War Series-Premiere Recap: The Tipping Point

War
It’s Done
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★

In her study of literary Victorian marriages, Parallel Lives, the critic Phyllis Rose wrote that compared with the permanently binding Victorian marriage contract, “our easy recourse to divorce seems –– to adopt Robert Frost’s image –– like playing tennis without the net.” If access to divorce has removed the net from our tennis game, for the one percent, the proceedings have turned into Sincaraz-level volleys. Forget Kramer vs. Kramer’s quiet, introspective disappointment; forget Noah Baumbach’s caustic depictions of how divorce brings out the worst in people. In the first episode of HBO’s divorce legal drama War, the word love doesn’t come up once. This divorce story is not about sadness, disappointment, personal limitations, or heartbreak. Stock words like secret and betrayal only come up at the episode’s end, in the one moment we see Carla Duval (Sienna Miller) and Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) share a frame; and even then, they are said with spite. War is not about the breaking down of a marriage — it’s about lawyers.

The pilot tells us, in no uncertain terms, that Morgan and Carla are beside the point. They are symbols: He is the philandering tech mogul with endless resources and a world of privilege on his side; she is the Hollywood star armed with the favor of public opinion and her own unharnessed fury. The real interest is in seeing how their lawyers will manipulate these symbols, whether they’re playing offense or defense. The lawyers, being protagonists, come with their own baggage. Nick Taylor (James McArdle) prepared the Hendersons’ prenuptial agreement when they first got married a decade ago. His pregnant wife and partner, Serena Byrne (Phoebe Fox), used to work for Cathcarts & Sons, a.k.a. the firm Morgan keeps on retainer and activates once he learns, from the front page of a tabloid, that Carla met with Nick and Serena; a.k.a., the enemy. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we get into the weeds, let’s lay out some basics about this doomed couple. In London, Morgan is accepting a Pioneer of the Year award for his services as an “entrepreneur and philanthropist.” Carla is suffering through a press junket for a new spy movie titled The Milliner with her obnoxious co-star, Jeremy (Aaron Tsindos). Having heard yet another rumor that her husband is running around on her, Carla devises a scheme to honey-trap Morgan with the help of her friend, the actress Flora Monroe (Rose Williams), who charms him at the reception for the Pioneer of the Year award. Morgan pretends to resist at first — “I don’t do this,” he says, unconvincingly — but invites Flora into his hotel room anyway. After he falls asleep, Flora snaps a picture of the two of them and sends it to Carla. That’s just in the first five minutes of the episode.

For the purposes of the war at hand, the photo is, basically, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serena and Nick advise Carla not to go through with the honey trap, but they’re too late. Nick and Serena’s partnership, both professional and personal, is healthier than the Hendersons’, which immediately raises red flags: Will their marriage survive this case? Can they persevere as a team? They lead with opposite attitudes. He is the scrupulous one — disapproving of Carla’s unsavory methods, he considers dropping her as a client. Serena, meanwhile, is more gung ho. “We’re lawyers,” she retorts when Nick says they need the moral high ground. “We need no such thing.” She wants the big case and the big money that comes with it.

Nick and Serena’s plan is to break the prenup and serve Morgan with a divorce. The goal is to take Morgan “for every fucking penny he’s got.” Before getting married, the couple signed a “drop-hands prenup,” which Nick explains means they would each walk away with whatever they brought into the union. But back then, Carla was worth significantly more than Morgan; now, the inverse is true. As for Flora’s picture, Nick and Serena’s barrister, Budgie (Celia Imrie), thinks up a way to use it to their advantage. The photo — which shall be deleted, then resent so Nick and Serena can create a paper trail establishing their condemnation of Carla’s idea — will not only prove that Morgan “was lying about his infidelities, but he was gaslighting [Carla], too.” They expect Morgan and his team to suggest Carla was crazy and paranoid; the photo will prove otherwise. 

It’s very important for Nick and Serena’s plan that Morgan be blindsided. In a hostile divorce proceeding, the first camp to attack has a major advantage. But the tabloid picture tipped Morgan off — what reason would Carla have, other than a divorce-related one, to go to a lawyer who is not St. John Smallwood (Pip Torrens) at Cathcarts? Talking while Morgan gets a suit fitted, Smallwood assures Morgan he is protected by his bulletproof prenup even if he has failed to keep it in his “trousers,” which they both know he has. But Smallwood is more worried than he lets on to Morgan. He sets up his own war room as soon as he leaves the tailor, summoning Beatrice Ubosi (Nina Sosanya) from court. They need to get ahead.

To do so, each team needs an extra pair of hands. Nick wants to be careful about their firm’s spending, but Serena reminds him that Cathcarts has every resource at its disposal. If they want to win, they have to spend; and if they want to spend, they have to win. Enter the third strand in this deranged legal braid — sorry, deranged legal plait. We meet Johnny Warner (Archie Renaux) as he is interviewing for a job with Cathcarts. The senior partner interviewing him, David Schill (Miles Jupp), raises an eyebrow at his University of Michigan law degree, which is how we know he is cool and chill. Johnny’s explanation for his non-Ivy pedigree is that Michigan’s prestigious program also offered funding, which he needed as “a South London kid from a single-parent family.” Despite being judged for his background, Johnny is confident and even slightly threatening: “Don’t let me walk out of that door,” he warns. It’s Johnny’s tactic to be brazen; later in the episode, we see a montage of several similar interviews. Repeatedly, Johnny asks for just a month — no, a week; no, a day — to prove himself.

Out of law school, Johnny worked at a firm in New York. An as-yet-undisclosed Bad Thing happened there — the firms in London keep hearing from New York that Johnny isn’t all he cracks himself up to be. As he tries to pick up the pieces of his career, Johnny works at a fancy restaurant, where the rich clientele feels entitled to sexually harass him. One lady gropes his ass. Johnny goes from shift to job interview to fancy dinner parties with his posh girlfriend, Bella Croft (Tilda Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne), where he is the outcast. Bella’s childhood friend Angus (Jake Simmance), a corporate jerk, condescendingly probes Johnny about his career. In the cab home, Bella and Johnny argue about it, but he easily wins back her favor with his wit. He is, apparently, always doing that. Bella chews him out for punching Angus in the face right before Angus’s big presentation, which Johnny knew about because they were supposed to throw a return supper for him, a dinner Johnny was supposed to cook. But when Angus shows up at Johnny’s job and makes fun of him in front of all his corporate-jerk friends, Johnny stands up for himself via a right hook. He tells Bella it’s called “punching up,” and he’s damn right. He also explains that it’s okay he got fired because he finally has an offer from a firm. He will get back to them after one last interview.

The firms Johnny is deciding between are, of course, Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne. Serena tells him his former boss Elliott Wyatt recommended him highly, which is strange given his former reticence. Johnny admits that Cathcarts offered him a more general position when what he really wants is a case he can “sink [his] teeth into.” Serena offers him a place in their brand-new, meaty, biggest-ever divorce case if he wants it — with the condition that he has to take it or leave it on the spot. If the stakes are high for the lawyers, they are astronomical for Johnny. He has no safety net of privilege, inherited wealth, or a family name to fall back on. He needs to prove himself and get his life back on track; we can already foresee that, for him, the ends will justify the means.

As the episode crescendos to a close, each team meets with its respective client. Morgan has no choice but to offer up the details of his dalliance with Flora, despite acting all sheepish about it. Nick and Serena instruct Carla to attend her film’s premiere that night with Morgan, as planned; later in the evening, they will serve him over email (Carla wants to serve him herself; she would know that’s not allowed if she watched Marriage Story). Beatrice and Smallwood, meanwhile, have devised their own scheme: They have hired Johnny. Only Nick and Serena have also hired Johnny; he will be their mole at Taylor & Byrne. Morgan’s first reaction is to worry about how that would look if word got out, but his lawyer reminds him he is “fucked already”: This is shaping up to be “the biggest divorce trial in British legal history, and you just admitted to screwing a 25-year-old stranger.” Even then, each team assures its client they are “the wronged party,” and both teams get permission from said parties to play dirty. Early 2020s prestige television skewered the rich and unscrupulous. Well, asks War, how about the striving and unscrupulous?

From the outset, War sets us up to side with Carla — sleazy rich men get away with enough. Heading to the premiere, Morgan doesn’t even know what Carla’s movie is about. She gets some satisfaction out of telling him she plays a spy who crosses and double-crosses people, but the smirk is wiped right off her face at the red carpet. Posing as a fan, one of the Cathcarts lawyers hands her an envelope: She has just been served.

Representations and Acknowledgements 

• Given that we are set up to side with Carla from the start, I’ll be watching for potential reversals of this dynamic. Is there any world, however improbable, in which I side with Morgan? 

• It seemed strange to me that the tabloid photo wouldn’t have come across the Taylor & Byrne desk or even Carla’s own. They are presented as the kind of savvy lawyers who would be attuned to small details like these; they went all the way to Paris to meet with Carla! 

• We learn, briefly, that Carla has a son named Gabriel, who sends her a good-luck card before the premiere. A child is the No. 1 complication of divorce, so we can expect this to come into play sooner or later. 

• Morgan’s assistant, Eric (Patrick Fabian), is obsessed with the idea of Morgan’s social-media platform, Zephyr, being bought by his competitor, Michael Anchor, who may or may not be courting Morgan. But at least so far, Morgan isn’t interested; his platform was devised as “a reaction against” Anchor’s. As tech moguls go, Morgan seems to be more Dario Amodei than Sam Altman. In his acceptance speech for the Pioneer of the Year award, he spews a lot of clichés about the dangers of alienation and calls for “accountability for our behavior online as there exists IRL.” The irony is, of course, that men like Morgan are never held accountable — it’s Taylor & Byrne’s goal to change that. Eric runs a team that works for Morgan; one of his colleagues finds a loose earring in Morgan’s bed, not that he needed any more incriminating evidence. 

• Another small condescension directed toward Johnny comes from Bella’s mom, Harriet (Caroline Harker), who tries to assure him the Crofts don’t have any “expectations” for him to land a hot-shot job at a big firm. “It’s just not how we think,” she says. At least she takes his side in the Angus fight. 

• The title of the episode refers to its two pivotal phone exchanges. In the first instance, Flora calls Carla to tell her the honey-trap plan is done. In the second instance, it’s Johnny texting David (who saves his number under “Michigan”) after he has accepted the Taylor & Byrne offer.