Film and television titillation always plays like gangbusters on streaming for reasons that we shouldn’t have to explain, but nobody in their right mind expected Disney Plus to get in on the action given its status as the streaming service representing the most family-friendly monolith in modern media.
And yet, if we take the word of the cast at face value – which we should, considering they’re the ones shooting the thing – then Rivals is destined to cause subscribers all over the world to frantically figure out how to work the parental controls to prevent their children from witnessing what’s about to unfold.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Jilly Cooper, the stacked ensemble boasts Aidan Turner and David Tennant among its most recognizable members, with the former admitting in a recent interview that “we have so much sex on our show, we have to have two intimacy coaches.”
Not the sort of the thing Mickey would approve of, then, but new set photos unveiled by Digital Spy unveil filming on a scene that’s decidedly less hot under the collar than we should be expecting from the end product.
Rivals takes place in the late 1980s and unfolds in the Cotswolds area of England, with several stories intertwining as a variety of characters get caught up in the debauchery of a decade largely defined by it, all set against quaint backdrops ripped straight from a postcard. Disney Plus getting into exclusive erotica wasn’t on the bingo card, which makes this one worth keeping an eye on for that reason alone.