Katherine Parkinson says Rivals takes sex somewhere television still too rarely goes: into a woman’s point of view. Speaking at a preview screening of the second series at the Everyman Bristol on Friday, the actor said the show’s approach felt “radical” because, in her view, there are not enough examples on television of a woman’s perspective on sex.
Parkinson, who plays romance author Lizzie Vereker, joined Annabel Scholey at the Bristol event as the first three episodes of the second series landed on the streaming platform the same day. Scholey appears in the show as Beattie Johnson, the ruthless journalist whose arrival helps drive the series’ mix of rivalry, sex and status games.
The screening came with a moment of mourning as the audience were asked to raise a glass in memory of Jilly Cooper before the first episode played. Cooper, whose Rutshire Chronicles inspired the series, suffered a fatal head injury in a fall at her Gloucestershire home in October, a loss that shadowed a night otherwise built around celebration.
That celebration was also about place as much as television. Rivals is set in the high-stakes world of British TV against the backdrop of the Cotswolds in the fictional county of Rutshire, and many of its locations were filmed within a 30-mile radius around Bristol. The event was intended to underline Bristol and the West Country as a production base outside London, where the show has already been tied to millions of pounds in economic activity.
Helen Godwin, who praised the region’s role in the production, said the West Country is proud to be the real-life Rutshire, seen by people around the world and helping to bring more visitors to the area. She also said Rivals being made there has directly and indirectly helped add millions of pounds to the country’s fastest-growing regional economy.
Filming on the second series started in May 2025, and the timing of the Bristol screening made clear how much the show now sits at the intersection of entertainment, regional industry and Cooper’s legacy. The series remains known for its frequent sex scenes and wide cast of characters, but Parkinson’s comments pushed the focus back to what Cooper wrote into the material in the first place: female desire, and the lack of it on screen.
For Rivals, that is the point. The show’s appetite for spectacle still grabs attention, but its cast and backers are now presenting it as something more rooted than scandal alone — a series that has helped turn Bristol into part of the story, and one that arrives on Friday carrying both a new run of episodes and a public farewell to the writer who made the world in the first place.
