Cliffhanger ending to the David Tennant series inspired by real life

Posted in: Hulu, TV | Tagged with: Bonkbuster Novels, Dame Jilly Cooper, David Tennant, Disney, EastEnders, Hulu, Rivals

“Rivals” ends on a life-threatening cliffhanger that foreshadows a possible second season that doesn’t appear in the book but has real-life inspiration.

Rivals is that rare, big-budget streaming series that seemed to come out of nowhere for Americans. It's already a success for the British, as there are millions of Checkers fans Jilly Cooperhas been the bonkbuster novel since its publication in 1988. Americans are less familiar with the books and therefore surprised. The word of mouth about the series is what the makers usually dream of. Have David Tennant Being cast as Big Baddie Sir Tony Baddingham doesn't hurt either. The series made a difference for posh, terrible Brits Shogun did for medieval Japan. It ends with a cliffhanger that only covers half of the novel's 800-page story, which is very different from that of the book, and for good reason. Nowadays every series needs a cliffhanger ending and hopefully it will be renewed.

Rivals: British Sex & Class Satire premieres October 18th on Hulu — Poster art: Hulu

SPOILERS – How Rivals ended the first season

In the final moments of the finale, Sir Tony got into a physical fight with his producer and his lover Cameron (Nafessa Williams), which ended with her hitting him over the head with his TV award and leaving him bleeding out on his office carpet. It's one of those “Are they DEAD?!” cliffhangers that soaps and showrunners are good at Dominic Treadwell Collinswho used to run Eastenders certainly knows a thing or two about ending an episode of a show on cliffhangers, and Rivals is nothing but a very classy and camp soap. However, in the book, Sir Tony was neither hit on the head nor left bleeding on the carpet. This was created for the series finale. In the book, Tony beats Cameron pretty badly, driving them deeper into the camp of his arch-enemy Sir Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), the shy anti-hero of the Rutshire book series.

“That’s where we end the book,” Treadwell-Collins told TV Insider. “Tony beats up Cameron and he beats her to a pulp and she goes to Rupert. That's an awfully big moment in the book, and we in the writers' room said very early on that we weren't going to do that.” version, just let a woman be beaten to a pulp. We decided very early on to make Cameron a woman of color. I think it's wonderful because we've always said that Tony hits Cameron, but Cameron hits Tony back, really back.

The real inspiration behind this cliffhanger

It turns out that in the TV version of Tony gets hit over the head with his TV award Rivals was inspired by what happened to Treadwell-Collins in real life. “Write what you know,” as the old saying goes.

“It emerged from a moment of lockdown,” Treadwell-Collins continued. “I moved a closet and got my BAFTA for it EastEnders was upstairs and my husband said clear out the closet before moving it. I ignored him. The BAFTA fell on my head and I got a concussion and was hospitalized. I was told that if it had fallen another inch I would be dead. What a BAFTA death for a television producer, if you will that's kind of cool. But early on, Felicity Blunt, Alex, Jilly and I laughed about it and said, “Can't we put in that prize that used to be played Chekhov-style, where Cameron ends up grabbing Tony and hitting him over the head?” There is us a really good, loud cliffhanger. It is also something that shocks people who love books. So it comes out of nowhere. There's a brilliant cliffhanger. If we never come back there will be a lot of questions left unanswered, but hopefully we’ll come back to do more.”

The series is much more feminist than the book

“But it was also a serious point,” emphasized Treadwell-Collins. “I didn’t want Tony to beat Cameron to a pulp. Our message for our show is that if you look at the journey that each woman goes on in Series 1, they are all much stronger at the end. We didn't have that. “What we actually wanted was for Cameron to get stronger, and for Cameron to fight back and beat Tony while giving a speech about the power of television on many TV shows.”

Treadwell-Collins, a lifelong fan of Dame Jilly Cooper's books, also revealed he had acquired the rights to adapt all of the Rutshire novels into doorstop size and hopes to do more in the future. Rivals is the second book in the series, and the shy Rupert Campbell-Black appears in many of them.

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