Disney+ commissioned an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals because bosses “know that audiences around the world love things like Downton”, a content director at the streaming platform has said. Lee Mason, director of scripted originals at Disney+, described the forthcoming series as a “traditional, kind of British, kind of premium soap”, and said he hoped it would provide viewers with an escape from a “tough world” in which watching the news is “hard”. Advertisement Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, he said the series, which centres on a group of wealthy media types in the 1980s, fitted with the platform’s brand as “a sort of place of escapism and entertainment, to transport you sometimes from the horrors of the world”.
He said of the new series: “It’s 1986, it’s lots of posh people in the 80s, in the Cotswolds, working in the world of independent television. There’s lots of rivalries, there’s lots of sex, there’s lots of affairs, there’s lots of heartbreak and all of those sorts of things. And it really is sort of escapism.
Advertisement Advertisement “We know that audiences around the world love things like Downton and that sort of thing. So again, it was like, ‘How do we do that? How do we sort of export that kind of the traditional, kind of British, kind of premium soap’, really.” He said the platform’s approach to British drama typically aims to represent an authentic British experience while making something th.