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Arts Intel Report

Rivals—Season Two

David Tennant in the second season of Rivals.

Streaming on Hulu

I don’t really associate Disney—the children’s streamer—with naked, thrusting buttocks, or orgies, or nude tennis, or dinner parties where the hosts stop rowing only to slope “upstairs for a shag between courses.” But let’s just say, having watched the first three screaming episodes of Rivals, adapted from Jilly Cooper’s novel, I bloody do now. This is an absolute bra-off, knickers-down production, wonderful in its recreation of Eighties detail. If you don’t know the plot of the first season, it’s simple: a rivalry between David Tennant’s Botoxed, vampiric television boss, Tony Baddingham, and the “handsomest man in England,” Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). The whole point of all of Cooper’s oeuvre is that we should be fainting with lust for RCB, a bugles-at-dawn apex shagger who falls in love with Taggie, played rather pathetically here by Bella Maclean. But the script is a treat: “Come on, Mummy, if you had to have sex with one of them, who would it be? Jesus, Judas, or Pontius Pilate?” (Pilate: “Much better at parties.”) Season two begins where we left off, with Tennant, Hassell, and the rest of the cast reprising their roles. —Camilla Long

Starting May 15, Rivals will be available for streaming on Disney+ in the U.K. and Hulu in the U.S.

Courtesy of Disney