HBO's War Premieres with a Celebrity Divorce and a Hidden Mole

HBO's slick new legal drama War has arrived, and its Season 1 premiere wastes no time establishing the battlefield. The show centers on two rival London law firms — Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne — and their respective clients: social media mogul Morgan Henderson, played by Dominic West, and his movie star wife Carla Duval, played by Sienna Miller. Their long, now loveless marriage is essentially over, which means a very expensive and very public divorce is inevitable.

Carla not only wants out of the marriage but also wants to take Morgan's fortune with her. Their pre-nuptial agreement is designed to keep Morgan bulletproof — provided he has lived up to his end of the bargain. He hasn't. He has been unfaithful before, but this time Carla is armed with photographic evidence thanks to a honey trap. Carla assures her lawyers she didn't enlist her younger actress friend to sleep with Morgan, but that doesn't ring true. Her lawyers Serena Byrne, played by Phoebe Fox, and Nicholas Taylor, played by James McArdle, are partners in both the firm and romantically, and they don't like Carla's underhandedness because it could be bad optics.

Carla wants to file for divorce first, but she and Taylor & Byrne are unaware that Morgan and his lawyers at Cathcarts have already deduced she is poised to file. Beatrice «Queen Bea» Ubosi, played by Nina Sosanya, and St John Smallwood, played by Pip Torrens, fire the first shot in this war by serving Carla divorce papers on the red carpet at the premiere of her new movie. It is a savage move, and Carla then has to smile for the cameras with Morgan at her side.

The episode's biggest surprise is saved for when we learn that the ambitious, overconfident young lawyer Johnny Warren, played by Archie Renaux, newly hired by Taylor & Byrne specifically to work on Carla's divorce, is in fact a mole working for Cathcarts. For the entire episode, we follow Johnny's desperate search for a job at a law firm, so the reveal that he is going to be the show's equivalent of Matt Damon in The Departed is a fun twist. Still, as a scrappy, lower class guy trying to make his way up the social ladder, Johnny is sympathetic — for now. Like Charlie Sheen's character in Wall Street, the question remains just how much of his soul he is willing to sell to succeed and how many personal relationships Johnny may destroy in the process. It is a testament to the writing and to Renaux's nuanced performance that the viewer remains invested in Johnny even when his arrogance gets the better of him.

War is impeccably acted across the board by an ensemble cast filled with familiar UK character actors playing the respective firms' legal teams. As for the leads, West finds some sad-sack sympathy in his tech bro mogul, while Miller imbues Carla with a steely resolve that suggests she would have been a natural fit in the boardroom had she not pursued acting. They are only in one sequence together this episode, but it is rife with tension. Showrunner George Kay's finely tuned script is as darkly funny as it is sad in its portrait of the wounded, if not outright lost, humanity of its many characters — people who may not want to be this nasty but, well, that is what you are paid for, luv.

The premiere establishes a world where everyone wants the benefit of the doubt while doing the dirty work anyway. Carla's lawyers want the photograph resent so they have a record of objecting to how it was obtained, documenting their disapproval while keeping the useful evidence. It is the same excuse Morgan gives himself, only with better paperwork. The result is a show that is sharply written, deftly paced, and well-acted — a trashy delight that will almost certainly be HBO's next big water-cooler show.

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Derek Weston

Sports Writer

Derek Weston covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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