Created by George Kay, HBO’s new series “War” follows tech billionaire Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his movie-star wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), whose marriage is colder than the dreary London weather. When we first meet him, he sleeps with a young woman who is clearly not his wife, but the morning after their tryst, she calls someone to report that her work is done.
We soon find out that Carla set this meeting between the two up, unbeknownst to her husband, as a means to use Morgan’s infidelity as a cataclysmic excuse for divorce. Later, Morgan has a legal aide posing as a fan serve his wife divorce papers on the red carpet at her new film premiere, showing that he too can be calculating, and that this marriage has run its course on both ends.
While Carla gets legal counsel from the famed Taylor & Byrne, Morgan hires the ruthless Cathcarts & Sons, and both firms make it clear they will stop at nothing to secure their clients’ victory. Largely an intriguing premise, the series unfortunately focuses on two incredibly dull characters who feel like they belong in a procedural drama aired on cable television rather than the home of a series like “Succession.”
Despite sharing 10 years in this marriage, Morgan and Carla don’t feel like two people who have ever been in love, or frankly, two people who have ever shared a room. While they’ve clearly fallen out of favor with each other, the life in every scene is sucked out each time West and Miller share the screen, leaving behind a stale, stifling air.
Thankfully, the series quickly introduces Jonathan “Johnny” Warren (Archie Renaux), an ambitious, cocky young lawyer who becomes entwined in the mess Morgan and Carla have created. Masquerading as a double agent, he just might be the most thrilling character to watch in the show’s overwhelmingly dull first few episodes. As Johnny runs to and from various offices and attempts to secure the future of his career, Renaux delivers each line and huff with a tenacity unlike the series’ top-billed cast. He, along with both sets of lawyers from Taylor & Byrne and Cathcarts & Sons, makes this series feel worthwhile, even when the series’ momentum feels like it’s finally fizzling out.
As the lawyers in the series, married couple Serena Byrne (Phoebe Fox) and Nicholas Taylor (James McArdle), along with work partners St. John Smallwood (Pip Torrens) and Beatrice “Queen Bea” Ubosi (Nina Sosanya) also steal the show. They play their roles like hound dogs thirsty for blood, sniffing out the lies Morgan and Carla tell and salivating at the thought of being at the center of a legal battle so messy it threatens to upend the lives of the two people at its center.
Slowly, the divorce at hand starts to infiltrate their lives as well, as lawyers and aides begin to use each other’s secrets and lies to gain the upper hand in their cases. With such a fantastic supporting cast, it’s a shame the series doesn’t fully invest in them until halfway through this season’s eight episodes.
That isn’t to say there aren’t moments of greatness in each episode. Oli Julian’s score, in particular, is filled with plucky strings and sharp keys that make even a drive down the road in a fancy car feel stressful, and Eve Doherty’s kinetic editing also amplifies the thrills.
The show’s craft makes each act of betrayal more complex and engaging than it appears on paper, even when the performances that the outcomes of these deceits hinge on do little to translate those moments. And of course, the sharp dialogue reminiscent of HBO titans like “Industry” often lands with a punch, even when the actors’ facial expressions don’t match the way their teeth gnash after vile words spill from their lips.
Although it gets stronger as the season unfolds, “War” takes too long to get its gears turning. That’s not to say the series doesn’t improve greatly over its eight episodes, because it certainly does. It’s just unfortunate that it takes so long to fully flesh out the identity that will inevitably continue on into the show’s second season, which has already been greenlit.
As the lawyers and aides become a bigger focus, the series shows how their lives are dictated by the cases they take, with the drama their clients bring trapping even the most experienced characters in a web of lies they become ensnared in. By the end of the eighth and final episode of the season, the series thankfully transforms into one that seems to understand what it wants to be, just in the nick of time.
All episodes were screened for review. Premieres October 1st on HBO.
