Warning: Rivals spoilers forward.
Welcome to ‘Showtime with Emily Maddick’, through which GLAMOUR’S Assistant Editor and Leisure Director brings a novel perspective to the month’s most hyped movie or TV present. For October’s instalment, Emily dissects the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 so-called ‘bonkbuster’, Rivals. Whereas there had been some concern that recreating Cooper’s notoriously sexist world might be problematic in 2024, Emily argues that this fabulously-executed TV present isn’t solely surprisingly progressive, but additionally a harbinger of #MeToo – exposing poisonous office requirements thirty years earlier than the worldwide motion that held so many males to account.
I like Jilly Cooper. I’ve at all times beloved Jilly Cooper, and I actually love the brand new Disney+ adaptation of her 1988 ‘bonkbuster’ Rivals. It’s a debauched, extreme and escapist breath of recent air in these dismal occasions; a televisual gorge of glamour, greed – and, sure… gratuitous, unbridled bonking. It’s additionally, extra severely, consultant of a time almost forty years in the past when sexism, homophobia and racism was rife. A time when males, particularly within the fictionalised Cooper Cotswolds confection of Rutshire, typically handled ladies as little greater than items of meat – right here’s you Mr Campbell-Black. (Reader, please notice, that is not why I like Jilly Cooper, so do bear with me.)
Sanne Gault/Disney+
Because it was introduced that Disney+ can be recreating the goings-on on the fictional TV community Corinium, full with a stellar solid together with David Tennant, Aidan Turner and Emily Atack, there was speak about how problematic Cooper’s books might appear at this time. Many thought that recreating the Nineteen Eighties Cooperverse in 2024 might be seen as regressive and tone deaf – after almost forty years of progress. Which, if dealt with incorrectly, it might very effectively have been.
Fortunately, this isn’t the case. Actually, in some ways, Rivals faucets into the zeitgeist of proper now. It is straight from the playbook of the latest smash hits which are Saltburn and The White Lotus (even right down to an identical theme tune and opening credit) with its pitch-perfect skewering of the British class system and the filthy wealthy (filthy being the operative phrase right here.) Its plot – specializing in the behind-the-scenes machinations of a TV station – attracts comparisons to Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston’s sensible The Morning Present and even the colossus of all latest tv sequence that’s Succession.
However Rivals is camp, self-aware and blisteringly witty – and has a banging ‘80s soundtrack as well. By no means thoughts the blue eyeshadow, perms and shoulder pads galore.
