focus on any single aspect of the show; above all else, Rivals is a passionate escapade for the ages, and you’re well within your rights to just let yourself be seduced and feel it, rather than contemplate (too) much. I suspect such an open-hearted viewing will produce the best overall results anyhow. We’re ready for more adventures of the uninhibited Rutshire coterie come November.