In the third episode of War, a legal drama from HBO and Britain’s Sky TV, a tech billionaire played by Dominic West makes a generous and degrading offer. He’ll give Steven (Robert Daws), one of many hirelings advising him in a nasty divorce, a wristwatch worth a million dollars if he disrobes “down to your socks, right now.” Steven’s initial response is a nervous giggle. Then he’s frantically unbuttoning his shirt.
His point duly made, West’s character, Morgan Henderson, quickly stops the striptease. 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 the very beginning, the Henderson-Duval split is sordid.
After accepting an award with a high-minded speech, Morgan—the entrepreneur behind a socially responsible social media platform called Zephyr—allows himself to be seduced by a beautiful young woman, Flora (Rose Williams). It’s a honeytrap, set by Carla in a desperate scheme to investigate rumors of her husband’s infidelity. On a junket promoting a dire-sounding period drama called The Milliner (her declining film career fuels some of War’s wittiest moments), she wastes no time forwarding Flora’s selfie with a sleeping Morgan to her lawyers.
And so the gears of the divorce machine shudder into motion, working to formalize a gradual estrangement that had been masquerading as the unavoidable byproduct of two demanding, international careers. We don’t learn much about either spouse as people; Carla’s personality is especially tough to pin down. At times, it’s implied that she’s cold or cutthroat.
Her son from a previous relationship (Aran Murphy, in his second HBO troubled-teen role this fall) is barely mentioned before he pops up in Episode 3. The 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.
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