Name: Rivals
Genre: Drama
Released: 2026-05-15
Cast: David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Nafessa Williams, Bella Maclean, Katherine Parkinson

Rivals is back on Disney+, and the show that turned Jilly Cooper’s 1980s bonkbusters into a streaming prestige bet returns sharper. David Tennant‘s Tony Baddingham, the franchise-villain at the centre of a 1986 ITV-style turf war, anchors the new run as the Corinium Television empire keeps clawing for survival. Season 2 picks up the rivalry that opened Cooper’s source novel and tightens it. The first season made the case that a 1980s period drama with sex, ambition and unrepentant English class warfare could carry Disney+; the second tests how far the platform will let it go.

Disney+ has brought Season 2 back to its weekly drop rhythm, episodes landing one at a time the way Season 1 used to build conversation. The new run pulls the Corinium boardroom back into open conflict: Tony’s broadcast empire against Rupert Campbell-Black’s rural ascendancy, with marriages and contracts mortgaged against the outcome. Cooper wrote her source novel in 1988 as the first ITV franchise wars were still fresh; the adaptation has kept the Thatcher-era media deregulation backdrop intact and treated it as the engine of the drama rather than the wallpaper.

Around Tennant, the cast that built Season 1’s audience returns intact. Alex Hassell plays Rupert Campbell-Black, the Olympic showjumper turned Tory MP whose private and public ambitions run on the same engine. Nafessa Williams returns as Cameron Cook, the American producer Tony imported to put a sharper edit on Corinium’s prestige slate. Bella Maclean’s Taggie O’Hara, the romantic centre of the show’s softer register, carries the season’s emotional pivot. Katherine Parkinson’s Lizzie Vereker is the writer-observer the show uses when it needs to slow down and read its own room. The five-handed ensemble is what Season 2 was built around.

Cooper’s novel arrived in 1988, the back half of the decade her work would come to define. The bonkbuster label she did more than anyone to popularise sat at the intersection of high-society romance, satirical newsroom drama and frank sexual politics; by the time Rivals hit shelves it was its sharpest expression. The Disney+ adaptation has not tried to soften the form. Season 1 leaned into the source’s appetites: the affairs, the class barbs, the boardroom fixers. The second season is built on the same calibration. Cooper’s voice survives the transfer: the show is still a comedy about people who would never describe themselves as funny.

For Disney+ EMEA, Rivals is the most successful test of whether a Disney-branded streaming platform can carry English prestige drama with a sex-positive register the US arm rarely produces. Happy Prince’s UK production with The Walt Disney Company EMEA has delivered a series that sits comfortably alongside the BBC and ITV prestige offerings the platform competes against, and Season 2 will be the proof of how durable that experiment is. The conversation around Rivals among UK and EMEA subscribers has been the closest the platform has come to a genuine word-of-mouth scripted hit since launch.

1986 is the year the show keeps coming back to. Cooper set Rivals in the season when the British TV franchise wars were beginning to bite and the country’s post-imperial press class was being remade by deregulation and money. The production has been careful with the period: the prestige craft is there in the costuming and the boardroom calligraphy, but the show does not idealise the decade. Tony’s empire is funded by deals he would not put on company letterhead, and Rupert’s political ascent has the same texture. The 1986 setting is the friction, not the nostalgia.

The release pattern stays weekly. Episodes drop one at a time and let the season hold the conversation through summer rather than collapsing it into a binge cycle. For a show whose audience has been formed by the dinner-table scene structure Cooper made her signature, weekly is the more honest distribution. Each episode is a chapter that ends on a board meeting, a row, or a betrayal, built to be discussed before the next instalment arrives.

The TV-MA rating remains intact. The version of Rivals that Disney+ commissioned does not soften the source’s frankness about sex, ambition or the class economics that drive both. The 1980s English drama register that BBC and ITV cut down for broadcast lives without those cuts here, and the platform has used that headroom to let the cast play the material as written. Season 2 reads as the run where the form has settled in: the production confident, the actors loose, the writers’ room trusting its source.

What Rivals is doing on Disney+ is what its source novel did in 1988: refusing to apologise for being interested in people who behave badly. The show treats its 1986 boardroom as a place where money, sex and television get made in the same conversations, and it does not pretend that is shameful. Season 2 keeps that bet on the table. Whether the platform extends the deal will say something about which kind of English prestige drama Disney+ is actually built to back.