Based on a novel by the British romance writer Jilly Cooper, whose bestselling Rutshire Chronicles were dubbed “bonkbusters” by the British press in the 1980s, Rivals is salacious but smart. Co-produced, somewhat improbably, with Disney+, the Hulu series is an unabashedly pulpy new eight-part comedy-drama about greed and libido among the upper classes of Margaret Thatcher-era England. It is not always subtle, nor is it something you should watch with your children or mother-in-law: Almost the show’s first image is of a hedonistic British aristocrat’s thrusting buttocks as he and a female journalist join the supersonic-and-mile-high club on a trans-Atlantic Concorde. Think of it like Succession or Industry with 10% less self-seriousness and 10% more Gossip Girl energy. In other words, it’s the most fun you can have with clothes on.

England, circa 1986, is experiencing its own version of the “greed is good” years satirized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. As the Conservative government enters its seventh year in power, the economy is booming, Bryan Ferry and Bonnie Tyler are eating up the charts, and it’s an excellent time to be rich — whether to the manor-born or upwardly mobile. The vaguely Murdoch-esque Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) is an English entrepreneur who wants to shake up staid British broadcasting. He and his hotshot American producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams) are determined to challenge the seeming hegemony of the BBC with Baddingham’s independent television company, Corinium.