The popular novel Rivals by Jilly Cooper will be coming to the Disney+ streaming service very soon, as reported by The Guardian.
The novel, originally published in 1988, is the second book in her Rutshire Chronicles series. The book series is set in 1980s England, and the eight-episode series be looking at it with a “2020s lens.”
The Rutshire Chronicles series consists of ten books, beginning with Riders in 1985. The most recent entry into the series is 2016’s Mount!. As mentioned, Rivals is the second book in the series and was also published under the title Players.
In Rivals, talk show host Declan O’Hara gets recruited to a television company called Corinium. It turns out his new company’s managing director Tony Baddingham is a fierce rival of Rupert Campbell-Black, Minister of Sport. Declan soon learns the only reason he got hired was to keep his show under the Corinium umbrella. Baddingham has assigned a domineering woman named Cameron Cook to produce his show, which creates a rivalry between O’Hara and Cook.
Previously, the first book in the series, Riders, was made into a TV movie starring Marcus Gilbert as Campbell-Black. In 2016, the rights to the series were purchased by UK production company FilmWave. Nothing ever came of that proposed series.
The showrunners on the series will be Dominic Treadwell-Collins (A Very English Scandal and EastEnders) and Laura Wade (The Riot Club). The show will be produced by Happy Prince (an ITV Studio). Aside from Disney+, it will air on Hulu in the U.S., and Star+ in Latin American countries.
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Based near Toronto, Brandon is a news writer and Book Specialist for Book Notification who covers the world of books, maintains author pages, writes a variety of content, and is an avid reader of non-fiction and biographies.