As seemingly every entertainment website drops its best-of lists to round out the year, you’ll probably notice some similar themes in terms of the television series being applauded. This isn’t actually all that surprising; many of the best programs from the past 12 months have been so evidently superior that any argument is really over what numerical position on said lists they ought to occupy—FX’s Shogun, for example, or Prime Video’s Fallout, or the second season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire. But maybe now that we’ve all collectively agreed on the best shows of 2024, it’s time to talk about the one that way too many of you have slept on, thanks to its lack of prestige credentials: Hulu’s Rivals.
At first glance, Rivals isn’t what most of us would likely consider serious television. (And despite my personal best efforts, it did not appear in our best-of rankings this year.) Sure, it’s got a blockbuster cast, lavish sets, and a plot involving deep-seated class tensions among a group of ridiculously wealthy elite, but it’s not a show that ever takes itself particularly seriously. After all, the first episode opens with a couple joining the Mile High Club in the bathroom of the Concorde and finishing up just as the jet itself goes supersonic, all while a freshly opened champagne bottle overflows outside. Subtle, it is not.
But in a world bursting with grim procedurals and overly ponderous dramas, too many people have forgotten what was once the key rule of television: At the end of the day, it’s supposed to be fun. Yes, there are important stories to be told in series like FX’s The Bear, HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, and Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, but our current pop cultural landscape has a significant dearth of properties that are just here to have a good time. At one point in the not-so-distant past, so-called “nighttime soaps” like Rivals would have been all over every major network, full of sex and bonkers plot twists, with the sort of characters you would both genuinely love to root for and often love to hate. (Frequently at the same time!) To finally have one back again feels like a breath of fresh air, and while Rivals may not be the year’s best drama, it’s certainly its most entertaining ride.
The show ostensibly revolves around the titular rivalry between bad boy Olympic showjumper turned Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), a man who is so attractive women repeatedly swoon in his presence, and Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), a literal cigar-chomping comic book villain of a regional TV executive with a deep insecurity about his slightly less than aristocratic upbringing. However, though the story of their battle over the future of a regional U.K. television empire is the narrative linchpin around which most of the series’ story turns, the question of the Corinium network’s fate is also the least interesting thing going on at any given moment. Rivals knows that what we’re tuning in for is everything else—the affairs, the vacation hook-ups, the longing looks, the blackmail, the opulent parties with sky-high shoulder pads and catty, cutting asides. (After all, no matter who “wins”, both men will still be rich, influential, and undoubtedly looking for a new reason to be at each other’s throats as soon as possible.) What we’re all here for, really, is pleasure, and that’s something that Rivals knows an awful lot about.