Dynasty meets Downton. Mad Men but with shoulder pads. Whatever the comparison the hedonists of Rivals – Disney’s new eight-part adaptation of the 1988 bestselling novel – jostle for sex and status as only ’80s aristocrats can. The high-society hi-jinx are set in the fictional English county of Rutshire (the clue is in the name) in 1986, and it has been called “Blighty’s answer to Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.”
Rivals is the second (and arguably most iconic) book in British author Jilly Cooper’s popular contemporary romance series. It’s what’s known as a “bonkbuster” – a term coined in 1989 to describe wildly bestselling commercial romantic novels (see also: Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz). For tweens stealing their parents’ books to read above their age (and often, above what was appropriate) Jackie, Judith and Jilly were the holy trinity.
The name of the series refers to the social rivalry that becomes professional between the heads of two broadcasting companies as they vie to secure a lucrative regional television franchise license.
On one side, the ruthless Corinium television mogul Lord Tony Baddingham, in suspenders seemingly borrowed from Wall Street’s greed-is-good honcho Gordon Gekko. It’s a juicy villain role for David Tennant, 53, who locks horns with pretty much everyone in view, including longtime nemesis Rupert Campbell-Black, a dastardly cad who heads up rival Venturer. Privileged and adored in spite of being a total shit, Campbell-Black is a Tory MP in Thatcher’s cabinet (maybe that’s why former British PM Rishi Sunak is an avowed Jilly Cooper fan). On the page he’s “the most handsome man in all of England”and after an extensive casting call, Cooper approved his embodiment on screen by tall dark and handsome stage actor Alex Hassell,44. The irresistible RCB, as he’s sometimes known, may be the most lusted-after literary creation since Mr. Darcy.
Tony brings in hotshot American television producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams, 34) – a smart, tough and ambitious strategist who power–dresses in slick designer fashions that could have come straight from Alexis Carrington Colby’s closet.
To bolster viewership they lure Irish investigative journalist Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner, 41) away from the BBC to headline a splashy news program. Last seen as the titular Cornish scythe-wielding heartthrob on Poldark, Turner wears the role of fiery idealist as easily as his corduroy blazers and bushy moustache.
A scene where Declan laments the absurdity of Corinium’s hit series Four Men Went to Mow – basically, strapping shirtless farmers carrying out their duties on camera – isn’t an easter egg but a line line plucked straight out of Cooper’s original novel: “TV can’t just be men taking their tops off!” (Can’t it, though?)
With over-the-top ambition, fashion and social gamesmanship, bonkbusters are brash and broad and heaps of fun. And just what we need this very minute. Here’s why.
It’s Got Royal Connections
Adultery, blackmail, polo and feuding aristos – write what you know, as they say. Accordingly, the Cooperverse is rooted in the author’s Cotswolds surroundings and society chums. Campbell-Black, society playboy and object of desire at the core of the novels, is famously based in part on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles – Queen Camilla’s former husband. (Her Majesty and the author are decades-long friends.) And from its opening mile-high club moment on the Concorde (with Champagne corks popping as the flight breaks the sound barrier) the profusion of buttocks, big hair and double entendres stay true to the irreverent spirit of its creator Cooper, 87. Make that Dame Jilly, because King Charles bestowed the beloved novelist with damehood back in May (“it’s orgasmic,” she enthused of the honour, on brand). It’s all enormously entertaining.
It’s Social Commentary
The shenanigans are more than Laura Ashley florals and adultery. “Jilly’s iconic novels’ razor-sharp observations on class, sex, love and what it means to be British resonate even more today than when Jilly wrote them in the 1980s,” Rivals executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who also writes for the series, said when the project was announced in 2022.
As I write this, the buzz and binge around the Rivals adaptation is spurring Gen Z to pick up the more than 700-page novel for the first time – and they can’t put it down. (This, in spite of reports Gen Z would prefer less smut on screen.) What they’re discovering is that beyond their unapologetic libido, Cooper bonkbusters are social novels, of a sort. Her sprawling setup and gimlet-eyed cynicism about the enduring British class system has been likened to a contemporary Jane Austen. The addition of a romance between characters Charles and Gerald to the television series, for example, also amplifies the debates in the conservative government’s proposal of Section 28 (the law that forbade teaching students about homosexuality), as well the dismissal and derision of the rising AIDS crisis.
It’s ’80s Nostalgia…
… and it’s glorious: the excess of huge shoulder pads, Armani gowns, and bad polyester slacks, references to the Scarsdale diet, taffeta puff dresses and trays of vol-au-vents. The appetites are enormous — for power, drinking, smoking, hunting and shagging. The shagging, it must be said, is at a rate James Bond would envy (by the end of the first episode there’s already been a montage). They shag almost as often as the music department deploys a jukebox of hits by the likes of Robert Palmer, Depeche Mode, Roxy Music, Paul Simon and Chris de Burgh. There are lusty, predatory, sex-loving men and women – and exploitative, predatory men and women too. At one point early on, American prime–time ‘80s soap Dallas gets name-checked as a favourite among the socialites, so it’s fitting Rivals delivers a cliffhanger worthy of “Who Shot J.R.,” the soap’s legendary 1980 season finale.
It’s Got Class Conflict
The alpha males have long-suffering wives – a slew of impeccable character actresses – while Tony has married well. His wife, Lady Monica Baddingham (Claire Rushbrook, 53) is a soft-spoken Machiavelli, while the landed gentry consider nouveau riche tech titan Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer, 47) and his wife (Lisa McGrillis, 42) vulgarians. Cooper satirizes the milieu as the newcomers navigate the baffling social codes, but reserves her most barbed commentary for the cruelties inflicted by the rich. Tony’s family money is only a generation older, less privileged than Campbell-Black in the aristocratic hierarchy.
It’s Actually Romantic
Rivals is a romp-com that’s hugely camp yet manages to balance its preposterous silliness with surprising moments grounded in real stakes (without soft-pedalling the sleaze). It’s social comedy with heart, even when it leans into the experienced rake/innocent debutante trope common to historical romance. Divorced womanizer Rupert’s age gap romance with Declan’s 20-year-old daughter Taggie (Bella MacLean, 23), for instance, sets the incorrigible rake’s redemption arc into motion and the progress of their relationship is largely what powers the Rutland books.
That remains true for the television adaptation, but a different romantic pairing has emerged as the fan favourite. Corinium’s self-absorbed morning show host James Vereker (Oliver Chris, 45) takes wife Lizzie for granted and treats her like a servant. Lizzie, a romantic novelist, is played by BAFTA-winning actress Katherine Parkinson, 46, and finds the spark of a kindred spirit in Freddie, who in middle age is discovering he’s also married to the wrong person. Their tender and tentative slow burn is palpable at the edge of every group scene – a highlight, in fact, as the two empathetic characters spark, increasingly drawn to one another. Viewers are rooting for them.
It’s English Country House Porn
Those who like their bed-hopping in stately homes will revel in the surroundings (Cooper’s novels are lush with descriptions of English landscape, dogs and horses); there’s even a shooting party. Rutshire isn’t real, but is based on the Cotswolds –Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire counties – and the series filmed there. The Baddingtons live at Neston Park. One principal location is so near to Highgrove that it’s frequented by King Charles and Princess Anne: historic Chavenage House doubles here as The Priory, home to Turner’s character and his family. In an unintentional but winking twist, the Elizabethan country manor previously played Trenwith, the home of Turner’s rival on BBC drama Poldark.
It’s Not Prudish … At All
There are no coy cutaways to the morning after or lens flares – but plenty of gratuitous sex, bare buttocks, humping, orgasms, and even orgies (as well as groping, coercion, sexism, sexual assault, and casual homophobia). Rivals goes for it to the point that it needed two intimacy coordinators. Adding to the naughtiness is the raunchy series’s rather unlikely home on Disney+, the family entertainment company.
Take, for example, how the O’Haras find the rural surroundings boring and long to go back to London – until they learn that notorious libertine Campbell-Black lives nearby and become intrigued by their celebrity neighbour. The novel’s famous meet-cute between RCB and Declan’s ingenue daughter Taggie is faithfully rendered. In the novel the 20-year-old aspiring cook stumbling onto the lord of the manor’s property and sees him playing naked tennis with another man’s wife. There’s nothing demure: shot as written, actor Hassell goes full frontal.
“We’ve been equal opportunities in our nudity,” as Treadwell-Collins boasted to The Times. “There’s a willy for every pair of tits.”
Or as Walt Disney himself once said: If you can dream it, you can do it.
All eight episodes of Rivals are streaming now on Disney+.
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