Disney+’s ‘Rivals’: The Inside Story Of How A Producer Overcame The “Snobbery” Of British TV To Bring Jilly Cooper To Screen
EXCLUSIVE: Disney+’s Rivals may launch tomorrow but the Jilly Cooper adaptation has been living inside producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins’ head since he entered the TV industry 25 years ago.
Treadwell-Collins has had a stellar career including a lengthy stint running BBC soap EastEnders and the idea to adapt Cooper’s novels has always remained front and center of his mind. But until Disney gave him the greenlight in 2022, he told Deadline he felt he was consistently coming up against the same enemy – the innate “snobbery” of British TV.
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“I had meetings with the BBC and ITV years ago when I didn’t have the rights and when I said, ‘Would you go for something like Jilly Cooper?’ they would look at me like I’d farted,” he said. “There’s a snobbery about her. Throughout my career I had kept mentioning Jilly and everyone sort of laughed at and ridiculed me.”
Cooper’s books, of which there are many, are often characterized as ‘bonkbusters’, a term coined in the 1980s to describe a raunchy subgenre of romance novel that has tabloid journalists licking their lips. Yet for Treadwell-Collins, who first read Cooper in his teens, she is a “brilliant storyteller, who writes about class and people in a way that is funny and well observed.”
“She’s like Dickens,” he added.
Treadwell-Collins said he has tried to pitch Rivals several times over the past two decades and was knocked back. He landed the rights in 2020 after becoming close with Cooper, and with the author’s blessing he set about writing the pilot. Ironically, given his views on commissioner snobbery, he felt himself taken more seriously by the TV community once he left EastEnders and worked with Russell T Davies on the BBC-Amazon’s Emmy-winning A Very English Scandal, while he also co-wrote Graham Norton adaptation Holding for ITV.
Launching his indie, the ITV Studios-backed Happy Prince, gave him the opportunity to start re-pitching Rivals. “I had always held Jilly Cooper close and I thought, ‘OK, when I’ve got my own company I will do this myself’,” he said. “It took me producing [A Very English] Scandal for people to say, ‘Oh he’s not just a soap producer,’ which I think is wrong.”
Set in the fictional, Cotswolds-esque county of Rutshire, Rivals charts animosity between the new-money Lord Tony Baddingham and aristocratic Rupert Campbell-Black, a rivalry that seeps into the Corinium TV station owned by Baddingham just as the world of commercial TV is taking off – a world that Treadwell-Collins feels is “celebrated” by the Cooper novel. “I remember starting off in TV and seeing those old-school execs going for boozy lunches, coming back really drunk and saying, ‘We’ve got a show’,” he said. “That was how it used to work.”
Having settled on adapting the first half of the novel, Treadwell-Collins changed tack and started pitching to streamers. “I was clear that we needed a bigger budget,” he explained. “Jilly Cooper has been made in the past fairly cheaply and that kind of adds to the ridicule. To get her to be taken seriously you needed a hefty budget because this is a story about money and power.”
Disney+, which was in the process of building out its international originals, was intrigued and Treadwell-Collins liked the way in which Lee Mason, the streamer’s EMEA scripted originals boss, appreciated that “we were skewering race and class, and looking at how far we have and haven’t come since 1986.” Mason also liked that the show is “about telly, and throws up preconceptions about Jilly Cooper,” he added, and Treadwell-Collins finally had his greenlight. It launches tomorrow on Disney+ worldwide and on Hulu in the U.S.
Beyond splashing the cash, he was impressed by what the Mouse House was bringing to the table. “You would have thought Disney might have been a bit po-faced but they were not, they wanted us to push boundaries and were questioning every scene.”
Seeing Tennant, Turner & Dyer In A New Light
Casting was always going to be critical and Treadwell-Collins’ aim from day one was to “see everyone do something they had not really done before.”
In this regard, few could argue he failed. David Tennant plays Baddingham, the uppity nouveau riche owner of Corinium, Aidan Turner is given a rare opportunity to showcase his native Irish accent as star presenter Declan O’Hara, and Danny Dyer, who worked with Treadwell-Collins on EastEnders, is Freddie Jones, a sensitive-soul millionaire type whose wife doesn’t give him his due. Ali & Ava star Claire Rushbrook, meanwhile, who is known for movies like Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, plays “the poshest person on the show,” according to Treadwell-Collins, impressing as Baddingham’s wife Lady Monica.
The casting team assembled for an “X-Factor-style judges houses” set-up to decide on final cast, and Treadwell-Collins was conscious due diligence was required to hire for roles that would have “go quite close to the edge with sexuality and some of our other themes.”
In the end, Treadwell-Collins was delighted with his band of thespians. “They are playing people they are not used to playing and that keeps them on their toes,” he added. “They bounced off each other but also wanted to impress each other.”
He paid the same attention to the writing process. After overseeing a hefty writing team for years on EastEnders, Treadwell-Collins always wanted to employ a U.S.-style writers room once he had mapped out initial scripts.
He split his rooms in two, assembling a large team first to interrogate the source material and hone in on themes before a smaller group led by Treadwell-Collins and Happy Prince’s Alex Lamb nailed down scripts. Playwright Laura Wade was aboard as writer/EP alongside the likes of EP Felicity Blunt and Treadwell-Collins said Wade is responsible for making the series “punchy and funny” by “sprinkling her writing over everyone’s scripts.” Lead director Elliot Hegarty, meanwhile, a BAFTA nominee who has worked on Ted Lasso, “knew how to tell a story through sex.”
Being so close to the writing team allowed Treadwell-Collins to modernize Cooper in a way that he felt better suited modern society. He introduced more LGBTQ+ storylines and changed the race of fierce Corinium executive Cameron Cook, who is played by Nafessa Williams (Black and Blue). “We thought this would be a way of telling an outsiders story within Rivals,” he added.
Creating a “Cooperverse”
The result, Treadwell-Collins believes, could be the next big international streaming franchise as the big U.S. players look to nail down longer-running hits. As Deadline publishes this feature, Disney+’s big Doctor Who international franchise bet appears to hang in the balance, while Sally Wainwright’s Renegade Nell failed to make it beyond Season 1.
“I’ve been thinking about Jilly Cooper for so long and know there is a ‘Cooperverse’,” said Treadwell-Collins. “Her books are weighty. We only told half of Rivals because we wanted to delve into the characters in more detail. TV is so disposable nowadays but I want people to re-watch Rivals, I want it to be telly that lasts and endures.”
These “enduring” characters have lived inside Treadwell-Collins’ head for a fair portion of his life. The proof will now be in whether they can enter the minds of millions of others.
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