Rivals

The "bonkbuster" that stole my heart

The British have a useful little term that’s never made its way into the American lexicon. The term is “bonkbuster,” and it means a book that is both a blockbuster (thus, commercially successful) and also about bonking (thus, sex). The term came into use to refer to novels primarily from the ‘70s and ‘80s with pithy evocative titles like Lucky, Lace, and Rivals. Over here it might be more commonly called a “bodice-ripper,” but that’s both too broad and implies a specifically historical setting (blouse-ripper just doesn’t have the same ring to it). These were novels about that era’s version of “the new woman:” women with money who spent it how they pleased and who had sex with who they pleased, usually very dominant handsome men.

Many of these novels were adapted into miniseries or movies shortly after their publication, but it’s been a few decades since they’ve been taken seriously enough to be seen as commercially viable. To be incredibly reductionist, the ‘90s were largely about how men told highly sexualized stories (see, Eyes Wide Shut, Basic Instinct, Body Heat, etc.) The 2000s version of the bonkbuster was Sex and the City, although only Samantha ever seemed to take the kind of joy in it the traditional bonkbuster heroine does. Sex on TV has been thin on the ground since (teen-focused shows like Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, and Reign were the sexiest thing around while also clearly not about or made for adults), with Bridgerton breaking the seal with its bodice-ripping glory and clear intention to be a show made for adults.

But lo, the fruits of Bridgerton continue to ripen.

If the show you’re about to watch is set in a fictional county called “Rutshire” with a bad guy named Basil Baddingham, you must know what you’re in for. Satire, my darlings, satire! And sex, of course. The “rut” in Rutshire is there for a reason. Rivals snuck up on me, as British shows sometimes do; there was little to no press around it in the States until after it had been quietly added to Hulu/Disney+. It is an adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper‘s bonkbuster of the same name, which follows the many passions of the adults in essentially a rich British arcadia.

Rivals is ostensibly about the rather unsexy topic of rural television broadcasting rights in the 1980s. It is actually about people’s relationship to pleasure and power, how they deny it to themselves until they don’t, how they grab it with both hands and damn the consequences, how they misunderstand their desire for it, how they become fully themselves when they embrace it. The principal rivals are Rupert Campbell-Black (all-around sexy MAN who is almost but not quite morally bankrupt and far too suave for his or anyone else’s good), Declan O’Hara (Irish firebrand television journalist with a strong moral complex and a perpetually dissatisfied wife), and Basil Baddingham (a baddy with an inferiority complex and no scruples of any kind). There are many wonderful female characters, my favorites being Taggie (Declan’s daughter and the moral compass of the show) and Lizzie (unsatisfied wife-cum romance novelist). Rupert sleeps with nearly every woman who steps one toe onto the screen, attempting seductions of, at different points, Declan’s wife, Basil’s mistress, Lizzie’s husband’s mistress, and Declan’s daughter. The series opens with his bare thrusting ass in the bathroom of the Concorde, meanders on to a scene of naked tennis, and ends with him utterly and hopelessly in love.

The novel clocks in at 720 pages; Dame Jilly is something of her generation’s George Eliot and has enjoyed a similar level of fascination, commercial success, confusion, revulsion, and grudging respect for her work as that illustrious lady did. She was, after all, a woman living openly with another woman’s husband who wrote about the complex interpersonal lives of the British gentry. In 2017, Ian Patterson reviewed her novel Mount! for the London Review of Books. In it, he opined on the loneliness of being a serious reader of Cooper’s works:

Jilly Cooper​’s work is not, so far as I know, much studied in universities. In the Senior Combination Room one lunchtime recently, when I mentioned that I was writing this review, a Very Senior Person slumped forward with his head in his hands, muttering: ‘Oh no, soft porn!’ Other people either laugh, or look quizzically at me and hurry away. It sometimes feels as if I’m in a Jilly Cooper novel, on the wrong side of some rivalry, the butt of village gossip, or even one of her caricature academics – who tend to be bearded, left-wing and ‘bootfaced’, with dubious personal hygiene and ineffectual yearnings.

But if you set aside for a moment the ‘raunchy’ cover pictures, the breathless titles (Score! or Wicked! or Jump!), and the publicists’ emphasis on wall-to-wall sex, you do find something worth reading and worth thinking about, which is pleasure, that most ticklish of subjects. There is a particular pleasure in reading about pleasure: pleasure delayed and deferred, guilty pleasure, the pleasure of repetition and the problems of it.

It is both easier and harder to sell the public on television that is focused on pleasure. The romance novel industry is in a gorgeous, feverish bloom right now with beautiful hardcover editions of novels topping bestseller lists and making it onto straightforward fiction shelves, novels that are about desire and that describe pleasure in specific, erotic detail. Romance bookstores are opening in every major city in the country; how utterly humbling and precious it is to see independent bookstores not only survive and thrive but thrive so well that the market welcomes with open arms bookstores dedicated solely to one genre. That would have been the pipiest of pipe dreams only a few decades back. But on television, that adoption has been slower. As mentioned above, Bridgerton dared to be television that declared itself “adults only” and some others have followed, but we have seen nothing like the feast readers have been treated to. Watching Rivals has felt like a giant exhale of pleasure for me, like yes finally my show is on. I only wish I’d discovered it in season five or so, as then I’d be still comfortably ensconced on my sofa merrily cackling at the goings-on in Rutshire.

The series works in large part because it takes its source material seriously. It is filled with good, serious actors who all seem to be having the time of their lives. Alex Hassell, a veteran of the British stage, plays the all-important Rupert Campbell-Black with magnetism, hauteur, and one small internal soft spot. Tony Baddingham is played by David Tennant, apparently at the urging of his wife, a Cooper fan, and he is deliciously evil. Declan is played by Aidan Turner, out of Poldark purgatory at last and perfect as a man so consumed by his principles he cannot see his wife for who she is. By casting established actors, rather than young unknowns or veterans of the soapier sort, the show comes to us with a veil of respectability. Tennant, in particular, is widely considered a national treasure. It’s quite a treat to see him snarling and fucking and yearning like the rest of them.

It is important to pick apart the role infidelity plays in the show, as that may be a hurdle for some. Very few characters confine their activities to their partner, and in a more hamfisted show, this would quickly sour into cynicism for characters and viewers alike. But this show is filled with complicated people. Characters with dicky moral compasses act in ways internally consistent to them; Rupert Campbell-Black is, as the quintessential Cooper hero, a good example. Rupert and Taggie are going to fall in love. This is clear early on when she stumbles upon him playing naked tennis (this is not a euphemism) with a woman married to someone else. She is appalled, but she cannot look away. He merely cannot look away. In a trope oft seen in romance novels, especially of this era, her relative innocence and goodness attract him and bring out a more tender side. He doesn’t want to just frolic with her in the garden. He finds himself wanting things his life is utterly anathema to. But he doesn’t simply cease his womanizing the minute he realizes Taggie’s pull. He is still himself and he is unfaithful to his feelings for her throughout the season until the moment he is not. That moment is earned; in Cooper’s world faithfulness is a declaration of love. In a distinctly opposite example, unhappily married novelist Lizzie Vereker falls in love slowly with a man married to someone else and the two must decide if they are going to choose love, i.e. infidelity, or remain faithful but unhappy. Every character confronts choices like these and they grow, or don’t, based on the paths they choose to take. You know, like in all great fiction.

Patterson is right that Rivals is about pleasure. Her novels, and this show, are great because they acknowledge the importance of desire and pleasure in people’s lives. Romance novels are oft-derided as “chick-lit,” “soft-core,” or “women’s fiction” (the first and third of which are still actual categories on Goodreads) but that lazy critique utterly misses why people write them and why people read them. I dare you to watch this show and not understand.