War Review: HBO's Divorce Drama Is the Tamest War You'll Ever See

There's a big-budget sleekness to War that has been inviting in comparisons to Succession and Industry. It's easy enough to see why. All three are HBO dramas, all three set a significant amount of their scenes in boardrooms, all three have sizable ensembles filled out with very talented actors. That's about where the similarities end, though, as War has a total absence of the fundamental qualities that make Succession and Industry such great television: a set of razor sharp teeth and a clear drive to tell any sort of meaningful story.

War comes from George Kay, the mind behind shows like the stylish espionage thriller Lupin and the stylish nonsense thriller Hijack. Kay is very good at making stylish TV, and style is certainly not something that War lacks. (Sienna Miller gets to wear a lot of fabulous coats.) This first season of the anthology series (which has already been renewed for a second season, set to star Marisa Tomei and Kelly Macdonald) revolves around the contentious divorce between tech titan Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his actress wife, Carla Duval (Miller). Morgan made his fortune from a social media app where people are nice to each other (I was genuinely more interested in how that could possibly be enforced and be such a massive success), while Carla's own career has taken a recent downslide.

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There's tons of money on the table as the couple separates, with Morgan's team of lawyers — the very reserved and very British law firm Cathcarts — looking to protect what Carla's team — the gentler, less experienced upstart firm Taylor & Byrne — hopes to secure a very large piece of. Morgan has gone old school, while Carla has put her faith in some up-and-comers, which War regularly reminds us with its production design: Cathcarts' offices are all stuffy dark woods and deep browns, though Taylor & Byrne's too-modern glass walls signal their own brand of corporate millennial coldness.

The split is acrimonious from the start, with Carla having a hand in honeytrapping Morgan into cheating on her, and Cathcarts encouraging Morgan to serve Carla divorce papers at the premiere of her latest film. These are all relatively interesting details, but by the end of eight episodes, we've learned so little about Morgan and Carla as individuals that it makes it impossible to figure out why we should care about anything happening between them. Carla's characterization is especially shapeless, with her opinion seeming to change depending on who she last spoke to and her personality more of a suggestion from other characters than anything the audience can actually see.

5.4

War

at HBO

Like

• The cast is filled with talented actors
• It looks expensive

Dislike

• It never figures out what it's trying to say

What doesn't help is that War suffers from an overpopulation problem. Cathcarts is led by the ruthless duo of Beatrice Ubosi (Nina Sosanya) and St. John Smallwood (Pip Torrens), while Taylor & Byrne is run by a husband and wife expecting their first child, Nicholas Taylor (James McArdle) and Serena Byrne (Phoebe Fox). The lawyers at the two firms have plenty of history with each other, but it's the striving Mr. Ripley-lite, Johnny Warren (Archie Renaux), a junior lawyer, who ties the story together as he secretly plays both sides. The ensemble is filled out by Aran Murphy as Gabe, Carla's moody teenage son from a previous marriage; Patrick Fabian as Eric, Morgan's right-hand man; Rose Williams as Flora, Morgan's one night stand; and many more I don't have time to list. At several points, I wondered what a talented comedian like Nick Mohammed was doing playing such a small, nothing role as one of Taylor & Byrne's barristers. The great Celia Imrie, also playing a Taylor & Byrne attorney, is always welcome on my screen, though she's called into the main action much too late and is similarly given very little to do, other than a few witty cross-examinations. There are simply not enough episodes or material for all of the gifted performers War has in its arsenal, making the series feel both crowded and underwritten.

All of that could potentially be forgiven if War had anything in the way of a keen point of view. The stakes are a snooze: While less privileged characters like Johnny are positioned against Morgan and his fellow 1 percenters, the series doesn't care enough about Johnny's upstairs-downstairs experience to give it any bite. The show never pulls back far enough to recognize how absurd all this infighting between rich people sounds to an outsider, which means that by the end, listening to these characters fight over unfathomable sums of money (billions!) just starts to feel laughable. Additionally, the series at many points angles to make the case that people are inherently selfish and conniving. If that's true, those people are nowhere to be found on War. The characters are all just a tad too nice to each other, always too set on doing the right thing. The lawyers at Cathcarts are at least willing to play dirty, but the series is too afraid of letting itself slide into cynical territory to ever really let them meaningfully get ahead. Contrasted against Taylor & Byrne, they almost come off as mustache-twirling cartoon villains. 

War is a totally watchable drama for adults. It's not poorly written, or poorly acted, or poorly constructed. It looks good, it sounds good. The ingredients that theoretically make up a good TV show are present. But there's an emptiness to it that makes it go in one ear and out the other, routinely making you wonder why you should care about any of the drama. For a show that boldly called itself War, you'd just hope for a bit more fight.

Premieres: Thursday, Oct. 1 at 9/8c on HBO
 Who's in it: Dominic West, Sienna Miller, James McArdle, Phoebe Fox, Archie Renaux, Pip Torrens, Nina Sosanya, Celia Imrie, Nick Mohammed, Shaheen Jafargholi, Emma Laird
 Who's behind it: George Kay
 For fans of: The idea of prestige TV, divorce
 How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8