Posted in: Hulu, TV | Tagged: bonkbuster novels, Dame Jilly Cooper, david tennant, disney, EastEnders, hulu, Rivals

Rivals: David Tennant Series Cliffhanger Ending Inspired by Real Life

Rivals ends on a life-or-death cliffhanger, anticipating a possible second season that wasn't in the book but had a real-life inspiration.

Rivals is that rare series on streaming with buzz that seemed to come out of nowhere as far as Americans are concerned. For the British, it's already a success because there are millions of fans of Dame Jilly Cooper's bonkbuster novel since it was published in 1988. Americans are less familiar with the books and are thus surprised. The word-of-mouth on the series is what makers usually dream of. Having David Tennant in the cast as Big Baddie Sir Tony Baddingham doesn't hurt either. The series has done for posh, horrible Brits what Shogun has done for Medieval Japan. It ends on a cliffhanger, covering only half of the 800-page novel's story, that's very different from the book's, and that's for good reason. Every series needs a cliffhanger ending these days, and hopefully, it gets renewed.

SPOILER – How Rivals Ended Season One

In the finale moments of the finale, Sir Tony got into a physical fight with his producer and mistress Cameron (Nafessa Williams) that ended with her whacking him in the head with his television award, leaving him bleeding out on the carpet of his office. It's one of those "Are they DEAD?!" cliffhangers that soaps are good at, and showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who used to run Eastenders, certainly knows a thing or two about ending an episode of a show on Cliffhangers, and Rivals is nothing if not a very upmarket and camp soap. However, Sir Tony did not get bonked on the head or end up bleeding on the carpet in the book. That was created for the series finale. In the book, Tony beats up Cameron rather badly, which drives her deeper into the camp of his arch nemesis Sir Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), the caddish antihero of the Rutshire book series.

"At this point where we end in the book," Treadwell-Collins told TV Insider. "Tony beats Cameron up, and he beats her to a pulp, and she goes to Rupert. That is an awful big moment in the book, and we in the writers' room said very early on, we are not going to, in our version, just have a man beat a woman to a pulp. Because we decided very early on to make Cameron a woman of color. We're not showing that on the screen. Our Cameron is slightly different to the Cameron in the book. What I think is wonderful is we've always said Tony hits Cameron, but Cameron hits Tony back and really hits him back."

The Real-Life Inspiration Behind That Cliffhanger

It turns out that Tony getting bonked on the head with his TV award in the TV version of Rivals was inspired by this happening to Treadwell-Collins in real life. "Write what you know," as the old saying goes.

"It came out of a moment in lockdown," continued Treadwell-Collins. "I was moving a cupboard, and my BAFTA for EastEnders was on the top, and my husband said, clear the cupboard before you move it. I ignored him. The BAFTA fell on my head and I was concussed, I was hospitalized. I was told that if it had fallen by an inch more, I'd be dead. Which death by BAFTA for a television producer, actually, if you're going to go, it's kind of cool. But early on, Felicity Blunt, Alex, Jilly, and I laughed about that and said, can we not layer in this award that in a Chekhovian way is played earlier, that ultimately Cameron grabs and whacks Tony over the head with. It gives us a really good, noisy cliffhanger. It also is something that is a shock to people who love the books. So it comes out of nowhere. It gives you a brilliant cliffhanger. If we never come back, it leaves a lot of questions up in the air, but hopefully, we come back to do more."

The Series Is Much More Feminist Than Book Was

"But it was also a serious point," emphasised Treadwell-Collins. "I did not want to have Tony beat Cameron to a pulp. Our message for our show is that if you look at the journey that every woman takes in Series 1, they're all much stronger by the end. We were not going to have Cameron weaker. We actually wanted Cameron to be stronger, and Cameron to whack back and hit Tony as he's surrounded by himself doing a speech on lots of televisions about the power of television felt delicious to us."

Treadwell-Collins, a lifelong fan of Dame Jilly Cooper's books, also revealed he had bought the rights to adapt all of the doorstopper-sized Rutshire novels and hopes to do more in the future. Rivals is the second book in the series, and the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black appears in many of them.

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