The First Images From 'Rivals' are a Look at the World of 1980s England's Elite

Disney+ may be the home of family-friendly TV in the States, but the U.K. arm is less bound by such values. See the current highly anticipated series Rivals, an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s best-selling 1988 novel of the same name. It is based on the second in her Rutshire Chronicles series that earned her the nickname “Queen of the Bonkbuster.” Despite the mid-1980s fashions, the cast definitely lives up to the archetypes one would expect to find in such a series in the first-look images the streamer has released.

The series was initially commissioned back in August 2022 by Disney for its UK version of the streamer and is expected to come to the States under the Hulu tile on Disney+ and the Hulu standalone app. Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles spans ten books published between 1986 and 2016. It follows the story of the rivalry between two aristocratic family scions, Olympian-turned-politician Rupert Campbell-Black and television executive Tony Baddingham, set in the 1980s era of the English upper class in the fictional county of Rutshire.

Baddingham runs an independent TV station called Corinium, a rival to the BBC, and a very thinly veiled take on what eventually became ITV. Though the story is fiction, there are enough real-life details seeded throughout the series that fans will have a fun time picking out what’s based on real-life facts and what is drawn from the whole cloth.