Based on an ’80s ‘bonkbuster’, Rivals is salaciously engrossing
Rivals ★★★★
Disney+
Release the hounds! A canny adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bestselling 1988 “bonkbuster”, Rivals is a swaggering period drama with an abundance of shagging, big hair – on women’s heads and men’s chests – and arch dialogue. Satiric enough to get away with its rich people behaving badly excess, salacious enough to keep you engrossed, this eight-episode series is an alchemical wonder when it comes to tone. It opens with a mile high club scene and never fastens its seatbelt for landing.
Swaggering period drama: Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals.Credit: Robert Viglasky
There’s a ream of characters, all living in Cotswolds rural luxury and hungering for something, or someone, they can’t have but usually do. The string-on-corkboard chart would reveal TV magnate Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), his blueblood nemesis Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), and Tony’s new star talk show host, Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner). The supporting cast includes wives and adult children, most notably Declan’s daughter Taggie, with novelist and rare good sort Lizzie Vereker (Katherine Parkinson) as the unofficial observer clocking her rapacious neighbours.
The characters have a larger-than-life spirit: Taggie first meets Rupert when she discovers him playing nude tennis with a fellow Tory MP’s wife. It’s the safety valve for all the bad things they do and a permission slip for the audience to laugh instead of lament. Rivals is also an equal opportunity playground, with full-frontal male nudity and a gay couple hooking up to one side. The men parade for the audience – Tony’s half-brother Basil (Luke Pasqualino) makes a Lothario’s entrance to Eurythmics’ Missionary Man.
Margaret Thatcher is just an unheard voice on the telephone, reprimanding Rupert for his latest indiscretion, and there are no working-class people around for her policies to be played out on. These country houses with their party-ready gardens are a playground, and the writers have great fun moving their pliant pieces around. There are setbacks but no real repercussions once the embarrassment dissipates. The show eggs the characters on and tells us to enjoy the shenanigans. The observations on class, wealth and taste are just droll appetisers.
Wicked games: David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham.Credit: Robert Viglasky
The risk is that you might tire of this before Rivals does, but the more problematic the behaviour the more engaging it is. It’s why the newcomers on screen succumb. Taggie is suspect of Rupert, who gropes her for a jape, but their mutual attraction despite the age gap becomes palpable, while Tony’s new hotshot American producer, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), is a Black woman happy to beat the locals at their own wicked games. It’s a small but telling triumph: the risqué is once more relevant.
Zoe Saldana stars as Joe, a CIA operative, in Lioness.Credit: Paramount via AP
Lioness (season 2) ★★★
Paramount+
Fronted by Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman, Taylor Sheridan’s action thriller about a CIA program focused on covert female infiltrators hasn’t lost any of its defining traits: the operators on the ground are committed professionals, the more senior their superior the more compromised the motives, geopolitics serves as audience scare tactics, and every episode needs a gearing-up montage that is shot with fetishistic devotion. It doesn’t always make sense, but the narrative hums along.
The key change is the setting, with Middle Eastern terror cells being replaced by Mexican drug cartels. This is familiar ground for Sheridan. The Yellowstone creator’s breakthrough as a writer was 2015’s Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s narcos horror about female endurance. Here, after a provocation on American soil, the CIA are once more operating where they shouldn’t, with Saldana’s Joe McNamara on the ground with her team and a new undercover operative.
The first four episodes often feel like different projects – mostly good ones – chopped together. Sheridan, who does the majority of writing and directing, gives us Zero Dark Thirty silhouettes, power trip theatrics, and the repetitive tug of Joe saving America but worrying that her family life is suffering. Decisions for his female characters are passionate yet binary choices, but Lioness isn’t slowed by anything. That includes ducking the show’s concept – the new Lioness is a long time coming.
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band.Credit: Disney+
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Disney+
Bruce Springsteen’s director of choice, Thom Zimny, does a capable job on this tour documentary, which charts rock & roll’s abiding spirit returning to stadiums with his backing band after a six-year absence. Using archival concert footage as both a contrast and a means of emphasising the passing of time, Road Diary has a celebratory backbeat and nervous melody – the question that lurks behind every gig and every exultant move is whether the ageing group, which has already lost cherished members such as saxophonist Clarence Clemons, has almost reached the end of the road?
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer.Credit: Netflix
The Lincoln Lawyer (season 3)
Netflix
While the season-long plots have a hefty quota of duplicity, cover-ups and initially confounding twists, this David E. Kelley legal drama about a scrappy Los Angeles lawyer, Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) remains a straightforward proposition. It knows the show it wants to be and mostly delivers, never growing too contemplative or exploring the contradictions of the characters, especially women, that pass through Haller’s world either privately or professionally. Shout out to Australian actor Angus Sampson, who continues to make the most of playing Haller’s gruff private investigator, Cisco.
Felicity Ward as the incompetent Hannah Howard in The Office.
The Office
Amazon Prime
My take on the Australian variant? Relax, it’s fine. Given the standing the British and the American editions of The Office hold, revered mockumentary and beloved sitcom respectively, any attempt to make a local edition is fraught with risk. But Julie De Fina and Jackie van Beek’s adaptation mostly sits in a familiar space defined by Australian habits and the show’s familiar character outlines. Notably, Edith Poor is first-rate as Lizzie Moyle, the wound-too-tight eccentric dedicated to the company’s cause. But if I had to choose, I’d still opt for Fisk.
Bridget Everett in Somebody Somewhere.Credit: Binge
Somebody Somewhere (season 3)
Binge
It’s not too late. You can start this masterfully bittersweet American comedy about the struggle to accept what has to change in your life now and still be up-to-date by the time the weekly episodes of the third and final season conclude in early December. I’m not convinced creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen can neatly tie together everything that fortysomething friends Sam (Bridget Everett) and Joel (Jeff Hiller) have to deal with, but then again absolutes have never held sway on this show. I just hope we get more series like this.
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