★★★★☆

Add Rivals season two to your watchlist

He’s on the posters and in the trailer, so it’s not a spoiler to say: Lord Tony Baddingham lives! David Tennant’s malign media tycoon ended the first season of Disney’s ripping adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel bleeding freely onto his own office shagpile, eyes glassy, giving off rapidly-cooling corpse vibes.

But Rivals spent its debut year lovingly building the fantastic world of Rutshire, a haven of the randy upper classes in the careless 1980s, with Tony at the centre. Full of surprises as the show is, killing off a main character isn’t its style.

What were those surprises, when Rivals first roared up our long gravel drive in 2024? Perhaps that depended on how au fait you were with Dame Jilly’s books.

If you knew them well, you knew they had wit and heart and deceptively deep characters to go with the flagrant excess, the relentless shagging and what are now the rich period trappings, faultlessly rendered in the TV version. If you didn’t know the books intimately, then you probably thought they were shameless, trashy fun, and Rivals on screen definitely didn’t lose sight of that.

To recap: Lord Tony is the boss of Corinium, an ITV regional franchise serving the Cotswolds. His nemesis is Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a former Olympic showjumper and presently an Olympic-standard womaniser who’s a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government.

The endless struggle of cold, calculating Tony to get the better of incorrigible cad Rupert, a man of slightly superior breeding, drove a first season that surrounded the two men with a wide array of lovable or ridiculous characters, and that slyly switched who the real villain was as it went on. It was a guilty pleasure you felt no guilt at all in enjoying.

But a show like Rivals – one that was so intoxicating with its assuredness, so brazen with its outlandishness, and just so much better than you had any right to expect – has a choice to make when it tries to follow up a storming first season. It can crank up a gear and become even bigger and bolder, at the risk of popping its own balloon and plummeting into absurdity; or it can accept that it has established itself now and calm down a little, which might mean it’s not quite as much of a lark.

In the first three episodes of the new run, at least, Rivals has taken option two. Certain relationships have been settled, more or less, and initially they stay put. Sensitive, principled romance author Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) loves and has slept with good-hearted, disarmingly frank electronics entrepreneur Freddie (Danny Dyer), but they can’t be together permanently as they’re married to other people, with children.

Rupert loves hopeful young caterer Taggie (Bella Maclean), but they can’t be together at all because she’s his colleague’s daughter and in any case, he’s enjoying a professionally and physically rewarding relationship with hotshot producer Cameron (Nafessa Williams), who has just lamped her ex-lover Tony with a TV award statue.

Rutshire life has become a little more serious. That said, the season does begin sportily, with two gratuitous penises within the first eight and a half minutes, followed swiftly by a beast with two backs in a bay window, a shower with benefits and a “locked out of hotel room in the nude” fiasco with an amusing guest star as the shocked passer-by. (Hang on, is that… no, it can’t be. It is!)

Mainly, though, Rivals confines itself to the stuff of regular dramas. Rather than a total upheaval every other week, one interesting thing per episode happens to each Rutshire resident. It’s impossible to recapture the novelty of Rivals when it first hit, or to continue the constant partner-swapping that made season 1 such a hoot. So it wisely retreats.

Dame Jilly Cooper died last October, a few months after season 2 of Rivals went into production. But her legacy looks secure: the residents of Rutshire are in safe hands.

Rivals season 2 is coming to Disney+ on Friday 15 May 2026.