HBO and Sky have premiered War, a legal drama that turns an obscenely expensive divorce into a fight between two rival law firms, with Dominic West as Morgan and Sienna Miller as Carla.
The series went out at 9 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, and its opening stretch moves fast enough to explain why viewers are looking for it now: Morgan starts with a one-night stand with Flora, Carla gets the bedroom selfie the next morning, and the marriage is over almost as soon as the evidence lands in her hands.
George Kay created the show, which follows the lawyers circling a tech mogul and a movie star as their private split becomes public sport. Carla is represented by Nick and Serena of Taylor & Byrne, while Morgan is backed by St. John and Beatrice of Cathcarts, and the pleasure of the setup is watching both sides treat the case like a prize fight dressed up as legal strategy.
That is also where War gets sharper than a glossy divorce drama. Carla arranges a honey trap to prove Morgan's infidelity once and for all, but her lawyers are aghast less at the ethics than at the optics, and the series uses that discomfort to show how quickly a scandal can turn into a lawsuit with everyone pretending the shame is someone else's. The review also points to flashes of Marriage Story-like poignancy when Carla and Morgan try, haltingly and usually unsuccessfully, to keep their teams from going for the jugular.
There is even a scene that recalls a particularly gnarly moment from the Olivia Wilde-Jason Sudeikis break-up, which helps the series land its real point: this is not a war in the military sense, but a courtroom battle in which the damage is emotional, financial and public all at once. What remains unsettled is how far the show will keep pushing that spectacle, especially since Morgan is framed as a hundred-millionaire or a billionaire without fully spelling out how he got there. For now, War has already done the hardest thing a premiere can do — make a divorce look both inevitable and worth watching to the end.
