Rivals Episode 4

Rivals on Disney+ has been the surprise British TV win of the year. By episode 4 the show has stopped being a Jilly Cooper adaptation and started being its own thing — funnier, sharper, and more emotionally honest than the source material got credit for in 1988. David Tennant and Aidan Turner are both doing some of their best work.

What episode 4 actually does

The Emma-Harry marriage cracks wide open. Katherine Parkinson and Aidan Turner have been building the tension for three episodes, and this is where the polite veneer breaks. Parkinson is particularly devastating in the kitchen-sink scene — the kind of acting where she's saying nothing and you can feel the ten years of bottled hurt.

Olivia (Victoria Smurfit) gets the secondary arc. Her own marriage is collapsing on a different timeline, and the friendship between her and Emma is the heart the show didn't have in the early episodes. Two women, both terrible at choosing men, finally finding the thing that actually matters.

The younger cast romance subplot is the weak link. It's there because Cooper wrote it. It pulls focus from the better material. Skim those scenes.

If you want to dig into the source, the original Rivals novel is the obvious read. Riders is the first in the Rutshire Chronicles series if you want to start at the beginning of the Cooper-verse.

Why it's working

The casting. Tennant has been on a tear the last five years and his Lord Tony Baddingham is the best villain on British TV since Tom Hardy's Alfie Solomons. Aidan Turner has finally been given a role that uses what he can do — quiet menace, repressed decency, the occasional shocking burst of warmth. The two of them together are reason enough to watch.

The script is sharper than Cooper's prose ever was. The adaptation has tightened the bagginess, added jokes that land, and given the women interior lives the novel mostly skipped. Showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins has clearly read the book carefully and decided to keep the spine while rewriting the muscle.

For listening, the official soundtrack and the 80s needle-drops are part of the show's appeal. A 80s rock compilation on vinyl if you want the period feel at home.

What to watch alongside

If you like Rivals, you'll like:

The Crown for the period-drama production scale. Succession for the family-of-monsters dynamic (Rivals is essentially Succession with horses). The original 1990 ITV adaptation of Cooper's Riders if you can find it — different cast, different decade, similar pleasures.

To watch, you'll need Disney+ — a Disney+ gift card is the entry. For the streamer setup at home, a Apple TV 4K or Roku Streaming Stick 4K is the cheap upgrade if you're still on a smart-TV interface.

The themes that matter

Rivals is ostensibly about class, ambition, and 1980s commercial television. What it's actually about is loneliness inside marriages, and the way money insulates people from consequences but doesn't insulate them from each other. The class commentary is fine. The marriage commentary is where the show earns its emotional weight.

The female characters are the better-written ones, which is the inverse of how Cooper's novel reads. Emma and Olivia are the two characters you'll think about between episodes.

The pick of the season so far

Episodes 1 and 4. Skip 2 if you're crunched for time — it sets up plot points that get re-established cleanly in 3 and 4. Episode 4 is the dramatic centre of the season; it's the one to watch twice.

If the show maintains this quality for the back half, it's the British drama of the year. Big if. Disney+ adaptations have wobbled before. The signs are good.