‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado — except, unlike the doomed early 1990s soap opera in which Tony Holland attempted to recreate the success of EastEnders on the Costa del Sol, it has at least been glamorously relocated to Nice, Monaco, New York etc.
The settings are the best thing about it. Those Mediterranean palaces with sun-bleached brick-red plaster and bougainvillea and shimmery blue pools and the sun-loungers arranged just so by invisible but discreetly attentive staff: we’ve most of us had the experience at some time or another, either because we’ve lucked out and been invited by an uber-plutocrat friend or, more likely, because we’ve paid through the nose for a weekend at one of the myriad hotels that now specialise in recreating that Onassis in the 1970s experience.
And when we’ve had it we’ve all thought to ourselves, ‘Yes.
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