A few episodes into HBO’s juicy legal drama War, I was struck by a thought as unexpected as it was unserious: Did I want to get a divorce?
Mind you, I’m perfectly happy in my marriage, with no reason whatsoever to leave it; I knew even as I formulated those words that they were a joke. But the fact that they’d occurred to me at all is a testament to the skill of creator George Kay. It turns out that in deft enough hands, even the morally grimy, emotionally agonizing, financially ruinous process of splitting a household’s assets can look an awful lot like fun.
The Bottom LineBreaking up is fun to do.
Airdate: 9 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1 (HBO)
Cast: Sienna Miller, Dominic West, Archie Renaux, Phoebe Fox, Nina Sosanya, Pip Torrens, James McArdle, Miles Jupp
Creator: George Kay
While the only battles here are the kind
While the only battles here are the kind waged in the courtroom, the characters seem to have taken to heart that old saw about all being fair in love and (metaphorical) war.
In the opening minutes of the premiere, tech mogul Morgan (Dominic West), either a hundred-millionaire or a billionaire depending on who’s asking and why, has a one-night stand with a beautiful stranger (Rose William’s Flora). What he does not realize is that theirs was no chance encounter but a honey trap orchestrated by his movie star wife, Carla (Sienna Miller), to prove his infidelity once and for all. The bedroom selfie Flora secretly sends her the morning after is the final straw impelling Carla to file for divorce.
It’s a trick so dirty that Carla’s lawyers, Nick (James McArdle) and Serena (Phoebe Fox), of their namesake upstart firm Taylor & Byrne, are aghast to hear of it — albeit on the grounds of poor optics rather than bad ethics. Morgan’s lawyers, St. John (Pip Torrens) and Beatrice (Nina Sosanya), of the storied institution Cathcarts, are delighted to learn of it for the same reasons.
It will also turn out to be just
It will also turn out to be just one of many tricks deployed by both sides by season’s end and, to the lawyers’ glee and ours, nowhere near the dirtiest.
There’s surely a version of this saga that would mourn the inhumanity of it all, and War does find flashes of Marriage Story-like poignancy in Carla and Morgan’s occasional, halting, generally ineffectual efforts to stop their teams from going for the jugular — though not, in my view, enough to mist my own eyes.
There’s probably another version of it that might use the split to comment on the way money warps relationships, or on gendered double standards applied to husbands versus wives, or on our lurid fascination with nasty celebrity divorces. And there is some of all that in War as well — including a scene evoking a particularly gnarly moment from the Olivia Wilde-Jason Sudeikis break-up. But none of those themes are explored with enough depth or nuance to dig up anything we haven’t seen before.
(Meanwhile, I don’t think there’s any version
(Meanwhile, I don’t think there’s any version of War that could actually explain how Morgan has gone about inventing a social media site with none of X or Meta’s toxicity. Consider that detail, instead, a sign that we’ve simply entered a nicer parallel timeline.)
Kay’s War is primarily concerned with entertaining us
As demonstrated in Hijack and Lupin, Kay has a special knack for elevating standard-issue thriller material into giddily addicting TV with his above-average command of storytelling basics. Each of the season’s eight hours is elegantly constructed and precisely paced. Each of the sets, from the airy blue-steel offices of Taylor & Byrne to the dim mahogany-wood rooms of Cathcarts, is considered down to the last chipped wooden table, and captured by director Ben Taylor with just enough style to keep things interesting. Each of the characters, down to the supporting ensemble of paralegals and assistants, is given enough shading to suggest entire lives that extend well beyond the glimpses we see onscreen.
The highest-wattage cast members are undoubtedly Miller and West, ideally chosen to exude effortless glam and rumpled arrogance, respectively. But the meatiest parts belong to their characters’ solicitors. As a happily married couple, Fox and McArdle share a soft and easy chemistry that stands in marked contrast to the chill between Morgan and Carla. Across the conference table, Sosanya plays Beatrice like steel swaddled in cashmere, while Miles Jupp, as her colleague David, peels away his genteel snobbery to reveal an unexpectedly dorky underbelly.
Archie Renaux is almost too effective
Archie Renaux is almost too effective in his unctuousness as Johnny, an ambitious junior lawyer — I found he occasionally tipped over from shady to serial killer-y, though loathing him for it becomes its own kind of pleasure. But possibly no one in the entire ensemble is having more fun then Torrens. His St. John is a fairly awful person, not above reveling in schoolyard-bully tactics to obtain what he wants. But he gets all the bitchiest lines, and delivers them in such imperiously withering tones that it’s hard not to relate to Morgan when he jokes, “I do love it the way you talk to me with such disdain. So refreshing.”
With such eager fighters on both sides, there’s never a question of whether things will get ugly — only of how ugly they’ll get. It says something about the deft balance Kay has struck in making these people watchable but not overly lovable, so that we can root along with their lawyers to barrel through mediation and arbitration and right into a very public courtroom battle — even if their low blows and surprise aces generally involve tossing aside frivolities like “truth” or “love” or “Carla’s heartbroken 16-year-old son Gabe” (played by Youth’s Aran Murphy).
Indeed, if War leaves behind the faintest tinge of disappointment, it’s owed to a minor stumble of nerve. In the final hour, the series finally succumbs to the sentimentality it has mostly evaded, grasping at and not quite capturing some deeper insight into human connection.
Only for a moment
But only for a moment. Within minutes, we’re right back to watching Nick wryly reassuring Serena that “We’re lawyers. We say things we don’t mean all the time” — and making that, somehow, one of the sweetest lines anyone’s spoken to anyone else in the whole series.
Who knows what secrets a marriage might really hold? More to the point, who cares? War understands better than anyone that sometimes what matters in a tale is not how factually true or morally righteous it is, but how compellingly it sweeps you along for the ride.
