The first chapter of Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 best seller, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, opens on a December evening in 1972, when masked intruders entered the West Belfast home of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of 10. As they dragged her away into a van, she told one of her sons to watch his siblings until she returned. And then she never did.

Keefe unspools the circumstances surrounding McConville’s disappearance over the course of his nonfiction doorstopper. Her kidnapping—and eventual murder—was just one crime among many that occurred during what’s known as the Troubles: From the late ’60s to the Good Friday Agreement that brokered peace in 1998, Catholic republicans seeking Irish independence clashed with Protestant factions and British soldiers, leaving thousands dead across Northern Ireland. Based on his own interviews and those conducted for a Boston College oral-history project, Keefe paints a panoramic portrait of the era that reads more like a novel than a history lesson. He studies how a common, radical cause can yield intense bonds—and also lead to profound trauma.

FX’s excellent nine-episode adaptation, now streaming on Hulu, matches the book’s ambition. The show, also called Say Nothing, similarly begins with the kidnapping of McConville (played by Judith Roddy) and subsequently delves into an ensemble of key figures involved in the Troubles. (Keefe served as an executive producer, working closely with the writers and the creator, Joshua Zetumer, to ensure an authentic adaptation.) But whereas the book tells much of the story chronologically, the series often collapses time, primarily shifting between the 1970s and the 2000s. Doing so streamlines the conflict and its aftermath into a study of juxtapositions: between youthful passion and adult disillusionment, collective ideology and individual responsibility, the appeal of secrecy and the power of confession. Sometimes, the series argues, history yields no heroes or villains, just people whose convictions curdle into confusion, and whose wounds never fully heal.

[Read: How conflicts end—and who can end them]

Dolours Price learned that firsthand. As a teenager during the early days of the Troubles, she joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group that broke away from the original IRA. Its young members, Dolours included, believed in using violent tactics to counter discrimination against Catholics; they were regularly harassed by the British police, prevented from living in some neighborhoods, and denied certain jobs. Like its source material, which uses a photograph of her on its cover, the show is drawn to Dolours and follows her life story the closest, from her childhood to her death, in 2013. Teenage Dolours quickly developed a reputation among her peers as a mouthy, attractive militant who rejected the “woman’s work” of making tea that the Provisional IRA (a.k.a. “Provos”) leaders assigned her. Older Dolours seemed wary of her notoriety, refusing later chances to rejoin the fight. Instead, she became a source for the Belfast Project, Boston College’s oral history of the group’s activities, thereby implicating herself as a participant in some of the Provos’ most brutal crimes, including Jean’s murder.

The show makes clear that despite how much Dolours’s attitude changed over time, she remained the same person at her core. The younger and older versions of Dolours—played respectively by Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake, both magnetic and well cast—overlap throughout the adaptation, an elegant choice that helps hold the sprawling narrative together. The older Dolours’s reflections soundtrack scenes of her younger self at work; the younger Dolours’s eagerness runs counter to her older self’s evident pain. Dolours’s foundational goals take center stage as the story hopscotches across time: Although she was raised to believe in the cause of Irish independence, her biggest motivation was her love for her little sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe). In her youth, she stayed at home and joined the Provos in part because going to university instead would have meant their separation. In old age, she never gave up Marian’s activities as another, more trigger-happy Provo. The focus on Dolours is pivotal to the show’s success: She embodies the struggle to separate your life and identity from the larger conflict, even after it ends.

Dolours is also an effective point of contrast for Jean, allowing the show to explore the different ways these two women moved through the world. An early scene of Dolours’s induction into the IRA, after she’s argued successfully that she can do more than serve her male peers, is spliced together with shots of Jean and her 10 children moving into their own apartment for the first time. Both women are bucking expectations; both seek to protect their families. Yet Jean’s identity as a widowed single mother is, to the IRA, a sign of weakness, a possible reason for her to become an informant for the British; her neighbors also ostracize her for comforting a wounded British soldier who collapsed outside her home. Dolours weaponizes her femininity, flirting with a border-patrol officer to gain entry into Ireland during a mission, and her Provos superiors reward her for adopting the organization’s ruthlessness. Once she’s “promoted” to be the group’s Charon, ferrying the IRA’s perceived enemies to their executions, she must also shepherd some of her own friends to their death—a responsibility that weighs on her conscience. Neither woman can disentangle her quest for independence from the unrest around her.

[Read: Great sex in the time of war]

Say Nothing is not absent of possible antagonists—it treats Gerry Adams (Josh Finan in early scenes, Michael Colgan later on), the alleged former IRA member who later helped negotiate the peace accord in 1998 in part by turning his back on the organization, with both skepticism and sympathy. (A disclaimer at the end of every episode notes his ongoing denials of involvement in the IRA.) But the show is more interested in pointing out that the thoroughly human impulse to belong can also be shortsighted, even naive. The Provos’ extreme views allowed for a deep-seated sense of community, and these idealistic teens and 20-somethings approached their terrorist activities with starry-eyed enthusiasm: Dolours and Marian don costumes to rob a bank, giggling together after they accomplish the heist. The Provos grab beers and gossip about their crushes in between rigging car bombs. Even the older Dolours reflects upon some moments with a wistful nostalgia, underscoring the continued allure of a movement that had seemed so righteous and revolutionary.

The consequences of belonging to such communities endure too. In the pilot, one of Jean’s sons clings to her leg before the masked Provos take her away; later in the episode, Dolours does the same to a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, grasping his leg tightly after he fends off a Protestant man who beats her with a baton at a civil-rights march. Taken together, these shots illustrate how cyclical violence and despair can be: Dolours’s failed attempt at peaceful protest leads to her devotion to the Provos, and that leads only to more pain—for her and others. Say Nothing presents Jean’s and Dolours’s fates as intertwined from the start, even before it reveals Dolours’s role in Jean’s murder—an indication of just how intimate the Troubles really were.

In focusing so much on Dolours and the Provos, Say Nothing doesn’t adapt some of the most intriguing turns in Keefe’s account—the mass prison hunger strike in the 1980s, the Belfast Project’s struggle to preserve the anonymity of its interviewees—and fast-forwards through years of political upheaval. In their stead, the series offers a thoughtfully constructed study of the conflict’s moral complexity. Say Nothing demonstrates that war can easily bring groups of people together. Ending the fighting—reckoning with atrocities, confessing to misdeeds, and assigning blame—is the hard part.

In Jilly Cooper’s world, men conquer, women sigh, the sun shines perpetually on pale-gold Cotswolds mansions with bluebells in bloom, and absolutely everyone is DTF, as the parlance goes. If Charles Dickens had been alive at the end of the 20th century, with a Viagra prescription and a window into the sporting pursuits of the English upper classes, he might have written books like Cooper’s: as heavy as doorstops and horny as hell, meticulously researched and brimming with romps in the verdant countryside. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t even a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye when Cooper created Rutshire, a fictional county occupied by a cast of wicked aristocrats, innocent heroines, and vulgar strivers who rotate in and out of her novels, fortune hunting and bed-hopping and scrutinizing one another’s family trees with one laconically arched eyebrow.

This is no country for modern men. Rivals, arguably the best of Cooper’s particular brand of bonkbusters, is set in 1986, which makes the new TV adaptation for Hulu technically a costume drama, stuffed with shoulder pads, canary-yellow Versace shirts, permed hair, and lots of Laura Ashley. To love Cooper’s stories, as I have for several decades, is to be constantly aware of how enmeshed they are in a particular time and place, one where racehorses were celebrities, groping was standard, and everybody seemed to be in love with Princess Diana. Even the author herself has floundered when she’s tried to update her style for the 21st century. (I’m too often haunted by a line from her 2006 novel, Wicked!, in which she tackles 9/11 by lamenting that the “people leaping out of the flaming tower windows” tragically had “no wisteria to aid their descent.”)

And yet, I can say: Make room in your life for Rivals. It’s undoubtedly the silliest show that’s come to television this year, but it’s also deeply serious about pleasure, which makes it as faithful to the ethos of its source material as anything could be. In the opening scene, Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), the gravitational center of Cooper’s world, is seen pleasuring a woman in the bathroom of a Concorde jet, thrusting so vigorously that she hardly notices when the plane goes supersonic. Rupert is a former Olympic show jumper, a Conservative MP, and a lothario in the James Bond (or Casanova, or Warren-Beatty-during-the-1970s) mold, which is to say that he’s entirely unlike anyone who’s ever actually lived. When he swaggers back to his seat, the female passengers swoon slightly as he passes. The tone, immediately, is one of absurd, winking excess. Rupert, arrogant, priapic to a fault, and vulnerable underneath the machismo is—somehow!—hard not to root for, if only because everyone who hates him is so much worse.

[Read: Let’s never do this to Edith Wharton again]

The actual dramatic arc of Rivals involves the arcane world of British commercial-television franchises—which, the less fretted over, the better. The primary villain is Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), the cigar-chomping, new-money heir to a munitions fortune and the boss of a regional British TV network who’s both evil and pathologically jealous of Rupert. In need of a hit show, Tony poaches Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a fiery Irish talk-show host, from the BBC, and promises Declan total authority over his interviews. Declan’s feckless wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit); his angelic elder daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean); and his younger daughter, Caitlin (Catriona Chandler), all immediately fall for Rupert, whose ancestral manor house is located just a couple of fields away. Declan, quite a serious character in the novel, proceeds to drink obscene amounts of whiskey and smoke intellectually in the bath, glowering beneath his mustache.

The business of television during the heady Thatcherite ’80s feels fundamentally at odds with the bucolic Cotswolds setting—an aesthetic clash of giant cellphones and gentle pastures, boardroom meetings and stray sheep. The unifying force, of course, is sex. Everyone is doing it, and with gusto. Tony is sleeping with his star new producer, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), imported from NBC for her professional acumen and passion for yelling. Maud is sleeping with an old flame. Rupert is sleeping with basically everyone. In the first episode, a mortified Taggie catches him playing naked tennis with the wife of one of his fellow MPs. Patient, virtuous, and brave, Taggie is obviously the romantic heroine of the story, yet the TV adaptation finds surprising depth in a will-they-won’t-they storyline featuring a dowdy writer, Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson), and a gentle, gruff tech investor, Freddie (Danny Dyer). Both married to (terrible) other people, they have the kind of sincere, curious chemistry that defies more conventional romantic storytelling. Pleasure, Rivals insists, should be for all.

To be this camp now, this kitschy and unabashed, is no easy feat. Cooper’s novels are easy to parody, yet Rivals never veers too far in that direction. The clothes, the music (a key romantic scene is scored to Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red”), the extravagance, and the boozing—all are roundly mocked. But the writers, Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade, seem to have an underlying affection for both the source material and the era. This isn’t to say they’re nostalgic; quite the opposite. The series is savvy about what women in 1986 were working with, and it even has flashes of real acuity toward the end. But watching Rivals, I was more drawn to the qualities it has that’ve been largely absent from more prestigious shows this year: joy, and also abundance, sly humor, and fun. Amid a glut of dour, depressed series with Serious Things to Say, a show that carries itself so lightly is absolutely welcome.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.