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Dallas meets Downton Abbey in Hulu’s soapy British drama Rivals

The 1980s-set miniseries, starring David Tennant and Alex Hassell, can’t settle on a tone

By Caroline Siede | October 15, 2024 | 11:14am

Photo: Robert Viglasky/Disney

TV Reviews Rivals

Dallas meets Downton Abbey in Hulu’s soapy British drama Rivals

Welcome to the Cotswolds, an English countryside oasis where glamorous aristocrats hash out subtle social tensions at elaborate fox-hunting parties. It’s the sort of prim and proper upper-crust world we usually associate with Regency-era romances like Emma or turn-of-the-century dramas like Downton Abbey, only Hulu’s new miniseries Rivals trades the carriages and petticoats for sports cars and shoulder pads. Set in the mid-1980s, at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s power and the dawn of the cable-news era, Rivals casts a winking eye at the petty dramas of the navel-gazing elite. Or maybe it’s a sympathetic eye? It’s never honestly quite clear where the off-kilter, overstuffed show is coming from.

Perhaps British audiences will feel a little less out to sea. The show is based on Jilly Cooper’s popular romance series “The Rutshire Chronicles,” which follows the scandalous sexual exploits of an ensemble of characters living in the fictional county of Rutshire. To British audiences, Cooper is a bodice-ripping “bonkbuster” brand name with a stable of caddish characters who’ve permeated the cultural consciousness. (The first novel in the series was adapted into a British TV movie in 1993, while the fourth got the TV-movie treatment in 1997.) To American audiences, however, Rivals is a lot to take in.

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Based on the second Rutshire novel, the show opens on the naked backside of rakish womanizer Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), the most famous creation of Cooper’s series. He’s a former Olympic show jumper turned Tory MP, who also happens to be a member of the landed gentry. (Again, the show is very British.) He soon gets a new neighbor in principled Irish TV journalist Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), who’s hired away from the BBC by ambitious Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), the head of the independent television company, Corinium.

Though Rupert and Tony are ostensibly the “rivals” of the title, their dynamic is oddly under-explored in the first four episodes screened for critics. Instead, Rivals is more of a Dallas or Desperate Housewives-style neighborhood soap opera that’s also sometimes a Newsroom-esque look at TV production. But it is, above all, a steamy sexcapade that aims to make Bridgerton blush. Rupert’s sleeping with just about every married woman in town, except for Declan’s unhappy wife Maud (Victoria Smurfit)—though not for her lack of trying. He does, however, find himself drawn to Declan’s guileless 20-year-old daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean) in a sort of Fifty Shades Of Grey/“her love could reform me” way. And theirs isn’t the only inappropriate flirtation in town.

Hardly a scene goes by where someone isn’t walking in on someone else having some kind of scandalous sexual encounter—a quickie at a dinner party, a handjob in the woods, an orgy on New Year’s Eve, a game of tennis in the nude. Yet the sex on the show is less passionate and sensual than frenetic and rompish, deployed as much for comedy as eroticism. Writer Dominic Treadwell-Collins clearly wants to contrast the dignified exterior of the well-to-do with the unseemly, selfish, carnal motivations that guide them behind closed doors. It’s just not always obvious to what aim he’s doing that, as a throughline of earnest romanticism winds up clashing with the sex-comedy stuff.

Turned up a bit more, Rivals could be an over-the-top satire like Knives Out. Turned down a bit more, it could be a grounded dark comedy like Succession. And revamped in a slightly different direction, it could just be a glitzy dramedy about the history of 1980s TV production. As is, however, it exists in an odd middle ground where it’s all of those things and none of them at once. It’s not glamorous enough to be aspirational, not sharp enough to be social satire, and not steamy enough to be smut.

What almost saves the show is the fact that it’s handsomely made and well-acted (something you can usually count on British TV to deliver). Tennant, Hassell, and Turner bring the right amount of swagger to the show’s three egotistical male leads, while Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer balance things out as two of the rare likable people in the Cotswolds’ upper-crust circles. The contrast between the centuries-old estates and the tacky 1980s fashion is purposefully and effectively jarring. And the copious ’80s needle drops and playful camerawork at least keeps things lively, even when the script stumbles.

There are also some interesting details about the history of British television, including the complicated franchise renewal process that has Tony wining and dining both old and new money. Rivals has a keen eye for subtle class distinctions and the way they etch tiny fracture lines through a close-knit community. It’s just frustrating that only some of the characters on the show feel like three-dimensional people, while others (most notably Nafessa Williams’ American producer Cameron Cook) feel like paper-thin soap-opera archetypes.

Perhaps there’s more cohesion to come in the final four episodes. Rivals certainly has an impressive pedigree and some compelling pieces on the board. Now it just needs to make sure they’re all living in the same show.

Rivals premieres October 18 on Hulu