In Jilly Cooper’s world, men conquer, women sigh, the sun shines perpetually on pale-gold Cotswolds mansions with bluebells in bloom, and absolutely everyone is DTF, as the parlance goes. If Charles Dickens had been alive at the end of the 20th century, with a Viagra prescription and a window into the sporting pursuits of the English upper classes, he might have written books like Cooper’s: as heavy as doorstops and horny as hell, meticulously researched and brimming with romps in the verdant countryside. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t even a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye when Cooper created Rutshire, a fictional county occupied by a cast of wicked aristocrats, innocent heroines, and vulgar strivers who rotate in and out of her novels, fortune hunting and bed-hopping and scrutinizing one another’s family trees with one laconically arched eyebrow.
This is no country for modern men. Rivals, arguably the best of Cooper’s particular brand of bonkbusters, is set in 1986, which makes the new TV adaptation for Hulu technically a costume drama, stuffed with shoulder pads, canary-yellow Versace shirts, permed hair, and lots of Laura Ashley. To love Cooper’s stories, as I have for several decades, is to be constantly aware of how enmeshed they are in a particular time and place, one where racehorses were celebrities, groping was standard, and everybody seemed to be in love with Princess Diana. Even the author herself has floundered when she’s tried to update her style for the 21st century. (I’m too often haunted by a line from her 2006 novel, Wicked!, in which she tackles 9/11 by lamenting that the “people leaping out of the flaming tower windows” tragically had “no wisteria to aid their descent.”)
And yet, I can say: Make room in your life for Rivals. It’s undoubtedly the silliest show that’s come to television this year, but it’s also deeply serious about pleasure, which makes it as faithful to the ethos of its source material as anything could be. In the opening scene, Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), the gravitational center of Cooper’s world, is seen pleasuring a woman in the bathroom of a Concorde jet, thrusting so vigorously that she hardly notices when the plane goes supersonic. Rupert is a former Olympic show jumper, a Conservative MP, and a lothario in the James Bond (or Casanova, or Warren-Beatty-during-the-1970s) mold, which is to say that he’s entirely unlike anyone who’s ever actually lived. When he swaggers back to his seat, the female passengers swoon slightly as he passes. The tone, immediately, is one of absurd, winking excess. Rupert, arrogant, priapic to a fault, and vulnerable underneath the machismo is—somehow!—hard not to root for, if only because everyone who hates him is so much worse.
The actual dramatic arc of Rivals involves the arcane world of British commercial-television franchises—which, the less fretted over, the better. The primary villain is Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), the cigar-chomping, new-money heir to a munitions fortune and the boss of a regional British TV network who’s both evil and pathologically jealous of Rupert. In need of a hit show, Tony poaches Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a fiery Irish talk-show host, from the BBC, and promises Declan total authority over his interviews. Declan’s feckless wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit); his angelic elder daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean); and his younger daughter, Caitlin (Catriona Chandler), all immediately fall for Rupert, whose ancestral manor house is located just a couple of fields away. Declan, quite a serious character in the novel, proceeds to drink obscene amounts of whiskey and smoke intellectually in the bath, glowering beneath his mustache.
The business of television during the heady Thatcherite ’80s feels fundamentally at odds with the bucolic Cotswolds setting—an aesthetic clash of giant cellphones and gentle pastures, boardroom meetings and stray sheep. The unifying force, of course, is sex. Everyone is doing it, and with gusto. Tony is sleeping with his star new producer, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), imported from NBC for her professional acumen and passion for yelling. Maud is sleeping with an old flame. Rupert is sleeping with basically everyone. In the first episode, a mortified Taggie catches him playing naked tennis with the wife of one of his fellow MPs. Patient, virtuous, and brave, Taggie is obviously the romantic heroine of the story, yet the TV adaptation finds surprising depth in a will-they-won’t-they storyline featuring a dowdy writer, Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson), and a gentle, gruff tech investor, Freddie (Danny Dyer). Both married to (terrible) other people, they have the kind of sincere, curious chemistry that defies more conventional romantic storytelling. Pleasure, Rivals insists, should be for all.
To be this camp now, this kitschy and unabashed, is no easy feat. Cooper’s novels are easy to parody, yet Rivals never veers too far in that direction. The clothes, the music (a key romantic scene is scored to Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red”), the extravagance, and the boozing—all are roundly mocked. But the writers, Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade, seem to have an underlying affection for both the source material and the era. This isn’t to say they’re nostalgic; quite the opposite. The series is savvy about what women in 1986 were working with, and it even has flashes of real acuity toward the end. But watching Rivals, I was more drawn to the qualities it has that’ve been largely absent from more prestigious shows this year: joy, and also abundance, sly humor, and fun. Amid a glut of dour, depressed series with Serious Things to Say, a show that carries itself so lightly is absolutely welcome.
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