HBO’s well-cast, classy-trashy divorce drama : NPR

Dominic West specializes in playing men who feel victimized by the consequences of their own actions. One of his signature lines as Jimmy McNulty on The Wire was, “What the f*** did I do?” The line was often delivered not in the sense of, “Oh no, what did I do?” But instead, as an indignant, “Why am I getting yelled at? What did I do?” And while West’s take on then-Prince Charles in The Crown put him in a completely different setting, he retained that sense of arrogant bafflement, affronted whenever he sensed that he was being perceived as the bad guy.

In HBO’s new series War, West plays Morgan Henderson — a tech mogul, not a cop or a royal. But he, too, has trouble seeing his own fingerprints on his problems, including his marriage. Morgan is married to Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), an A-list actress whose fame is starting to teeter, inevitably, as she ages. As the first episode begins, they both seem aware that the marriage is on its last legs, but no one has acted — at least not openly — quite yet. Then, at a dinner without Carla where he’s receiving an award, he spies a beautiful woman in the crowd. Things progress. Someone acts.

This is the setup for the first battle, as it were, of War, which is intended to be an anthology series about two dueling London law firms. Each season will be about a different case. The first is Morgan and Carla’s parting, which one of the lawyers predicts will be the “biggest divorce trial in British legal history.” Morgan is working with an old, established firm called Cathcarts — all dark-wood interiors — where he’s represented by the terrifying St. John Smallwood (a delightfully wicked Pip Torrens). Carla has hired a young firm called Taylor & Byrne — all glass walls and contemporary furnishings — run by married couple Serena and Nick (Phoebe Fox and James McArdle).

In this first hour, we also meet Johnny (Archie Renaux), a young attorney who, for initially unclear reasons, has fled a firm in Manhattan to return to London, and is scrambling to find work while waiting tables and trying to hang on to a frustrated girlfriend. Johnny is a bit desperate, and around the kinds of people he meets in the course of this story, it is never good to be desperate. He naturally includes both firms in his hunt for employment, and he ends up interviewing with both. By the end of the first episode, we know that he will affect the way things progress on both sides of the case.

War was created by George Kay, who also created the Idris Elba action drama Hijack and the fleet-footed and clever Lupin, and he brings a lot of story velocity to this setting, too. Much of War is made up of elements that have always driven heightened, scandal-adjacent legal dramas: intrigue, dramatic reversals of fortune, witnesses who do or do not appear, documents lost, found and suddenly revealed. That these attorneys are also people matters only intermittently: Over on the Taylor & Byrne side, there is a bit of attention given to Serena and Nick’s domestic life, but on the Cathcarts side, there’s little evidence that St. John or any of the other stone-faced partners think about anything except crushing each opponent into dust and moving on to the next.

But there is, too, the story of Morgan and Carla, who once genuinely loved each other and who learn very quickly that the very last thing any of their lawyers are interested in is protecting whatever amicable relationship they have left — even for the sake of Carla’s son, to whom Morgan has been an involved and loving stepfather. On the contrary, the lawyers see it as their obligation (and, they will sometimes admit, their pleasure) to engage in all-out destruction of the other side.

There’s a tricky tonal balance in treating the lawyers’ gasp-inducing ruthlessness as entertaining and even amusing while also allowing its consequences to be clear. At times, the effort to be sincere about the sadness of Morgan and Carla’s situation doesn’t sit entirely comfortably alongside the more arch, more malicious (and delicious) goings-on at the two firms, where internal competition and backstabbing can be just as dangerous as anything opposite sides can do to each other. The series has a little too much heart to be the ice-cold examination of humanity’s underbelly that it sometimes feels like it’s going to be.

Still, War offers an impressive cast solidly executing a well-constructed story. You might call it classy-trashy, embracing both its “what will these people do next?” high drama and moments of genuine humanity from West and Miller, both of whom are solid in it. They both, in fact, may fail at first to see what exactly they’ve done to land in such a miserable state, but if their lawyers teach them anything, perhaps it’s to think twice about both marriage and divorce.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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