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Jilly Cooper's original Rivals novel was published in 1988 as part of her Rutshire Chronicles series — a sequence of novels set in a fictional English county populated by an overlapping cast of aristocrats, media figures, and various people who want to sleep with them. The Rutshire Chronicles had sold millions of copies across decades but had never received a major television adaptation until Disney+ commissioned the Rivals series, with Cooper herself serving as a consultant on the production and expressing enthusiastic approval of the casting.
David Tennant was attracted to the role of Tony Baddingham specifically because the character represents a type of English masculinity that is rarely examined with genuine psychological depth — the successful, controlled man who is fundamentally insecure and driven by envy rather than ambition, whose professional accomplishments are less a source of pride than a weapon in a competition he can never fully win. Tennant spent extensive time with the novel's text and with Cooper herself understanding what specific wound Tony is compensating for, finding in that wound the human core around which the character's more theatrical qualities could be organized.
The 1980s British television industry setting gave the production a specific historical lens through which to examine questions about power, class, and gender that remain entirely contemporary. The franchise auction system that drives the plot's central conflict was a real feature of British commercial television regulation during the period — television licenses were awarded competitively, creating exactly the kind of winner-take-all rivalry the novel dramatizes. The research into how that system actually operated gave the show's business plotting a procedural authenticity that grounds its more melodramatic personal storylines.
Rivals is a 2024 Disney+ series based on Jilly Cooper's landmark 1988 novel, set in the glamorous, ruthless world of British commercial television in the late 1980s. The series follows the escalating war between two media moguls — Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a debauched, rakish aristocrat and the supremely charming owner of a television franchise, and Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), his uptight, calculating rival who is determined to take Rupert's franchise from him at the next franchise auction. Between them orbit wives, lovers, children, and a constellation of supporting characters who exist somewhere on the spectrum between moral compromise and outright dissolution.
David Tennant is magnetic as the cold, controlled Tony — the performance is a masterclass in repression, with Tennant conveying an entire inner life of frustrated ambition and sexual jealousy through clenched jaw and clipped vowels. Alex Hassell is the effortless charmer against whom every other male character is implicitly measured: Rupert's particular brand of aristocratic roguishness would be unbearable in a less skilled actor's hands, but Hassell makes him infuriating and irresistible in equal measure. Aidan Turner, Claire Rushbrook, Lisa McGrillis, Nafessa Williams, and Katherine Parkinson round out an ensemble that brings Cooper's vast character landscape to life with wit and considerable physical energy.
Rivals arrived as a wildly entertaining prestige drama with the pace and energy of a soap opera and the production value of a prestige cable show — a combination that proved enormously popular with audiences who had spent years asking when Jilly Cooper's beloved novels would receive serious screen adaptations. The series became a genuine cultural event in the UK and performed strongly internationally through Disney+ and Hulu, combining the pleasures of period costume drama with the frank sexuality and competitive excess that made Cooper's original such a phenomenon. It is the kind of show that demands immediate viewing of the next episode and generates passionate audience investment in questions of who will end up with whom. Stream on Hulu.
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