This is as close as the first season of War, premiering Oct. 1 on HBO, gets to a thesis statement. Created by Lupin and Hijack hitmaker George Kay, this planned anthology series set within the high-rent hallways of London’s elite law firms takes, as its debut subject, the protracted uncoupling of Morgan and his actress wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). The show is everything you’d expect from a prestige-branded drama: persuasively acted, aesthetically polished, intricately plotted, and, with a few baffling exceptions, subtly scripted. It can be quite exciting. But as the season progresses, sparse character development and minimal insight into the absurdity of possessing—let alone fighting over—sums of money that could sustain hundreds of upper-middle-class Steven types add up to a frustrating lack of perspective.
From left: Nina Sosanya, Pip Torrens, and Dominic West in War —Sky/HBOThe show’s failure to flesh out these characters could have worked. The anthology’s overarching concept implies that it’s the lawyers, not the clients, that we’re supposed to be getting to know. In Morgan’s corner is Cathcarts & Sons, a venerable, old-school firm whose patrician pomp is telegraphed by stuffy, dark-wood interiors. Carla hires upstarts Taylor & Byrne, whose glassy, modern office space, by contrast, underscores a mission of operating on the light side of the legal arts—avoiding dirty tactics and putting clients first. (Flora’s photo, which is proof of Carla’s entrapment as well as of Morgan’s cheating, is an early ethical test.) The adversaries have history that goes beyond the prep-school-to-white-shoe-firm pipeline, and it gives both sides further ammunition for a fight they’re incentivized to draw out for as long as possible.
From left: James McArdle, Sienna Miller, and Phoebe Fox in War —Miya Mizuno—Sky/HBOBut even these standouts feel underdeveloped. And most of the dozen or so colleagues of theirs we meet are either cyphers or types. Smallwood’s underling David Schill (Miles Jupp) is flop sweat personified. Shadow and Bone star Archie Renaux is very good at conveying the quiet calculations of Johnny Warren, a working-class junior lawyer who is basically the straight Tom Ripley, Esq., but the fact that his character can be summed up so concisely speaks to its limitations. Farther down the call sheet, for every inspired casting choice (Celia Imrie as a sprightly barrister), there are a couple of name actors wasted in roles that serve expository purposes (Patrick Fabian as a Morgan minion, Nick Mohammed as a Taylor & Byrne staffer).
Archie Renaux in War —Justin Downing—Sky/HBOThe point may be that money destroys families and debases everyone who seeks it. But even if Succession hadn’t already eloquently made it (Morgan’s watch stunt is a milder version of Logan Roy’s viscerally disturbing Boar on the Floor), that’s not what War’s ultimate framing of Morgan and Carla suggests. While all the scheming and jockeying and betrayal can be thrilling, the resolution feels like a shrug. Kay invokes big, timely issues—extreme wealth, gender roles, the horrors of social media—without finding much to say about them. An anthology is supposed to be a collection of complete stories. War’s slick but shallow first outing is anything but.
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