What Happened
Rivals is back. After eighteen months of teases, recasting headlines, and a lengthy shoot across the Cotswolds, the Jilly Cooper adaptation returned on May 15, 2026, dropping its first three episodes on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ everywhere else. The 12-episode second season has been split into two batches — six episodes now, six later in the year — and Disney+ is staggering the first run weekly after a triple-bill premiere, a release pattern designed to keep the bonkbuster trending all the way into summer.
The season opens in 1987, two years deeper into the Thatcherite hangover than its predecessor. The battle for the Central South West television franchise that simmered through the first run now boils over: Tony Baddingham's Corinium TV and the upstart Venturer consortium are openly at war for the regional broadcast license, and Lord Tony — David Tennant in full villain bloom — is "weaponising scandal" against everyone in his orbit. New ferries arrive at the Rutshire docks too. Hayley Atwell joins as a recast Helen Gordon, ex-wife of Rupert Campbell-Black and mother of his children, while Rupert Everett strolls in as Malise Gordon, Helen's elegant new husband and Rupert's old Olympic show-jumping coach. The arrival of that triangle alone is enough to rearrange the Rutshire social map.
The cast that anchored the first season is otherwise intact. Alex Hassell returns as Rupert Campbell-Black, Aidan Turner reprises Declan O'Hara, Danny Dyer is back as Freddie Jones, and Bella Maclean continues as Taggie O'Hara. Director Elliot Hegarty oversaw the season's tone, with showrunners Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Alexander Lamb steering the scripts toward higher-stakes politics and lower-stakes restraint — which is to say, just as many open shirts and mid-canter affairs as before, but with a sharper satire about media power running underneath.
Why It Matters
The first Rivals season slipped onto Disney+ in October 2024 as something of an unexpected hit, a frothy import that scooped a BAFTA nomination and a 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. The follow-up is arriving with a much larger spotlight on it — and with an unusually heavy weight on Disney's shoulders. Disney+ has been re-tooling its general-entertainment slate after a string of cancellations and reshuffles in 2025, and Rivals has quietly become the streamer's most reliable original drama outside the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. A perfect early Rotten Tomatoes score for season two is exactly the kind of headline Disney needs as it pushes the property into international markets.
The show also matters because it has helped re-popularise the bonkbuster, a genre that publishers and broadcasters had quietly written off in the late 2000s. Jilly Cooper, who passed away in October 2025 at age 88, lived to see her Rutshire Chronicles climb back up the bestseller charts on the strength of the first season. Producers Happy Prince and Disney UK both confirmed early in 2026 that more Cooper adaptations are on the long-term slate, including the possibility of a Polo-led spin-off if season two delivers. The show is, in other words, the seed for a small but very profitable transatlantic literary universe.
There is a quieter institutional story too. Rivals is one of the rare Disney+ shows that began life as a UK-led commission and only later wound its way through Hulu. Season two's confident creative authorship — British producers, British directors, a cast list assembled from the Royal Shakespeare Company alumni rolls — is a useful counter-example for executives wondering whether streamers can keep nurturing regional voices rather than chasing the same global swing. That the model worked once was lucky. That it has now produced an even stronger second season suggests it is reproducible.
Reaction
The first reviews landed early on May 15 and the verdict was striking. Rotten Tomatoes posted a perfect 100 percent score for the season after the embargo dropped, with 22 of the first 22 critics filing positive reviews — a higher mark than the 95 percent the first season closed with. Aggregator boosts can be fragile, but the unanimity of the praise was the more telling number. Den of Geek called it "TV's most unapologetic guilty pleasure" and "more entertaining than ever." TechRadar described the first three episodes as "as steamy as ever" while flagging that the second season's politics-of-power thread had taken on more weight.
Audience reaction tracked the critics. Hulu's social channels said the May 15 premiere window cleared the platform's previous "first three hours" record for a returning original. On the British side, the Disney+ launch coincided with a packed world-premiere event in Glasgow where David Tennant, Aidan Turner, Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett gathered for a red-carpet rollout that trended in the UK throughout the day. Tennant told reporters in Glasgow that he had needed "a long talk with myself before going back to being Tony" — exactly the kind of soundbite the marketing team had hoped would surface naturally on premiere day.
Notably, the conversation has stayed on the show itself. Where season one's launch tone leaned into nostalgia for the source novels, season two is being received as a piece of contemporary television in its own right. Rupert Everett's swaggering Malise has emerged as the early favourite among critics; multiple reviews single out the dinner-party scene in episode two as the season's standout set piece.
What's Next
Disney+ and Hulu will release the remaining three episodes of the first batch weekly, with episode four landing May 22, episode five on May 29, and episode six on June 5. The second batch of six episodes does not yet have a confirmed date, although Disney UK told The Hollywood Reporter in April that the back half would land "before the end of 2026," which most industry watchers read as a September or October return window.
Beyond the immediate schedule, the bigger question is what happens next for the Rutshire universe. Happy Prince has been holding open conversations with Disney about adapting Polo, the 1991 Cooper novel that picks up Rupert Campbell-Black's story a few years later. Cast and creatives have publicly endorsed the idea — Alex Hassell told Deadline in early May he would "do another six seasons if they'll have me" — and Disney has now seen enough launch data to consider whether a Cooper-verse is worth pulling forward. Expect a green-light decision before the end of season two's full run.
Closing Thoughts
For a show that began life as a slightly winking period bauble, Rivals has become something more durable: a portrait of how power moves through small English towns when broadcasting rights, sex, and family money all collide. Season two leans further into that idea without losing the licence to be ridiculous, and the result is the rare returning drama that argues, episode by episode, for its own existence. It is also a reminder that the streamers' enthusiasm for vast genre tent-poles can leave room for the small, specific, regionally rooted stories that travel surprisingly well.
If the second half holds the shape the first three episodes promise, Rivals will end 2026 as Disney+'s strongest non-franchise original to date. That is a remarkable arc for a show whose biggest creative bet, two years ago, was that audiences still wanted to spend a weekend with people behaving badly in stables. The bet keeps paying out — and on the strength of these episodes, the table has plenty of chips left.
한글 요약
질리 쿠퍼(Jilly Cooper)의 동명 소설을 원작으로 한 디즈니+ 드라마 Rivals 시즌 2가 5월 15일 미국 Hulu와 영국·국제 Disney+를 통해 동시 공개됐다. 첫 회차로 1~3화가 한꺼번에 풀렸고, 이후 6월 5일까지 매주 한 편씩 추가되는 1차 배치 6화 일정이다. 시즌 2는 1987년을 배경으로 코리니움과 벤처러의 지역 방송권 쟁탈전이 격화되는 이야기를 다루며, 데이비드 테넌트가 다시 토니 베딩엄으로 돌아오고 알렉스 해셀, 에이단 터너, 대니 다이어, 벨라 매클린이 시즌 1 캐스팅을 이어간다.
시즌 2 최대 화제는 신규 캐스팅이다. 헤일리 앳웰이 루퍼트 캠벨-블랙의 전처 헬렌 고든 역으로, 루퍼트 에버렛이 그녀의 새 남편이자 루퍼트의 옛 승마 코치 말리스 고든 역으로 합류했다. 두 사람의 등장이 러츠셔의 인간관계 지도를 단번에 뒤흔든다. 비평가들의 반응은 압도적이다. 로튼 토마토는 시즌 2에 100% 신선도 점수를 매겼고, 영국과 미국 매체들 모두 "더 야하고 더 어른스러워졌다"는 평가를 내놓고 있다. 데이비드 테넌트의 80년대형 악역 연기는 다시 한 번 시리즈의 중심을 잡는다.
2025년 별세한 쿠퍼의 러츠셔 연대기는 이번 시즌의 성공으로 다음 작품(Polo) 영상화 논의까지 본격적으로 이어지고 있다. 디즈니+ 입장에서도 프랜차이즈에 기대지 않는 오리지널 드라마 중 가장 안정적인 성과를 내는 작품으로 자리 잡아, 영국 발 글로벌 콘텐츠 전략의 새 모델로 떠오르는 모습이다. 후반부 6화는 연내 추가 공개될 예정이다.