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I first heard about Rivals when the International Emmys were announced a few weeks ago. A Disney/Hulu show, apparently. What surprised me more was that it had been available all this while on our very own JioHotstar. Quietly sitting there, unannounced, un-hyped, waiting to be discovered.

So I watched.

Then I read up a little.

The series is based on Jilly Cooper’s novel of the same name. I haven’t read the book so I’ll restrict myself to the show and perhaps that’s the best way to encounter Rivals anyway. Unburdened by fidelity tests, nostalgia or the anxiety of comparison.

What struck me almost immediately was how confidently Rivals announces itself. This is a show that knows exactly what it is and is completely at ease with that knowledge. It doesn’t hedge, apologise or posture. It is glossy, decadent, unapologetically sexy, soaked in the excesses of the 1980s and yet beneath the silk shirts, shoulder pads, and sharp suits it is unmistakably intelligent television.

A stellar cast helps. Tremendous actors, all of them. Performances that feel lived-in rather than performed. Dialogue that snaps and crackles with wit. Satire that doesn’t scream for attention but lands its punches with elegance. Social critique that is embedded in character rather than delivered as sermon. And character arcs that actually arc – messy, contradictory, flawed, and recognisably human.

Yes, there is a lot of sex. And thank god for that.

What’s refreshing is not merely the presence of desire, but the absence of shame around it. Rivals treats sexuality as a fact of life : a driving force, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes destructive, often tender but never something that needs to be apologised for, sanitised or dressed up as empowerment rhetoric. As one of the many stellar lines in the show so aptly suggests, morality is often just a convenient costume we wear over our appetites.

That to me is one of the show’s quiet provocations.

Does it falter? Of course. Somewhere in the middle episodes the storytelling leans into familiar tropes. The rhythms become predictable. The indulgence occasionally tips over into excess. But even then it never collapses into mediocrity. It remains assured, entertaining and watchable. And when it regains its footing it rewards the viewer with something increasingly rare – television that understands payoff.

By the time it ends you realise you’ve been in the hands of storytellers who respect both their audience and their craft.

And that brings me to the larger point.

Watching Rivals reminded me once again of why the British are bloody good at telling stories. There’s a confidence there. A refusal to be embarrassed by intelligence or pleasure. A comfort with contradiction. A belief that popular entertainment does not have to be stupid to be successful nor austere to be artistic.

Around the same time I watched an American show that desperately wanted to feel British – mannered, edgy, “classy” but ended up feeling forced, underwhelming and hollow. It was all surface and no spine. An imitation of tone without an understanding of why that tone works. More on that some other time.

What I hope streaming executives – especially closer home take away from Rivals is this: television can be sexy, silly and smart at the same time. These qualities are not mutually exclusive. Popularity does not demand creative compromise. Audiences are far more perceptive, far more adventurous and far less prudish than we give them credit for.

There is so much to learn here – from the writing, the performances, the tonal confidence, the refusal to condescend. From the courage to let characters be flawed, selfish, libidinous and contradictory without immediately punishing them for it. From the understanding that entertainment and art are not enemies – they are collaborators.

This is the kind of show that reminds you why you fell in love with television in the first place. Why the medium matters. Why it can be both a guilty pleasure and a serious artistic pursuit.

It’s a lesson I’d like to keep learning myself.

And one I hope my colleagues on the other side of the table learn too.

Together, we really can make great stuff.

Rivals, it is. Perhaps the best fun I’ve had watching TV in a long time!

Some films arrive like a whisper. You don’t notice them at first. Then they settle inside you and refuse to move. Train Dreams is one of those films. Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella is quiet and unhurried, almost deceptively simple, but somewhere along the way it opened a small window inside me. It reminded me of why I fell in love with cinema in the first place.

Watching it took me back to 1994 when I first saw Kieslowski’s Bleu. I remember leaving the theatre with something rearranged within me. I felt that again here. A gentle shift. A soft turning of some inner wheel.

The film drifts through nearly eighty years of Robert Granier’s life. A man who seems to live inside himself even when he is with the people he loves or the men he works alongside. His solitude is not dramatic. It is simply who he is. A condition of being. The film treats it with a kind of respect. A patience. It allows him the quiet he needs.

What struck me most was the use of voice-over. In so many films it feels like a crutch, like a shortcut for narrative bankruptcy. Here it becomes part of the breath of the film. You don’t hear it as narration. You hear it the way you hear your own thoughts when you are walking alone. Soft, unforced, present but never demanding attention. It blends with the landscape, with the forests and rivers and the changing seasons. The film lets nature speak. And it listens.

Everything that matters : love and grief, cruelty and tenderness, life and its inevitable vanishing – appears visually. The film trusts the viewer to see, to feel, to understand without being told. It is visual poetry held together by the prose of human experience. A balance that is rare.

As a filmmaker, I felt grateful watching it. There is a kind of democracy in its creation. A belief that cinema belongs to those who are willing to imagine and to wait. Those who allow the story to breathe. Those who listen more than they assert. Films like this make the medium feel wide and generous again.

After Adolescence, Netflix has surprised me once more by bringing a film like Train Dreams into our reach. Even if they were not involved creatively, simply making space for a work like this is contribution enough. Sometimes all a platform has to do is open the door.

Train Dreams left me with a lingering stillness. A sense of something quiet but important passing through. I think that is the best a film can do.