Disney+ chose Rivals as it was looking for ‘things like Downton’, says executive

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”.

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.

“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 that will be watched around the world, adding that Rivals represented “a certain version of the UK and Britain”.

He was also asked by host Rhianna Dillon how much the platform considered “diversity and authentic representation” in what it commissioned, including “overlooked and underrepresented working class communities”, which formed the focus of this year’s James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture.

Mr Mason replied that the platform does commission material representing a range of communities, but admitted that the fact he is working class has been more of a barrier during his career than the fact he is gay.

“I think if I was starting in TV now, I couldn’t afford to come to London. I couldn’t afford to live here, so it just wouldn’t be an option.

“Throughout my sort of whole career, actually, the fact that I’m working class feels like that differentiated more than my sexuality.

“It was a rarer thing to be working class. And we definitely do need to do better across the board at commissioning level as well, not just the writers that we commission.”

He said he was conscious that he had commissioned LGBT+ content in the past because he saw something in it as a result of his own sexuality.

He added: “And I thought to myself, how many times have I not picked something up or not thought that something was something we should take forward, because I don’t understand that experience, and I wasn’t able to see the power of that, that piece that someone else could have done. So we definitely need to do more.”