War Knows Exactly What It Is

In several scenes in the HBO-Sky drama War, as a high-profile divorce escalates in both nastiness and total billable hours, one shrewd longtime attorney (played by a British TV and theater star you’re always happy to see; in this case, Nina Sosanya) will describe the strategy behind the maneuver she’s about to make. Then the show will cut to the other firm — a more modern outfit run by another group of well-trained British theater actors — announcing they’ve anticipated their rival’s plan and have a way to counter it. It’s a storytelling move that invites viewers into a circle of trust, flattering them into feeling just a bit more clever than the audiences of more predictable legal dramas, then gently ups the ante. None of the counter-strategies are all that different from what you’d expect to see in a middlebrow courtroom potboiler — War comes with corporate espionage; a heavy dose of soapy interpersonal drama; and, as is typical for a British series, tons of class resentment — but the show, created by Lupin and Hijack’s George Kay, carries its twists and turns with aplomb. If the eight-episode series often becomes silly, it knows well enough how to keep you interested: sleek montages, a great bench of acting talent, a big reveal followed by a scene in which someone ruefully puffs a cigarette and says, Ah, the legal system, what a mess. War knows what it is and enjoys serving it up well.

Before the narrative twists kick in, the most eye-catching parts of War are the characters involved in its big divorce: a preening tech executive named Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his movie-star wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). Their marriage has been rocky for years but crumbles after Morgan sleeps with another woman who turns out to be a friend of Carla’s and volunteered to test the strength of their relationship. (Whether Carla is responsible for that honey trap becomes a key matter in the ensuing legal proceedings.) Morgan has invented a “nice” Twitter named Zephyr, evoking the tech-bro masters of the universe who dominate the world economy at the moment — it’s hard not to think of Jeff Bezos’s marriages and Elon Musk’s weird divorces while watching — but the series takes a softer view of their ridiculousness: Morgan is a good-enough billionaire led wrongly by his subordinates rather than a terror in and of himself. There’s still plenty to enjoy in West’s plummy and gentlemanly performance; both Miller and West, in fact, are aces at oozing posh resentment, and, to the show’s advantage, they have both been caught in tabloid relationship drama of their own. She had a high-profile divorce from Jude Law. He and his wife once left a handwritten note for the paparazzi in the midst of rumors of an affair. Carla and Morgan read as fantasias of the sorts of people that occupy the minds of the British press and public: glamorous yet broken, fabulously privileged, and a bit unknowable. As War unfolds, we see them slide between animosity and lingering reflection, which West and Miller play well, though they’re most fun when they’re pouty and wounded. Nobody slouches in a great suit like West, and nobody scowls in a gorgeous coat like Miller.

Though Kay has denied casting for meta-fictional reasons, War kicks off with a reference to another incident from a high-profile divorce. Carla gets served divorce papers by Morgan in a scene inspired by Olivia Wilde receiving a filing from Jason Sudeikis at CinemaCon. Morgan has been egged into the move by his over-aggressive lawyers — Carla and Morgan might’ve been able to work things out in their relationship, the series proposes, were it not for the meddling interests of the people who work for them. At first, I found myself reflexively rooting for Carla and her firm, and though they tend to retain some of the high ground — Kay will never make you take the side of a plutocrat like Morgan and his old-money representatives entirely — both sides get their hands very dirty as the show goes on. Morgan employs a posh, old-fashioned firm called Cathcarts & Sons, headed up by a chilly Pip Torrens and a fantastically frank Sosanya who scheme about in elaborate wood-coated offices with dim lights. Carla has hired young married upstarts at a place called Taylor & Byrne, played by Phoebe Fox and James McArdle (an eclectic theater performer who was an incredible Louis in Angels in America; it’s fun to see McArdle in a big TV role). They have a light-filled office where younger associates work in an open floor plan. As Carla and Morgan’s divorce gets more elaborate, a back bench of British TV talent arrives to play various other attorneys and experts employed by both firms, including Celia Imrie, Archie Panjabi (in a nice nod to The Good Wife), and Nick Mohammed.

Complicating matters, in both War’s plotting and its effectiveness, is the one character and device that is both essential for plot to function and totally unbelievable: A young associate named Johnny Warren, played by Archie Renaux, who is double-dealing between firms. Johnny has an anger streak and a massive amount of ambition, and he’s landed back in London after crashing out at firms in America. He’s interviewing for jobs while waiting tables — and clashing with the higher-class young lawyers he ends up serving — and he has a mopey girlfriend who is worn out by his antics. (She’s played by Honor Swinton Byrne, of The Souvenir; may she have a nice boyfriend onscreen someday.) Johnny lands an interview with Cathcarts & Sons, but they soon realize he might also be talking to Taylor & Byrne and commission him to play double agent. He’ll leak information to them about the rival firm’s next move, and they’ll negotiate around it — not so much to make the rival firm suspicious, but enough to make it really hard for them to get an upper hand.

Johnny’s life as a double agent is essential to the way War pulls off the trick of making a legal drama that’s both familiar and more lurid than expected — a deposition is a lot more pulse pounding if you know the lawyers are plotting around stolen info. But on a character level, it’s deeply frustrating. Though Kay nudges the audience toward sympathizing with Johnny early in the series, he’s never less than totally insufferable and haughty. Renaux is plenty handsome, so it’s not entirely implausible that Carla develops a fondness for him, but as an actor, he struggles to channel arrogance and exhaustion into the part. It’s more fun later on, once the machinery of War gets turning and you start to see the ways in which Johnny may well get screwed for participating in all this. Renaux plays a trapped man more compellingly than one who thinks he’s king of the world. Turns out you’ll end up rooting for big conglomerates crushing the little guy when the little guy is this annoying.

But maybe that’s the cost of doing business. Kay ups the stakes of the divorce with each episode, to the point that it seems as if the entire British economy may topple in one direction or another depending on the fate of Morgan’s fortune. Will Carla get control of the social-media empire? Will Morgan’s rivals take over Zephyr and make it less nice? In a moment when global power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of weird men with a lot of relationship drama, War doesn’t ever seem too implausible. But the show also develops a moralizing streak in its back half. Kay wants to remind you that all the folderol of the legal system only makes real communication more difficult, which is a small and foregone conclusion. Yes, a legal circus distracts from the things that matter and creates a massive amount of drama all its own. That’s why it makes such good material for a TV show.