The production team behind the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals has obtained the rights to the whole of Dame Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles, the BBC reports. Executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins announced the deal while speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival at an event honouring the author's work. Dame Jilly died in October last year at the age of 88, after suffering a fatal head injury in a fall at her home in Gloucestershire.
Why it matters
The acquisition gives the makers of Rivals access to a much wider set of storylines than the single novel the current series is drawn from. Treadwell-Collins told the festival audience that the production now has "all these books to plunder," according to the BBC, and that the show could be kept running for a long time. For Disney+, whose adaptation has drawn a high-profile cast, the deal points to a possible long-term franchise built on Cooper's fiction rather than a one-off limited series.
Cooper was known for novels that her readers nicknamed "bonkbusters," among them Riders and Polo, and her writing centred on scandal and extramarital affairs among the upper classes. The BBC notes that Rivals has been a major success for the streaming service, with David Tennant, Emily Atack, Aidan Turner, Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer among its cast.
Four books, and a shift in how the show is billed
Treadwell-Collins said the production holds the rights to all four of the Rutshire Chronicles. He also pointed to a change in how the programme is presented, noting that the poster for the Disney+ show now describes it as based on Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles rather than on Rivals alone.
He described an ongoing relationship with the author's family and said the approach involves drawing on portions of the books and reshaping them for television. Cooper's material, he said, functions as a store of ideas the production can keep returning to. The BBC reports that the author had already given her approval to the central storylines for a third series before she died.
"We have Jilly's notes for season one and all the way through season two," Treadwell-Collins said, adding that the team had discussed its plans for series three and beyond with her while she was alive. He also said the production has the family's blessing and remains in regular contact with them.
From a letter to a greenlight
The executive producer told the festival that the Rivals adaptation came about after he sent Cooper a letter setting out his admiration for her novels and his vision for translating Rivals to the screen. He said he had long believed the books would work well on television because of her storytelling and her characters, but that his enthusiasm had not always been shared by others in the industry.
He recounted that television producers had laughed at the suggestion over the course of his career. After meeting Cooper, he said, she urged him to write the adaptation himself rather than hand it to someone else. Treadwell-Collins, who had written only one show before, said he had doubted his own confidence for the task and had thought other writers were better placed to take it on. He described bringing Cooper's work to television as the proudest achievement of his career.
Where series two was filmed
Production on the second series of Rivals took place in Bristol, Corsham in Wiltshire and Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, according to the BBC. Locations around the West of England were used to represent the Cotswolds and London. Tennant and Claire Rushbrook were filmed on Corsham's high street, where the town hall was dressed as a polling station for the show.
The BBC's report follows its Gloucestershire operation, which is inviting story ideas by email and WhatsApp.
What to watch next: whether the production confirms which of the remaining Rutshire novels will form the basis of future series, and when a third season is formally announced.
