Cavaliers Ride Again in ‘Rivals,’ Defying an Increasingly Puritan Britain

Despite a new Prime Minister whose manner is that of a light entertainment comedian, laughter and pleasure are on ration right now in my British homeland. Puritanism is on the rampage, pubs are closing, and minor vice is not just vilified but frankly unaffordable. The most fun thing in prospect, therefore, is the return of the hit television show “Rivals“, based on the novel by Dame Jilly Cooper, who died aged 88 in 2025 and is much missed, not least because she understood fun better than most. The show takes place in the 1980s, by no means a paradisal era, but one that now has a prelapsarian quality because life was seized rather than feared, and nobody had smartphones. The second half of season two lands on Hulu today. White wine spritzers are at the ready.For all its Britishness, “Rivals” has a global appeal, and won the 2025 International Emmy for best drama series. At its heart is the most basic of premises: it is a story of good versus evil, although its heroes are imperfect and its villains can arouse sympathy. The plot of the original 1988 book, set in the world of television, was inspired by the Thatcherite policy of allowing companies to compete for independent broadcast franchises. Two sets of bidders — the nice-ish guys, led by Dame Jilly’s dream man Rupert Campbell-Black, versus the hiss-boo guys, headed by the subtly-named Lord (Tony) Baddingham — fight it out for the “Central South West” franchise, a quaintly low-stakes tussle that acquires the side-swapping turbulence of the Wars of the Roses. Everybody sleeps with each other, like the Bloomsbury Group in shoulder pads. And it all takes place in the glorious Cotswolds countryside — long before it became home to “celeb hangout” Soho Farmhouse, and even longer before the arrival of Meghan and Harry — where the main characters live in vast honey-colored mansions scattered with dogs and horses. “Even I have to wince sometimes at how f***ing pretty the place is,” cackles David Tennant as Lord Tony, a thespian having the time of his life as he puffs evilly on his Hollywood-mogul cigar and plots dominance of the fictional county of Rutshire.What a liberation this show is. Not just to the performers, who are all unimprovable, but to us, their viewers. “Rivals” is the equivalent of watching a crowd of carousing Cavaliers gallop across drab Cromwellian Britain. Refusing to run scared of 21st-century orthodoxies, it gives us tireless seducers, sympathetic right-wingers, lunchtime drinking, unrepentant smoking and the most hedonistic parties since Jay Gatsby’s. The on-screen warnings before each episode — “sex, coarse language, tobacco depictions” — are all too accurate. Dame Jilly was a celebrant of the lesser sins; schoolgirls legendarily consulted her books as guides to what were called the facts of life, and her merry spirit haunts the show, of which she is still named as an executive producer. Disapproval — modern Britain’s default position when anybody threatens to have a good time — is off the agenda, even though there are undoubtedly those who feel it towards “Rivals,” which really does shatter the mould of sanctimony into which so much of our entertainment is now poured. Alex Tassell, Nafessa Williams, and Aidan Turner in ‘Rivals.’ Via HuluTake, for instance, the leading man, Rupert Campbell-Black, brilliantly played by Alex Hassell. A minister in the Thatcher administration, he is shameless in his pursuit of any prey, from a hunted fox to a gorgeous woman. He is entitled, arrogant, an alpha-plus male. He falls madly for a girl young enough to be his daughter, who first encounters him playing naked tennis with another man’s wife. In other words, he commits pretty much every crime in the present-day playbook. Yet his palpable flaws are not allowed to prevent him from being likeable — and, in the context of British television, so predictable and po-faced that the mere fact of him being a “Tory” would convey a license to hate, it is hard to emphasize how radical this is. Tonally, the show is assured: cartoonish in the “Carry On” film tradition, yet completely sincere. The soundtrack is so cleverly deployed as to make Marillion’s “Lavender” — played over last season’s emotional midseason finale — seem a composition of genius. The script keeps silliness and sharpness in fine balance. The mood is energized, zestful — “It’s 1986, you can have whatever you want!” cries one woman, amid blissful shots of sun-veiled landscapes. As for its portrayal of television itself — it is shown as a medium full of possibility, in which the competing franchises offer a live performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”versus a documentary about W.B. Yeats. Halcyon days indeed.Yet a colder reality is always present. The feudal nature of this gilded society is not overlooked, nor the terrible need for a loving gay couple to hide the nature of their relationship. And, although women are often shown as strong players, there is no shirking of grim sexual inequalities. Some are of the period; some for all time. The stunning climactic scenes of the previous series, in which two ill-treated wives suddenly opened their souls to each other, fairly shuddered with resonance. “Why do we stay, with these men who aren’t nice to us at all?” The wives, played by Katherine Parkinson and Claire Rushbrook — utterly magnificent, both — gave those scenes a force that would be welcome in Shakespeare, while always maintaining their well-bred facades, and viewers breathlessly absorbed every second of it.This is the real secret of “Rivals.” It has a heart. It is a morality tale, but a forgiving one. It knows that being fun does not preclude the power to move. The best thing of all? It is hugely popular. People absolutely love it. I myself approached it with a degree of skepticism, having never read Jilly Cooper, and indeed despising former PM Rishi Sunak for saying that “Rivals”was one of his favorite books. Within two minutes I thought, “wow.” This will surely herald the end of generic TV dramas set in bleakly trendy coastal towns, which begin with somebody holding a knife and looking stricken, before the words “Six months earlier” float on to the screen. Dame Jilly Cooper attends a special gala screening for ‘Rivals’ on October 15, 2024 at London, England. Jed Cullen/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Disney+I wait, in hope, although the sad fact is that “Rivals,” to date, remains something of an outlier. Perhaps other producers lack the courage of Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who had the vision and chutzpah to bring the show to screen in all its shameless bright-colored glory. Perhaps the enterprise was shielded by the presence of Dame Jilly, whose schoolgirlish delight in “naughtiness,” self-deprecating giggly charm, and venerable age took the edge of danger off its flagrant decadence. Or perhaps, as with “Mad Men“, another show relished for its high-style depictions of ‘unacceptable’ behavior, the strongest shield is the one that says: this is all safely in the past, and the past is another country. Whatever serendipity lay behind its journey to the screen, the astounding success of “Rivals” — which portrays a society that is essentially free, and whose viewers are free to think what they want about it — surely has lessons for the television industry. Even, indeed, for governments. Assuming, of course, that either wishes to learn them.

Cavaliers Ride Again in ‘Rivals,’ Defying an Increasingly Puritan Britain

Cavaliers Ride Again in ‘Rivals,’ Defying an Increasingly Puritan Britain

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