What makes this so interesting is how comparably little interest there has been in productions over recent years that emphasized the message of the moment around sex and politics: the all-women version of Ghostbusters was a historic and financial disaster. Audiences reacted terribly to the inserted boss-girl character of Rose in the Disney Star Wars sequels. The woman-led Marvel flick The Marvels somehow managed to make a loss after audiences interpreted it as a two-hour lecture on feminist values.
Rivals, by contrast, transports the viewer back to an era before woke morality emerged: it is England in the 1980s, where greedy television tycoons and misbehaved aristocrats live a life of secret depravity while posing to the public as avatars of Margaret Thatcher’s remade Britain.
It is an era where serious sexual crimes are punished, but harmless – though adulterous – flirting in the office is not. The characters are fully human and their strengths are blended in every case with fatal but very relatable flaws. The women scheme as much as the men. The lavish helpings of heaving bosoms and rippled abdominal muscles are seasoned with genuine moments of introspection, loneliness and insecurity. The characters are fully human, though perhaps in every case in need of a confessor, both for the sake of their minds and their immortal souls.
That such a production would come from Disney, and that it would come now, is telling. The series is based on the books of the late Dame Jilly Cooper, whose reputation as the author of “bonkbuster” content won her the approval of Britain’s Queen Camilla, who described herself as a massive fan. Yet such a series could only be set in the 1980s: trying to make these characters believable in 2026 would be an impossible challenge, given that there is not a single human resources manager in sight.
The Backlash to Modernity?
Why, then, is it so popular, this television series that transports the viewing audience to a fantasy world that – broadly speaking – existed in recent memory before being excised from the boundaries of the acceptable? What does it say that audiences react so positively to a depiction of a world that is broadly portrayed in modern culture as the bad old days over which feminism, equality and #MeToo have triumphed?
This is, arguably not coincidentally, an era of declining fertility, declining relationship formation and vastly decreased human interaction. AI dating assistance is now necessary because young people are spending an average of two hours fewer than their predecessors per day in the company of others.
It is also an era in which efforts have been made to re-make the past in a sanitized way, suitable for modern eyes and ears: Witness as proof the sustained effort to re-write and edit classic films like Aladdin and Peter Pan, or recent efforts to re-edit the classic works of children’s authors like Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton to sanitize language for modern children – often with the effect of removing the charm of the books altogether.
That this censorious era has coincided with the revival in popularity of the unshackled period drama focused on sex and relationships is therefore less than surprising: Western television is increasingly seeing the benefit of transporting viewers to eras that are, on the face of it, less liberated than our own but in which the characters experience liberty to be themselves that is much harder to come by than our own society perhaps advertises.
The success of shows like Downton Abbey, Yellowstone, Vikings and even the hyper-feminist Bridgerton, which almost certainly overstates the sexual liberation of women in Regency-era London, demonstrates a hunger for audiences to be transported to the past.
What sets Rivals aside is that the past in question is remarkably recent, and yet remarkably foreign. Viewers are not presented with a dubious reconstruction of ancient Rome or Napoleonic France in which people were free to be themselves: they are given a culturally accurate depiction of the English-speaking world, not very long ago at all, replete with all the flaws that are said to have been addressed by the left-wing cultural revolution of the past two decades.
Perhaps many more viewers than care to admit it are coming to the realization that not all that has been banished was bad, and that not all that has replaced it is good.
