Disney’s Delicious Romp of a Series Isn’t Just Steamy. It Also Nails a Key Element of the British.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I know that if you are watching Rivals, the new Disney+/Hulu series charting the rise and fall of various people associated with an independent TV station called Corinium in the 1980s English countryside, you are watching it not for its sociopolitical insights. You’re watching it for what I must refer to in this case as “the bonking.” There is so much sex in this show. My colleagues Nadira Goffe and Rebecca Onion can take you through it, blow by glorious blow, here. But it’s not just because of all the shagging that the series is supremely entertaining. I can’t think of the last time I had this much fun watching TV. It’s oversaturated, frivolous, and daft, full of outrageous ’80s costumes and needle drops.

As a British person, though, I found my attention drawn away from the fun and toward its depiction of class. Plenty of the class dynamics on Rivals are not subtle. This is not a subtle show, after all—it opens with a woman achieving orgasm in the bathroom of the Concorde as the aircraft breaks the sound barrier, for God’s sake. Any idiot watching this series can work out that, for instance, the Makepieces, whom we see serving drinks at the luxurious Cotswolds garden parties, are from a different class background than the people with aristocratic titles. But I was impressed by how accurately the show handles the small details that differentiate, in British society, upper from upper middle class, old money from new money, posh from—as a character spits out at one point—“common.”

The four central families of Rivals—the Baddinghams, the Campbell-Blacks, the Joneses, and the O’Haras—all have money. They all live in the same area, in nice houses, become involved in the same industry, and socialize with one another. They should, by rights, occupy the same place in society. But they don’t quite. Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a television journalist, and his wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit), are high-society Dublin transplants, and as such are both slightly excused from the rankings of the English class system—and casually looked down on by the Brits. Before the recording of the first episode of Declan’s new chat show on Corinium, he hears one of the TV station staff making a joke about Irish people, and says, “Cut the fucking Paddy jokes or I’ll knock you from here to the Irish Sea.”

Freddie (Danny Dyer) and Valerie Jones (Lisa McGrillis) are fabulously rich but not posh. He made his money in electronics, and she owns a boutique. Right from the first moment she enters Cotchester society, Valerie puts a foot wrong: She has had double glazing installed on her country-estate windows, a modern encroachment on the old building that no country posh person would contemplate. When she speaks, she tries to soften her Essex accent by adopting posh phrasing that is just slightly overemphasized. “Shall we find somewhere to perch?” she asks her new aristocratic neighbors.

We watch as Corinium’s owner, Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), and his wife, Monica Baddingham (Claire Rushbrook), discuss how inelegant the Joneses’ decor is, knowing that their own house is a hideous, dated froth of heavy curtains and trinkets not very different from what the Joneses have. But it’s the right kind of froth, which it ought to be—Monica is a lady, you see, and thus will always be above new-money strivers like the Joneses.

But even that is not enough to put the Baddinghams at the top of the social pack in the British countryside. Though a lord, and though living in an aristocratic country house, Tony is still marked out as lesser than. He went to a grammar (read: academically selective but free) school, whereas rival Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), the person in the show with the most untouchable class credentials, went to Harrow, which is not just a public (read: expensive) school, but one of the right ones. Tony knows he has to get Rupert, a member of Parliament, onto the board of his television channel because of those aristocratic credentials, and he hates this. In one scene, Tony says to his wife, “I can’t believe I’m going to him for legitimacy; all he did for his status is be born into it, public-school wanker.” Monica, in response, smiles wryly: “Shall we send Archie to a comprehensive, save on the school fees?” Their own son is, of course, a public-school wanker just like Rupert, and Tony wouldn’t dream of his being anything else. These are exactly the bizarre contradictions that class in the U.K. is built on: hating others for having what you want for your own children, and hating anybody who reminds you of where you came from, if you’ve managed to claw your way up the ladder. It makes sense that Tony is particularly cruel to Valerie Jones; as Monica points out, Valerie reminds him of his own mother.

There are so many such markers of class micro-differences in this show, if you’re looking out for them. The Baddinghams’ son works a summer job as a waiter because Tony is “teaching his children the value of money.” The Joneses have an electric fireplace rather than a wood-burning one, and in their “lounge,” not their “sitting room.” The Joneses turn up to a shooting party in a squeaky-clean new car, rather than the mud-flecked Land Rovers that all the aristocrats drive. Rupert doesn’t talk about class half as much as Tony does, because he doesn’t need to concern himself with what he has had since birth and can never lose. And, true to life, the working- and middle-class characters couldn’t care less about these minute, stupid differences between the upper-middle and upper crust. They’re all, as one of the local boys puts it to his friend, simply “posh cunts.”

It’s not surprising, really: author Jilly Cooper treads this ground expertly in Rivals’ source material, the 1988 novel of the same name, as well as the rest of the book series, known as the Rutshire Chronicles. I’m currently reading Riders, the prequel to Rivals, a work that would be genuinely thrilling to someone who likes horses a lot more than I do. There’s plenty of sex in these novels, yes, but class is so often what Cooper is getting at around all the shagging.

I think what I found most satisfying about Rivals’ representation of class in the U.K., though, is that it makes all of this seem ridiculous. Much of the show presents ’80s nonsense as nonsense: the oversize jewel-toned pussy-bow blouses; the silly hits of the period, like Chas & Dave’s “Rabbit,” in the soundtrack; the sex on the beach–powered synthetic excess of it all. And so the class dynamics become inflected with that tone of Look how absurd all of this is. It is absurd! What a bonkers little country, where calling it the toilet or the loo, where the exact nature of your carpeting, where the smallest inflection in the way you pronounce certain words, means something in terms of where you stand in society. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’d say most people in the U.K. wish we did not live in a country that is so insanely, often unspokenly stratified. However, that is the way it is, and Rivals really knows it.

But, small mercy, not in a po-faced “Look on the inequalities in society and despair” kind of way—rather, in a “Look at this and laugh” way. Perhaps my favorite line in the whole thing is spoken by a toff called Henry Hampshire (Brendan Patricks) at one of their hunting parties: “Before the syphilis reached his brain, my father used to host seven shoots a year, and we never started the first drive later than half past 9.” Funny, surreal, and yet totally believable as the sort of thing that sort of person might say. This show is set in the ’80s, yes, but class never dies in the U.K., and these people remain very much alive and well.

“God, you Brits are weird,” says Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), the American producer who finds herself in a new world here among these poshos, to Rupert at one point, laughing. Truer words were never spoken.