The trudge from now until Christmas is a slow one. The finish line’s in sight but our legs are giving out, and we’re all sort of limping our way to a sad Christmas cracker joke and the unbridled bliss of no Slack notifications. So if you, like us, need a little boost to get you through the end days, please consider our gentle suggestion: smut. Horny, sexy shagging. Good old fashioned bonking. Fairies getting their kit off, etc. 

There’s simply nothing like a raunchy little novel to transport you out of your life and into a new world of your choosing. And you really can choose. There are smutty dragon books and smutty fairy books and smutty angel books. There’s smut at the polo, smut in the boardroom and smut on the pommel horse. 

Recently, we’ve been mainlining the smut of the posh English countryside, courtesy of a show called Rivals. It’s based on a novel by bonkbuster pioneer Jilly Cooper, and as Zoe writes below, is about a bunch of “despicable, horny Tory toffs” who play tennis in the buff and say things like “the first of May, the first of May, outdoor fucking begins today”. 

And while much of Ensemble’s favourite smut comes in the written form, if there’s one thing we can thank Hollywood’s suffocating dependence on pre-existing IP for, it’s that there’s always hope your chosen smutty novel will be soon rendered in visual form. Unfortunately you’ll probably hate the casting because no one will ever live up to the particular brand of hot you’ve conjured up in your head. But that's what dreams are for honey.

With that in mind, we asked a few friends of Ensemble about the smutty books they want turned into TV shows. And while this is essentially free labour for TV execs, it also serves as a reading list to keep you going until Christmas. And going, and going. 

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (or anything from the Maas-verse)

Read and selected by Johanna Cosgrove, comedian, writer and podcast host

I love smut. On my final day of 7th form, to celebrate my freedom from secondary education and to mark becoming a "real adult" (delusional), I bought a pack of cigarettes, a hip flask of vodka and... a Mills and Boon. Perfect combo alert! 

The florid descriptions of genitals and insane storylines inside The Tycoon's Pregnant Mistress and A Virgin's Debt To Pay had me hooked. Yes, one could label them as unfeminist hetero trash, or one could relish the fact that most 'steamy literature' does not exist for men. Both the supply and the demand is for the girls! For the love of god, gimme some juicy (chaotic) plot with my porn. Give me complex characters. Give me emotional journeys. Give me high drama that is also hot hot hot!

Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles is also a perfect example of how smut can do amazing world building. Both Cooper and Sarah J Maas have created rich, vivid and political landscapes and populated them with characters who want to fight and/or bone each other. As a television writer, these things are essential ingredients for storylining a show that hooks the audience in.

This year (like every other sweetie with a drink bottle the size of an office water cooler), I have been addicted to romantasy. I've read a sickening 27 books about horny fairies, fae, vampires, demons, witches, gods and dragon riders. I'm even in a genre specific book club. I'm 32-years-old and I can't and won't be stopped.

The Sarah J Maas universe needs to be made into television stat and it... sort of is. It's in a weird place in the industry, with the rights to ACOTAR having been bought and subsequently dropped by Hulu. Cryptically the showrunner intimated that the show is not attached to a network but still being written. Fingers crossed I guess???

My favourite series in the aforementioned 'Mass-verse' is Throne of Glass, which would make perfect television. Think LOTR and Game of Thrones but centering around a teenage assassin who is *spoiler alert* fae royalty (alongside sexy witches and fucked up demon parasites).

READ: From Gatwick to Ganni: How Johanna tried to hygge her way through heartbreak

All Fours by Miranda July

Read and selected by Anjali Burnett, co-founder of Twenty-seven Names

I would love this as a TV series. I'm thinking of three seasons. The first: Intro and The Hotel. The second: The Fall out and bento boxes. The third would be Having your cake and eating it too - featuring themes of navigating perimenopause, open relationships, gains, and pop stars. The third season is always hard, but I believe Pamela Anderson’s episodes will really get a lot of hype.

Casting-wise, I'm thinking: 

The narrator - Aubrey Plaza.  

Davey - Justin Bieber. Huge swing, but imagine the weird chemistry between those two. If he declines we’d need to look for a modern day Brad Pitt - circa Legends of the Fall era - to play Davey. This is hard because Rat Boy Summer. The shortlist includes Leo Woodall and Austin Butler, but I'm taking any suggestions here if Bieber is busy with the new baby.

Harris, the husband - thinking Billy Crudup. I can hear his dick whistling from here. 

Jordi, the narrator's best friend - Michelle Buteau.

Claire, Davey’s girlfriend - Sydney Sweeney.

Caro, Harris’ new star - Zendaya.

Dev, Davey’s best friend - Hasan Minhaj.

Audra, Davey’s Mom’s friend - Pamela Anderson.

Arkanda, The pop star - Keke Palmer.

There’s so much room for great cameos and guest spots  - even some local talent required for Sonja, the busty friend with the Auckland accent at the start. Is Melanie Lynskey available? Jonah Hill could play the motel owner. Woody Harrelson could play the narrator's Dad - he'd be perfect to waffle on about the deathfield. 

Writers: Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover, please. I would love to see them give it another go. If they’re not keen, Willow Henderson (my writing partner) and I are both obviously well suited to the task. So if you’re reading this Miranda - no one belongs here more than us! 

Also, just quickly, Emily Henry’s books - where are those adaptations? Her recent novel Funny Story (dream cast: Kristen Bell and Paul Rudd) would be a modern day Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Someone get on to this, I’m busy on All Fours.

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The Troy Series by David and Stella Gemmell

Read and selected by Kaarina Parker, writer and model

This three-part series is an evocative, smutty, bisexual retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of Andromache, the wife of Hector. It takes a lot of liberties with the history (although the 'history' we know of the Trojan War is based off of fiction, really), and strikes a beautiful balance between the romance and interpersonal conflict, and the violence of the war itself. It's an epic, each of the three books is longer than the last.

Highly recommend this as a series to get lost in if you like history, women being badass, tragedy, romance, and bisexual escapades. I would love to see this turned into a series one day - it is one of a long list of brilliant Trojan War retellings that would translate beautifully to the screen.

READ: Kaarina reviews the shows she walked in at NZ Fashion Week 2023

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Read and selected by Sam Brooks, writer and playwright

I will put aside the many, many smutty fanfics that I read in my youth and instead focus on The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Is it smutty? Not especially. Is it hot? Yes especially. It tells the already sort of told love story between the greatest warrior who ever lived (Achilles) and his companion (Patroclus) from them meeting right up until the inevitable tragic ending of that story. Do I think it is especially adaptable? Not especially. Do I still want to see someone try? Yes especially.

READ: Sam on why Instagram Reels are better than Tiktok

Lace by Shirley Conran

Read and recommended by Rebecca Wadey, Ensemble co-founder

Okay to be fair, there was already a middling TV miniseries of this book in the 80s, starring Phoebe Cates (of Gremlins fame) as Lily, the glamorous and very famous movie star who demands to know ‘which one of you bitches is my mother?’ in the opening scene. However, having devoured the Rivals adaptation and realising that in the age of peak TV we can make period 80s dramas far more convincingly than in the 80s themselves, I would love to see a superior modern remake.

Interestingly, I am more a Jackie Collins smut girlie than a Jilly Cooper one, obviously far more into the Hollywood glamour and its murky dark secrets than the aristocratic smut of Jilly’s British horsey world, but Lace creates a vivid, sprawling world that manages to encapsulate all the above. There’s finishing schools in Switzerland, Parisian fashion houses in the 40s and 50s, backstreet abortions, war correspondents turned fashion editors, Middle Eastern princes, Hollywood glamour and more.

As I type that, I am thinking ‘that sounds expensive’, as Rivals is confined largely within the Cotswolds (apart from one brilliant episode partially set in Mallorca) but please dear executive, don’t let that put you off. At its core Lace is a tale of female friendships, the power that men try to wield over us and our dedicated reclaiming of our bodies, our careers and our lives. There’s also a lot of sex.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

Read and suggested by Mairātea Mohi, publishing associate

I'm currently reading The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, which already has its own film adaptation (watch with caution!!). But just before that I was reading A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. The novel follows a Chinese woman navigating life in England, grappling with the unfamiliar culture and language: fizzy water becomes "filthy water," a rucksack morphs into a "rocksack."

Each chapter reads like a personal English dictionary and dictates a love story between our protagonist Z (whose name no one bothers to learn or pronounce correctly) and her English boyfriend - a 44-year-old, ex-anarchist, bisexual vegetarian who lives in Hackney with a dislike for discussing his emotions. As the chapters evolve so does Z's English and her personal insights.

Through humorous, and sometimes risqué, anecdotes - ranging from peep shows to bolder encounters - we trace Z's journey of self-discovery.There's one memorable scene where she climaxes on her own for the first time and realises she doesn't actually need men to satisfy her. My kind of woman!

READ: Mairātea in 2022 on making it werk in the workplace, without buying new clothes

ACOTAR by Sarah J. Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Read and selected by Georgie Wright, Ensemble writer

I have a book club with friends that, like most book clubs with friends, is just an excuse to drink wine and gossip and shit talk about [redacted]. Sometimes someone will throw a ‘literary’ recommendation into the group chat and sometimes, someone will read it. But nothing, absolutely nothing on this godforsaken dumpster fire of a planet, has consumed us like fairy fantasy porn.

A book called Fourth Wing (dragon fantasy porn) was the gateway drug. For those who haven’t dipped a cursory toe into BookTok, it’s about a girl who goes to a dragon riding academy and rides as much dick as dragon. Couldn’t tell you a thing that happens in the second book, because it was written and released a mere seven months after the first (and reads like it). But I could tell you that we held a reading party when it came out and put temporary dragon tattoos on. 

After the dragons came the fairies: specifically A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) by Sarah J Maas, followed by Maas’ other series. Like Marvel but better, all the SJM books interlink in some way to create a universe of militarised angels and dimension-hopping plotlines and horny royal fairies that look like humans who don't age. I downloaded the Kindle app on my phone so I could get my Maas fix at every conceivable opportunity. My screen time clocked in at eight hours a day. 

Extremely aware we’re all in our early 30s, thanks. Will not hear a word about there being better uses of our time or reading attention than mainlining books about incredibly horny mythological creatures. Life is hard, and when you find an opportunity to transplant your soul into an alternate reality, you take it.

So anyway: the TV shows (or movies) are in the works. Amazon have the rights to Fourth Wing and Michael B. Jordan's production company is set to produce. On the ACOTAR side of things, Margot Robbie was photographed having coffee with Maas recently, so obviously everyone's speculating she might produce. I personally wasn’t phased by the Barbie movie, but this, I will throw my fervor behind.

If they’re struggling with casting, I know a group chat that could help.

Every single book in Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles

Read and suggested by Zoe Walker Ahwa, Ensemble editor

Why mess with perfection? Jilly Cooper's Rutshire universe is ripe with potential post Rivals, which ended in such a way that a second (and third, fourth, fifth, sixth etc etc) season is inevitable. And thank god for that! We (I) need more of these despicable, horny Tory toffs (I loved this review of the series which perfectly describes Rupert Campbell-Black as a "braying toff, absolute shit"), shedding their incredible 80s clothes and bonking in the lush Cotswolds countryside.

There are 11 brilliantly silly but actually deeply insightful books in Dame Jilly's Rutshire Chronicles, with a few already adapted into films or series (Riders in 1993; The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous in 1997). But I'd love to see this new Rivals' production crew and cast give their fresh take on them all, exploring the cut throat, very horny, worlds of polo (Polo, 1991), show jumping (the Jilly classic Riders, 1986), classical music (Appassionata, 1996; Score!, 1999), high art (Pandora, 2002), jump racing at the Grand National (Jump!, 2010), posh schools (Wicked!, 2006) and more, more, more. In about 10 years we’ll get to Tackle!, based around football and released last year. Think Footballers Wives, but posher, ruder and with WAGs trying to seduce that absolute shit Rupert Campbell-Black.