How ‘Rivals’ Helped David Tennant Fall for Romance

David Tennant didn't see Rivals coming. When the scripts for the Jilly Cooper adaptation first landed, the actor — fresh off playing serial killers and mind-controlling villains — couldn't quite taste where the show sat. I can't quite taste this," he told the New York Times. His wife Georgia read them and disagreed: "This is going to be massive. There's an appetite for this, and an excitement in it that isn't really like anything else." She was right. The series debuted at No. 1 on Disney+ in multiple countries, including the UK and Ireland, and cracked the top ten on Hulu in the US, per FlixPatrol data. It won an International Emmy for best drama series and earned Tennant a BAFTA nomination. Disney ordered an expanded 12-episode second season before the first had finished airing.

The show's alchemy — raunchy escapism, boardroom warfare, and genuine class satire — proved tricky to calibrate. "Tonally it was always difficult to know quite what it was," Tennant said. "When we shot the first season, there were endless conversations among the cast going, 'How broadly comic can we be? Where's the gritty realism?'" Director Elliot Hegarty held the line, finding the "one degree above real life" register that lets the show pivot from horse-riding sex romps to Thatcher-era media franchise battles without breaking.

Now the stakes have sharpened. The mid-season cliffhanger killed off Tony's wife Monica (Claire Rushbrook) in a car crash moments after she discovered his infidelity. A guest at her funeral warns that Tony has "lost his conscience" and "can do what he likes." Tennant describes grief as "the one variable you cannot orchestrate" for a man obsessed with control. Executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins said the creative team leaned into heartbreak "without losing the delicious wickedness that makes the show hum. The grief isn't an intermission from the scheming; it becomes the fuel that accelerates the scandal."

The fallout radiates across Rutshire. Venturer's franchise bid is compromised by a mole feeding intel to Corinium. Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner) remains unaware of his wife Maud's covert connection to his bitterest adversary. The dangerous entanglement between author Lizzie and tech mogul Freddie deepens. Tennant, who once compared Cooper to Charles Dickens for her social observation, now anchors a series that refuses to choose between melodrama and meaning — and viewers can't get enough.