Even if you’ve never heard the term before, you probably know what “bonkbusters” are: soapy, sexually frank novels featuring caddish men and adventurous women in glamorous locations and careers. The term was coined by British writer Sue Limb in the Guardian in the late 1980s, and some its greatest exemplars hail from that decade, such as Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy and I’ll Take Manhattan and Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives, all huge bestsellers in America.

Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles (11 books and counting) are less well known here, but they’re nothing less than a phenomenon in her native England. The series began with 1986’s Riders, set in the world of equestrian show jumping, which was followed two years later by Rivals, about cutthroat goings-on among the rich and powerful in British television. The latter book was published in 1989 as Players in the United States, where it’s set to be reissued this month under its original title; it’s also the inspiration for a new streaming series starring David Tennant and Poldark’s Aidan Turner, premiering on Hulu on Oct.18.

Kirkus’ reviewer called the novel “a good-humoredly glitzy, vulgar romp through the British TV industry,” and it is indeed all these things. Rivals’ cast is massive—the book opens with several pages identifying about 80 major and minor players—but it mainly revolves around three figures: Baron Tony Baddingham, the wealthy and ruthless chairman and managing director of independent network Corinium Television; Rupert Campbell-Black, a former show jumper and current Tory Member of Parliament and Minister for Sport, known for his womanizing ways; and Declan O’Hara, a TV interviewer with a “world-famous husky infinitely sexy smoker’s voice,” whom Tony hires away from the BBC.

The central plot is a leisurely affair in which Tony Baddingham—whose surname has all the subtlety of “Snidely Whiplash”—brutally mistreats those around him, causing them to make a play for his TV franchise. It takes more than 300 pages to get to that plot turn, however; until then, readers are treated to endless parties and get-togethers by the many, many characters. Rupert, who’s 37, meets Declan’s 18-year-old daughter Taggie when she happens upon him playing tennis in the nude. Later, at a dinner, he casually gropes her; he apologizes, so she starts having swoony feelings for him. Declan’s unfaithful wife, Maud, a former London actor who’s dissatisfied with her country life in Rutshire, also fancies him, among others. Tony, meanwhile, is having an extramarital affair with Corinium’s American producer Cameron Cook, who’s described as having a “lean, wonderfully rapacious body”; she, in turn, begins a tentative relationship with Declan’s college-student son, Patrick, which angers Tony. And so on. There’s lots of bed-hopping and cutting remarks and concerns about class (this is England, after all), although not a lot of it moves the plot forward in an appreciable way.

Still, amid all the rambling, Cooper does get off some amusingly cruel lines. The head of religious broadcasting at the TV network is described as having “a round red face like a Dutch cheese”; a production assistant is “easily the prettiest girl working at Corinium but also the stupidest.” There are references to the ’80s prime-time soaps Dallas and Dynasty, from which Cooper clearly took more than a few cues, and a character observes that “one can’t obtain one’s entire sexual education from the pages of Jackie Collins.”

Other aspects of the novel are rather less appealing, including its characters’ casual racism (“the story, despite its depths, is simple enough to appeal to a Mexican peasant or an Alabama black,” says Tony of one of Corinium’s TV dramas) and homophobia (“I could have put up with her being gay, but she was a real bull dyke”). Sure, the people who say these things are generally established to be loathsome, but it doesn’t make it any easier to read distasteful “jokes,” such as “I’ve lost so much weight my friends are convinced I’ve got AIDS,” or an off-putting scene in which Declan interviews an actor who served time for the statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl: “I know I screwed her, but I don’t figure I screwed her up.”

Fortunately, the first four episodes of the streaming series excise these elements and feature excellent actors in the three main roles. Tennant is consistently entertaining as the cartoonishly villainous Tony, and Turner brings an earnestness to the idealistic, workaholic Declan that contrasts well with the comical characters that surround him. Alex Hassell (Young Woman and the Sea) is delightful as the smug Rupert, as are Black Lightning’s Nafessa Williams as the tough-as-nails Cameron, and Once Upon a Time’s Victoria Smurfit as the shallow but sympathetic Maud. The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson is also a standout as perceptive local novelist Lizzie Vereker. However, despite all the Dynasty-like shenanigans at play, the show can’t escape the novel’s slow pace and lack of focus. Indeed, enthusiasts of the genre may well want to watch Dynasty instead—especially the 2017 CW reboot, starring the great Elizabeth Gillies (currently streaming on Netflix). It absolutely flies along, and, unlike Cooper’s novel, is shameless without ever being shameful.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.