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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
21
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
ColliderMay 11, 2026
ColliderOct 8, 2024
Season 1 Review:
These are characters who happily indulge urges with a devil-may-care attitude (though they're not static, and do grow), with the audience able to comfortably await the inevitable fallout. It makes for a fun, thrilling watch, and it's backed by strong and charismatic performers who add enough complexity to avoid any dramatic ruts.
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iOct 17, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The series flips between confused sincerity and all-out sex farce making for a glossy puddle of a show, seemingly unwilling to admit its own quite joyful lack of depth. If only the Disney bosses had been brave enough to open the stable door, Rivals might have been able to run to the trashy paddock wherein it clearly longs to frolick.
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Oct 8, 2024
Season 1 Review:
A vivid, thrilling throwback to the soapy dramas of primetime television’s heyday. A scandalous, uninhibited romp from its very first scenes (which involve two characters joining the mile-high club in an airplane toilet), its story is full of betrayal, ambition, greed, and excess in all the best possible ways.
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Radio TimesMay 11, 2026
Radio TimesOct 9, 2024
Oct 15, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Rivals has a keen eye for subtle class distinctions and the way they etch tiny fracture lines through a close-knit community. It’s just frustrating that only some of the characters on the show feel like three-dimensional people, while others (most notably Nafessa Williams’ American producer Cameron Cook) feel like paper-thin soap-opera archetypes.
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Nov 1, 2024
Season 1 Review:
I was more drawn to the qualities it has that’ve been largely absent from more prestigious shows this year: joy, and also abundance, sly humor, and fun. Amid a glut of dour, depressed series with Serious Things to Say, a show that carries itself so lightly is absolutely welcome.
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The GuardianOct 8, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It has all paid off. Cooper’s books are about joyfully indulging your appetites and knowing that literary (or televisual) escapism is not a sin but a very necessary part of being a human. Disney has taken the business of bringing her Rutshire vision to life just as seriously and with just as light a touch as they needed.
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The TelegraphOct 7, 2024
The TimesOct 7, 2024
Season 1 Review:
How much you enjoy Rivals will depend on how much of a Jilly Cooper fan you are (I think she is fabulous). But even if you’re not au fait with the books you can tuck in to a lavish series that takes you back to a decade (it is set in 1986) before mobile phones and when people still got steaming drunk at lunchtime. This is a big pink Anglo bubblegum of a production and a splash of retro-escapism.
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