This juicy new British drama set in the ’80s features tennis players in the buff & a surprising gay love story
If you like your TV filled with sex & scandal, 'Rivals' just might be your cup of tea.
If you miss Succession but thought the darkly funny HBO drama was a little too buttoned-up, then the unapologetically bold and brash—and gay!—Hulu series Rivals might be the show for you.
Based on author Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel of the same name, the show is set in the 1980s in the fictional English county of Rutshire, where neighbors Rupert Campbell-Black (The Boys‘ Alex Hassell) and Lord Tony Baddingham (LGBTQ+ all David Tennant of Doctor Who fame) have a long-standing rivalry.
Very loosely inspired by the era of British television when government-run (and therefore conservative) network The BBC saw a number of independent networks rise to challenge its chokehold on audiences, the plot kicks into motion when Lord Baddingham uses his immense wealth to run new TV station Corinium out of his estate, sniping popular talk show host Declan O’Hara (The Hobbit trilogy Aidan Turner) as a new face of the channel.
As Rivals opening scene makes clear—featuring bare bum as Campbell-Black gets it on in an airplane bathroom to the tune of “Addicted To Love”—this show knows it’s pure, trashy fun.
Rivals features a surprising gay romance
Across eight episodes (which began streaming on Hulu Oct. 18), it’s a story filled with sex and scandal, and features a sprawling ensemble of über-wealthy egotists you love to hate and fresh, in addition to young upstarts who will do anything to climb to the top.
And while it’s juggling a lot, a clear standout of the series is its secretive gay romance between two very unlikely characters.
On one end of this affair is Corinium’s director of programming, Charles Fairburn (Outlander‘s Gary Lamont), who is out as gay in his personal and professional life, which makes him an easy punching bag for his colleagues at the TV network.
On the opposite side of this socio-political battle is Gerald Middleton (Hubert Burton, known for The Inheritance on the West End), an aide for Parliament member (MP) Rupert Campbell-Black who has his own designs on becoming an MP. His party is deeply conservative, so Gerald needs to keep his sexuality a secret, but his behind-closed-doors relationship with Charles threatens to blow everything up for him.
The precariousness of their romance resonates even deeper because of Rivals‘ period-piece setting. It’s 1986, so not only do Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies actively marginalize queer voices, but the threat of AIDS looms large for Charles and Gerald.
Series writer/producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins tells Digital Spy they were very careful in how they expanded Charles and Gerald’s stories from Cooper’s original novel, wanting it to feel truthful to the gay experience during this specific time and place:
“We talked a lot about what it would be like to be gay in 1986,” he shares. “You’ve got the specter of AIDS. And within that, we talked about giving Charles a big, sweeping difficult love story. That’s what we’ve done with Charles and Gerald. We wanted Charles and Gerald to feel equal to all the other couples, so you’re willing them to go on, even though it’s much harder for them.”
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As Treadwell-Collins sees us, there’s real potential to “change the world” by including LGBTQ+ stories in characters in mainstream entertainment, and not just via “niche, smaller” series by and for queer folks.
“With a show like Rivals, I want the audience to fall in love with Charles and Gerald. Even if the audience had maybe been a bit more prejudiced before they come to watch the show, you can change the world a bit, I think, by playing gay stories in the mainstream.”
Rivals goes balls-put with the steamy scenes (literally)
Another way Rivals is pushing boundaries is in its liberal use of sex and nudity. Yes, the pilot opens with the aforementioned scene of two people joining the mile-high club… and then ends with a (literally) climactic montage of intimate scenes, featuring most of the cast of characters—including Charles and Gerald—showing off their O-faces at the same time.
But perhaps the first episode’s most talked about scene involves a game of naked tennis, balls flying around the court all willy-nilly (which is how we wish Challengers had ended).
The moment comes when Declan’s daughter Taggie (Sex Education‘s Bella Maclean) sees smoke rising from her new neighbor Rupert Campbell-Black’s yard. She rushes over for help, only to find the MP in the buff, playing tennis with an equally unclothed blonde woman (comedian Emily Atack), who she’ll later learn is married to someone else.
The eye-popping scene features actor Alex Hassell in all his glory—and he sure does look fit, which is appropriate considering his character, Campbell-Black, is an ex-Olympian.
The star tells Metro there was much discussion prior to filming over whether or not he would use a prosthetic. “In the end, we just went for it,” Hassell shares of the choice to go au naturel. In fact, that might’ve been one of the only facts of his look that was real.
‘Well, my hair’s dyed, I’ve got a fake tan and my eyelashes are curled but apart from that it’s all me,” the star admits.
This comes just a week after out actor Cooper Koch revealed that was, indeed, “all him” in Netflix’s hit Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez, too. Trend alert! Does that mean the era of the prosthetic is behind us? Are actors getting more and more willing to show their full selves on the screen?
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Hassel’s certainly willing to go there if the role calls for it. As Metro reports, male and female intimacy coordinators were on the set of Rivals at all times to ensure the cast felt comfortable—no matter what the script asked of them.
“It doesn’t feel like any of it’s gratuitous either,” he says, speaking to the series’ frequent intimate scenes. “It’s always an extension of the character and the relationships and the way that they’re expressing themselves and the power dynamics or the sexual dynamics.”
Dominic Treadwell-Collins echoed those same sentiments in his conversation with Digital Spy: “We talked a lot about sex, and sex not being gratuitous in the show. Every sexual moment has a meaning, and it’s driving the story forward.”
Speaking to the writers’ approach to that spicy episode-ending montage, he adds: “[Producer] Laura Wade and I looked at Lizzie Vereker’s voiceover at the end of episode one. We looked at it in so much detail, because that plays over the montage, and it’s saying that everyone’s an animal, but lots of people use sex for different motives and have other things going on underneath.”
“We were very, very careful with that montage, to not make it feel silly or gratuitous,” Treadwell-Collins continues. “And then amongst everyone, you have a gay couple. Look at all the different ranges of sexual relationships. It sets up so you want to follow Charles and Gerald through the series as well as all the other characters.”
So there you have it: Clandestine gay love affairs, airplane boinking, tennis in the buff, and an entire montage of getting it on set to the tune of Depeche Mod’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”—and that’s just in the first episode!
The entire first season of Rivals is now available to stream in the U.S. via Hulu.
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