Plot: The battle for the Central South West television franchise reaches a fever pitch as the war between Corinium and Venturer enters a dangerous new phase. More ruthless than ever, Tony Baddingham is determined to dismantle his rivals piece-by-piece, weaponizing scandal and manipulating those closest to him to maintain his grip on power.
Review: If you didn’t watch the first season of Rivals like me, you missed out. An unabashedly soapy series inspired by Dame Jilly Cooper’s beloved 1988 bestselling novel, Rivals is everything audiences used to love about shows like Dynasty and Dallas, but with a heavy dose of profanity and nudity that brings it closer to HBO’s Succession. Featuring a who’s who of British talent, led by Alex Hassell and fan favorite David Tennant, the second season of Rivals is even juicier than the first, with everything that made it a hit with audiences ratcheted up even more as the cast digs into relationships, affairs, backstabbing, and rivalries that border on the ridiculous. But thanks to the cast all chewing the scenery with abandon, Rivals is easily the most entertaining series on television, guilty or not.
The first season focused predominantly on politician Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) and his rivalry with the brilliantly named Lord Tony Baddingam (David Tennant). Baddingham is the head of the television network Corinium, which aims to be the preeminent broadcast affiliate in the fictional county of Rutshire. In the first season, Campbell-Black and his friends formed their own network, Venturer, which was set to air opposite Corinium, and the finale featured producer Cameron (Nafessa Williams) bludgeoning Tony after he attacked her. Leaving him for dead, Cameron falls into the arms of Rupert, and audiences were left to wonder what would happen next. This season opens with Lord Baddingham surviving his blow to the head and the rift between him and Rupert becoming far more complicated. Combine the showdown between the two companies with new romances involving, well, rivals, and you have the makings of the ultimate guilty pleasure.
Releasing in two parts, with the first six episodes premiering now and the second half later in the year, Rivals is way more fun than you would expect. By setting the series in the mid-to-late 1980s, Rivals mines pop culture references and music for a blast of nostalgia in every single episode. The series also continues to revel in the bad boy characters acting like testosterone-fueled animals as their chest hair, mustaches, and asses make frequent appearances. But Rivals has also expanded its scope this season, giving us more depth into the female characters. Taggie (Bella Maclean) remains lovelorn for Rupert despite his now public romance with Cameron, while author Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) still pines for married Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer). Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) keeps trying to return to his journalistic fame despite trying to fix things with his wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit). There is also an expanded part for Tony’s wife, Lady Monica Baddingham (Claire Rushbrook), who is a far more substantial and vocal presence this season. There are also new roles for Hayley Atwell as Rupert’s ex-wife and Rupert Everett as her husband, Malise.
While the entire cast is excellent, the characters most easily liked and rooted for are new television presenter Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack) and Taggie, who are easy to care about and the least villainous in the cast. That said, David Tennant delivers the epitome of an 1980s antagonist in his performance as Tony Baddingham. The closing moment of the premiere episode makes it easy to rank Tennant’s role alongside iconic 80s villains like J.R. Ewing and Alexis Colby. Tennant is clearly having fun with Tony and delivers a speech in the premiere that feels like an homage to The Wolf of Wall Street and some backstory in the fifth episode that actually lets you sympathize with the series’s biggest villain. That is part of the charm of Rivals in that you can despise and love these characters, sometimes in the same scene, while waiting for their delicious comeuppance to drive even crazier plots in subsequent episodes.
Dame Jilly Cooper passed away in 2025 before the second season of Rivals made it to air, but she would be pleased to see the second novel in her Rutshire Chronicles series finally doing justice to her novels that fans have been waiting decades to see. Series creator Dominic Treadwell-Collins and executive producer Felicity Blunt have expanded the second season from the eight episodes in the first run to twelve. The longer series commitment allows more subplots to develop and simmer while the main rivalry remains the core of the series narrative. The nudity and needle drops are even more noticeable this season as the story keeps moving at lightning speed. While I have only seen five of six episodes from the first half of the season, I binged them all and found myself incredulous at the decisions characters made, which made me want to watch what came next even more. Where Succession was more of a satire that developed into destination viewing, Rivals makes it very clear that this story is meant to be scandalous, sexy, and pure entertainment.
Rivals is not high art, but the attention to world-building and three-dimensional characters populating one of the most vainglorious eras of the twentieth century is a labor of love for everyone involved. It takes a lot of work to make a series this engrossing and enjoyable, with the pulp and melodrama serving as anchors to a story that is fun in the most guilt-free guilty pleasure possible. David Tennant adds yet another iconic role to his vast filmography, as this series proves to be the kind of show that can be a global sensation rather than a regional one. Rivals is the perfect summer show that will prove to be another big hit with audiences and critics. Just be sure to prepare yourself for as many plot twists as you can handle, as this show is not aiming for realism but rather for unabashed, unfiltered, and totally eighties excess.
Rivals season two premieres with three episodes on May 15th on Disney+ and Hulu.
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