Parents' Guide to Rivals

With vicious and venal characters wreaking havoc in elegant English country houses, this racy 1980s throwback feels like an updated prime time soap opera, a Dynasty or Dallas for modern times. Author Dame Jilly Cooper, who wrote the book Rivals, isn't well-known in America, but in her native England, she has a reputation much like America's '80s best-selling beach read behemoth Jackie Collins. Cooper's novels are glossy, gripping, populated by rich people doing naughty things, and read by those who prefer paperback potboilers. They're set in glamorous rich-people milieus such as the horse-racing world, or, in this case, the TV business in England in the 1980s, an era when, as Tennant's Tony Baddingham puts it, "Satellite is coming. We're going global."

When TV interviewer Declan O'Hara is wooed from the BBC (which is owned by the government) to Baddingham's privately owned network, he and his family become our entry point into the seamy small town inhabited by Baddingham, his nemesis Rupert Campbell-Black, and residents who don't let money and titles get in the way of throwing drinks in each others' faces or sleeping with each others' spouses. There are pink suits with peplums, smoking on airplanes, parties on manicured English estates with women wearing veils, and not a mobile phone in sight. Viewers who remember the ‘80s will be delighted to be reminded of the era's ephemera, such as rotary phones so heavy they could serve as murder weapons, expense accounts, and journalism still being important. But this is no musty history exhibit: it's a dirty, debaucherous delight for those old enough to be titillated—instead of shocked—by its excesses.