After Rivals Season 2: Eight Shows That Prove Premium Drama Still Has a Pulse
TL;DR: If you've burned through Rivals Season 2 on Hulu or Disney+, here's where to find eight similar shows — specific platforms, streaming availability, and which ones actually deliver the same mix of period excess, sexual consequence, and characters imploding under their own ambition.
What do you watch when the show you've been obsessed with runs out of episodes?
That's the practical problem facing Rivals fans right now. Hulu's adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's 1988 novel has become one of the streamer's most-discussed properties heading into mid-2026, generating the kind of audience engagement that drives subscriber retention far more reliably than any marketing campaign. The question isn't whether people are watching — it's where they migrate when the season ends.
The eight series below aren't ranked by prestige. They're mapped by how closely they replicate the specific cocktail Rivals delivers: lush period settings, sexual tension with actual consequences, and characters whose ambition is indistinguishable from their self-destruction. Some of these shows are critical darlings. A couple are criminally underseen. All of them have a clear streaming home you can open tonight.
Why Rivals Season 2 Signals What Networks Actually Want Right Now
Rivals Season 2 opened in May 2026 and did something bold: it skipped the reset entirely. Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) and Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) returned directly to their conflict — no soft re-introduction for casual viewers. The show trusts its audience to keep up, and that trust is worth reading.
According to Deadline's coverage, Hulu has been leaning harder into prestige-adjacent soap as a retention strategy, mirroring what HBO did with Succession and Industry earlier in the decade. The Rivals formula — lush production design, literary source material, a cast stacked with British stage talent — costs real money to execute. But it generates word-of-mouth that paid acquisition can't replicate. That's the business case for this show. And it's the same business case that greenlit every show on this list.
Most coverage treats Rivals as a throwback to 1980s glamour TV, but the more interesting read is that it's a proof-of-concept for a specific economic model: mid-budget British literary IP adapted for a US streamer at a price point roughly 40–60% below a Crown-tier production, yet pulling comparable engagement metrics per dollar spent. If Hulu's internal data backs that up, expect two or three imitators greenlit by Q1 2027.
Scandal: The Gold Standard for Political Seduction
Shonda Rhimes built Scandal (ABC, 2012–2018) on a single, almost reckless bet: that audiences would root for a president's mistress if the writing was sharp enough and the chemistry was undeniable. She was right. Kerry Washington earned two Emmy nominations for her performance as Olivia Pope, and the show essentially invented live-tweeting a drama series in real time. At its peak, Season 3's "Vermont is for Lovers Too" pulled 10.5 million same-night viewers, numbers that no network drama outside of Grey's Anatomy was touching in 2013.
What's striking is how well Scandal holds up as a Rivals companion piece, specifically because of the power imbalance at its center. Every relationship in Rivals — Rupert and Taggie (Bella Maclean), Rupert and Tony — is a negotiation between desire and dominance. Scandal operates on the same frequency. The Olivia-Fitzgerald affair isn't just romantic; it's a geopolitical liability, and Rhimes never lets you forget it.
Where to watch: Netflix (US, UK, India, Spain). All 7 seasons. Start with Season 2 if Season 1 feels slow — the pacing picks up considerably.
Industry: The Honest Successor to Rivals
Industry (HBO/BBC, 2020–present) is what most people mention when they want Rivals but don't want to admit they want something steamier. It's set in a London investment bank rather than the Cotswolds, and the period is now rather than the 1980s — but the mechanics are identical. Young, ambitious people destroying themselves and each other in pursuit of something they can't quite name.
The show was created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both of whom worked in finance before television. That background shows. The trading floor scenes have a specificity that most financial dramas fake — the slang, the hierarchy, the particular cruelty of an open-plan office where everyone can watch your performance in real time. Season 3 earned an 87 Metascore (per Metacritic), making it one of the best-reviewed drama seasons of 2024.
Ken Leung as Eric Tao gives the show its Rivals-grade villainy — a mentor figure so morally compromised that you spend every scene trying to decide whether you admire or despise him.
Where to watch: Max (US), Sky Atlantic (UK). 3 seasons as of 2025. Check Movie OTT's platform tracker for availability in other regions.
Mad Men: The Blueprint for Charming Self-Destruction
Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015) uses the 1960s as a pressure cooker to examine how power, sex, and professional ambition collide. Rivals does the same thing with the 1980s. The period setting isn't nostalgia — it's permission. You can show characters behaving badly when the era itself is the alibi.
The show won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series four consecutive years (2008–2011), a record that still stands. Jon Hamm as Don Draper is the template for the charming, self-destructive antihero that Rivals fans clearly find irresistible. He's since carried that same energy into Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV+, where his character Coop is essentially Don Draper if the expense account ran out.
The thing that strikes me about rewatching Mad Men now is how little the show actually likes Don — which makes it perfect if you enjoy Rivals' refusal to moralize about its characters' behavior. They're terrible. You watch anyway.
Where to watch: Netflix (India, Spain), AMC+ (US), Pluto TV (US, free tier). All 7 seasons.
Minx: The Cancelled Show You Need to Finish
HBO Max cancelled Minx after two seasons despite strong critical reception — the kind of business decision that makes sense on a spreadsheet and makes no sense to anyone who actually watched the show. Ophelia Lovibond and Jake Johnson built something genuinely funny and genuinely smart about the sexual revolution, and it's gone.
The 20 episodes that exist are worth your time. Don't let the cancellation put you off. The show's refusal to take itself seriously — while still taking its feminist argument seriously — is exactly what makes it feel like a Rivals sibling rather than a distant cousin. Plus, the late-1970s production design is meticulous in a way that makes you want to rewind scenes just to look at the set dressing.
Where to watch: Max (US). 2 seasons, 20 episodes total. Movie OTT has current international availability listed by region.
Your Friends & Neighbors: The Prestige Drama That Quietly Launched This Year
Apple TV+ dropped Your Friends & Neighbors with Jon Hamm leading — and James Marsden joining the cast in Season 2. It's a show about a group of Manhattan professionals caught between marriage, infidelity, and ambition, which means it's operating in the exact same moral territory as Rivals.
What separates it from other ensemble dramas is the willingness to let scenes just sit in discomfort. There's a quality-of-life angle here — these are people with money and access, but money and access don't actually solve anything — that Rivals understands completely.
Where to watch: Apple TV+ (US, India, most regions). Season 2 is in progress. Apple pricing in India starts around ₹99/month.
Joan: The Underseen Sophie Turner Performance
Sophie Turner stars in Joan (The CW, 2024–present), a biographical drama based on the life of Joan Baken, a woman who survived being shot by her husband and became a domestic violence advocate. The show is genuinely underseen, and Turner's post-Game of Thrones reputation as a serious dramatic actress hasn't quite caught up with her actual range.
What connects Joan to Rivals is the focus on how women operate within systems designed to protect men. It's a different tone — darker, angrier — but the central mechanism is the same: character under pressure, and we watch to see how they break or survive.
Where to watch: ITVX (UK), The CW (US). Not yet widely available on Indian OTT platforms as of May 2026; check Movie OTT for current listings by region.
The Affair: The Slow-Burn Option
The Affair (Showtime, 2014–2019) is the slowest burn on this list and the one with the highest emotional cost. 5 seasons, told from multiple perspectives, each episode showing the same events from different characters' point of view — a narrative technique that forces you to confront how unreliable memory is, how self-serving our own stories become.
It's not as immediately addictive as Rivals, but it's the show to watch if you want something that'll haunt you for days after finishing an episode. The infidelity at the center isn't treated as scandal — it's treated as the inevitable collision between desire and commitment.
Where to watch: Paramount+ (US). All 5 seasons. Slower pacing, but builds to something significant.
The Watch Order: Where to Start Tonight
If you've finished Rivals Season 2 and need something immediately:
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Start with Scandal or Industry — both have the immediate narrative momentum Rivals has. Scandal if you want pure plot propulsion. Industry if you want something that feels more recent.
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Save Minx for when you want something that'll make you angry it was cancelled — the emotional hit lands harder if you go in expecting it to last.
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Put Mad Men on your weekend list — it rewards patient viewing, and the production design is worth the slower pacing.
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Queue Joan for later in the week — it's darker than the others, and the tonal shift works better if you've already cycled through something lighter.
The India-Specific Streaming Reality
The Rivals audience in India discovered the show via Disney+ Hotstar, which holds international streaming rights outside the US. That's the same platform carrying a significant portion of the HBO and Hulu catalog for Indian subscribers.
Here's the India breakdown:
- Scandal — Netflix India. All 7 seasons, English with Hindi dub available.
- Mad Men — Netflix India. Full run.
- Industry — Check Movie OTT for current availability; Max content in India is sometimes distributed through JioCinema partnerships.
- Your Friends & Neighbors — Apple TV+ India.
- Joan — Not yet confirmed on major Indian OTT platforms. SonyLIV sometimes carries ITVX partnerships.
- Minx — Limited Indian availability; Max originals are occasionally available through JioCinema.
Honestly, the India streaming rights situation for mid-tier British and American drama remains a mess. Regional language dubbing is available for Scandal and Mad Men on Netflix India (Hindi confirmed), but most of the others are English-only. For Indian audiences weighing where to spend ₹99–₹199 per month, the more relevant comp for Rivals isn't Succession or Downton Abbey — it's Heeramandi on Netflix India, which proved in 2024 that a period drama built on glamour, sexual politics, and ensemble villainy can dominate the Indian top-ten charts for weeks. The appetite is there. The distribution just hasn't caught up.
What Happens Next for Prestige Soap
Rivals Season 2 is mid-run. The bigger question — and I keep coming back to this — is whether Hulu doubles down on this format or treats it as a one-off. The economics of prestige British adaptation are complicated: production costs are high, the talent pool is competitive with the BBC for the same actors, and the US audience for period British drama, while loyal, isn't enormous.
The comparable data point is The Crown (Netflix), which ran for 6 seasons at an estimated production cost of $13 million per episode (per Variety). Rivals is almost certainly cheaper to produce, but it's competing for the same prestige-drama subscriber segment.
Watch for: a Season 3 renewal announcement from Hulu, likely tied to streaming numbers from the Season 2 premiere weekend. If Rivals gets renewed, expect the other shows on this list to see a measurable traffic uptick as the algorithm pushes them as companion content.
The Next Step
Rivals Season 2 is airing now on Hulu (US) and Disney+ (international), with new episodes dropping weekly. Sophie Turner's Joan is the most underseen show on this list and deserves a second look. Industry Season 3 is the critical benchmark everything else is being measured against.
For real-time streaming availability across all eight shows in the US, UK, India, and Spain, Movie OTT has the current picture updated as rights deals shift. Start with Scandal or Industry tonight. Honestly, you can't go wrong with either one.
Watch the official trailer:
