Rivals is the silliest, sexiest show of the year

In Jilly Cooper's world, men conquer, women sigh, the sun shines constantly on pale gold Cotswolds villas with blooming bluebells, and absolutely everyone is DTF, as the saying goes. If Charles Dickens had been alive at the end of the 20th century, with a Viagra prescription and insight 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, carefully researched and full of fun in the green landscape. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't even a glimmer in Kevin Feige's eyes when Cooper created Rutshire, a fictional county inhabited by a cast of evil aristocrats, innocent heroines and vulgar nerds who featured in their novels, fortune hunts and bed-hopping around and eyed each other's family trees with a laconically raised eyebrow.

This is not a country for modern men. RivalsArguably the best of Cooper's particular bonkbusters, it's set in 1986, making the new TV adaptation for Hulu technically a costume drama, replete 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 closely tied they are to a particular time and place, a time when racehorses were celebrities, groping was normal, and everyone was in Princess Diana seemed to be in love. Even the author herself faltered as she tried to adapt her style to the 21st century. (I'm haunted too often by a line from her 2006 novel, Evil!in which she addresses 9/11 by lamenting that the “people who jumped out of the burning tower windows” tragically “had no wisteria to help them get down.”)

And yet I can say: Make space in your life for Rivals. It's undoubtedly the silliest series to hit television this year, but it also takes pleasure deeply seriously, making it as true to the ethos of its source material as can be. In the opening scene, Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), the center of gravity of Cooper's world, is seen pleasuring a woman in the bathroom of a Concorde jet, thrusting so hard that she barely notices when the plane is traveling at supersonic speeds reached. Rupert is a former Olympic show jumper, a Conservative MP, and a Lothario in the mold of James Bond (or Casanova, or Warren-Beatty in the 1970s), which means he's completely different from anyone else who's ever actually lived. As he struts back to his seat, the female passengers faint slightly as he passes. The tone is immediately absurd and tongue-in-cheek exaggerated. Rupert, arrogant, priapic and vulnerable beneath the machismo, is – somehow! – hard not to root for him, if only because everyone who hates him is so much worse.

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The actual dramatic arc of Rivals covers the mysterious world of British commercial television series – the less you worry about it, the better. The main villain is Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), the cigar-chomping, new money heir to a munitions fortune and head of a regional British television station, who is both evil and pathologically jealous of Rupert. In search of a hit show, Tony poaches Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner), a fiery Irish talk show host, from the BBC and promises Declan complete authority over his interviews. Declan's dim-witted wife Maud (Victoria Smurfit); his angelic older daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean); and his younger daughter Caitlin (Catriona Chandler) all immediately fall in love with Rupert, whose ancestral mansion is just a few fields away. Declan, a fairly serious character in the novel, drinks intellectually obscene amounts of whiskey and smokes in the bathtub, scowling beneath his mustache.

The television business during the turbulent Thatcherite 80s is fundamentally at odds with the idyllic setting of the Cotswolds – an aesthetic collision of giant mobile phones and rolling pastures, boardrooms and stray sheep. The unifying force is, of course, sex. Everyone does it and does it with enthusiasm. Tony sleeps with his new star producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), imported from NBC for her professional acumen and passion for screaming. Maud sleeps with an old flame. Rupert sleeps with practically everyone. In the first episode, an embarrassed Taggie catches him playing naked tennis with the wife of one of his fellow MPs. Patient, virtuous and courageous, Taggie is obviously the story's romantic heroine, but the TV adaptation finds surprising depth in a will-they-won't-they story with down-and-out author Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) and a gentle, gruff one Tech investor Freddie (Danny Dyer). Both are married to (terrible) other people and have the kind of sincere, strange chemistry that defies more conventional romantic storytelling. Enjoyment, Rivals insists it should apply to everyone.

Being this camp now, so cheesy and unapologetic, is no easy task. However, Cooper's novels are easy to parody Rivals never swings too far in that direction. The clothes, the music (a key romantic scene is set to Chris de Burgh's The Lady in Red), the extravagance and the drinking – all are roundly mocked. But writers Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade seem to have a deep fondness for both the source material and the era. That's not to say they're nostalgic; quite the opposite. The series knows exactly what the women were working with in 1986, and even has moments of real poignancy toward the end. But watch RivalsI was more drawn to the qualities largely missing from more prestigious shows this year: joy but also fullness, sly humor and fun. Amid a sea of ​​dour, depressed Serious Things to Say series, a show that carries itself so lightly is entirely welcome.

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