In fact, George Kay’s glossy, smart, very high-end and thoroughly entertaining new show is quite unlike the British legal dramas that came before it. You could just about call it a grown-up This Life but if you want to put it in proper context – establish precedent, if you will – better to look across the Atlantic to the spiritual home of the legal drama.
As do – now – Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne. For, from the get-go – the instantly credible names for the firms and its fancy opening titles – War feels very American.
In a way, this should not be surprising as it’s what Kay set out to do. In an interview with Radio Times, he told me “the ambition was to show off aspirational London the way that Ally McBeal showed off Boston… to make a show that makes you want to be there, and be part of the gang. The idea of having two law firms come up against each other as a returnable format was really great. Then these are just places to put characters and then really work on the relationships, and so the legal story becomes a little metaphor for each of the characters' storylines.”
In the battle for the spoils in the divorce of harrumphing tech billionaire Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and brittle film star Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), the firms are populated with a veritable selection box of characters. There’s someone-for-everyone played by an ensemble without a weak link.
As for showing off an aspirational London, even those of us who actually live in London, are now entertaining a move to War’s shinier, fancier, cleaner London – and not just because flats at the Barbican appear to be affordable. War feels like an American show because it’s so self-assured and confident but it’s resolutely, defiantly, proudly a drama set in London.
View oEmbed on the source websiteReal cases – a Russian oligarch's split reportedly costing him over £8 million in fees alone, a musician being told by a judge that his bill of £800,000 was "manifestly excessive" – make clear that Kay isn't exaggerating for effect with War’s jeopardy. If anything, he's underselling it. If, for example, you want Ayesha Vardag, one of Britain’s top divorce lawyers, to watch all eight hours of War for her expert opinion on it, it’ll cost you nearly £10k, on account of her hourly rate (£1,200).
This is the world of War, a world which Kay mines for stories and stakes, delivering delicious plot twists and compelling characters. Like LA Law and Boston Legal before it, War is the sort of show that makes you want to be a lawyer when you grow up – even if the way they operate is pretty appalling.
What Kay understands, and what makes War more than a glossy diversion, is that this industry runs on performance as much as law – the same theatrical instinct he brought to Lupin's elaborate cons. Every negotiation is a piece of choreography; every "reasonable" offer is a threat with better manners. No doubt about it: War has a run of seven impressive episodes. That there are eight episodes in the series is, therefore, a bit of a problem.
I won’t go into too much detail here – it’d be too spoiler-y and, for all its achievements, War deserves to bathe in the positivity it should garner for being the best British legal drama in years.
Suffice to say, for now, that Kay has written himself into a corner. In seeking to redeem everyone and resorting to a deus ex machina moment – which, I admit, is exquisite – War ends up leaving me not so much angry as disappointed. I’d sue, if I knew how.
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