War

The real engine of War is not the marriage, it is the two firms. On one side: Cathcarts & Sons, the establishment — centuries of polish, represented by Nina Sosanya's formidable Beatrice "Queen Bea" Ubosi and Pip Torrens' patrician St John Smallwood, with Miles Jupp deliciously snobbish as lawyer David Schill. On the other: Taylor & Byrne, the upstart — Phoebe Fox as the ruthless, ambitious, and pregnant Serena Byrne and James McArdle as Nicholas Taylor, who are partners in life as well as business. Caught between them, and carrying much of the show's beating heart, is Archie Renaux as Jonathan "Johnny" Warren, an ambitious young lawyer out of the Industry school of wide-eyed hustle, who pitches himself around London's top firms in the opening episode unaware he is about to become the case's secret weapon. The series is smart enough to treat the divorce like a war campaign: war rooms, dirty tricks, a honeypot scheme that arrives early, and a switcheroo at the end of episode one that critics rightly flagged as a genuine jolt.

George Kay wrote and executive-produced every episode, and his fingerprints are all over it. Kay built his name on Lupin — Netflix's great French-language smash — then on Hijack for Apple TV+, and War completes his transition into the prestige-TV heavyweight class. He directs the show's chessboard logic the way he directed Assane Diop's schemes: every move has a countermove, and the pleasure is watching smart people lose anyway. Lead director Ben Taylor (the Sex Education veteran) gives the legal maneuvering a propulsive, almost heist-movie rhythm, and the show was co-produced by New Pictures (a Banijay company) and Observatory Pictures in association with Sky and HBO — the kind of transatlantic prestige pipeline that has quietly become television's most reliable hit factory. Perhaps the clearest measure of HBO and Sky's confidence: they greenlit two seasons before a single frame aired. Season two, already in production, keeps the same lawyers but swaps the case — an explosive defamation battle starring Marisa Tomei, Kelly Macdonald, and David Harewood, with Richard Schiff also joining the ensemble.

The cast is the show's deepest bench, and Kay staffs it like he is drafting for a decade. Dominic West — no stranger to playing charmingly errant husbands, as he will cheerfully admit — makes Morgan Henderson a philandering tech numpty you somehow cannot hate, while Sienna Miller plays Carla Duval as even-tempered and canny rather than the Hollywood-monster caricature the tabloids would write. There is real-world texture humming under their scenes: Miller's own history of weathering a very public split gives Carla's war-room composure an edge you cannot fake. But the performances that reviewers kept circling were the firm's gladiators. Phoebe Fox finally gets a role with teeth in Serena Byrne; Nina Sosanya's "Queen Bea" Ubosi delivers the season's best line readings, including the mission statement of the whole series — "If they play dirty, we will be total and utter filth." And in a genuinely inspired piece of casting, Kay packed the supporting ranks with comedy specialists — Nick Mohammed, Celia Imrie, Steve Furst, Jupp — who keep the minor skirmishes crackling with dry, lethal wit.

Reception has been strong, if not unanimous. War opened to an 83% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Decider's Meghan O'Keefe calling it "an absolute blast of a TV show" that "feels like The Good Wife meets Industry" — which, honestly, is the highest praise a legal drama can earn in 2026. ScreenRant's season review called it "almost perfect," arguing it belongs in the conversation with the genre's greats if it holds the line. The Times gave it four stars, praising the leads' surprising relatability and the comedy ringers in the margins. The most serious dissent came from TV Guide, which found the show crowded and underwritten — too many gifted performers for too few episodes, and a world of billionaires too nice to each other for a series that calls itself War. That criticism has some teeth: the stakes are, at heart, rich people's problems, and the show never quite steps back far enough to acknowledge how absurd the whole beautiful mess sounds to anyone outside the war rooms. But for a debut season, the balance lands. It is luxurious, fast, and — the rarest thing — genuinely fun to watch lawyers talk.

Culturally, War arrives at exactly the right moment. The legal drama never died, but it spent the 2020s living off reruns and the great Suits streaming renaissance — the genre was waiting for a prestige entry that could do what Industry did for finance and The Pitt did for medicine. HBO clearly thinks War is that show: it handed the series the Thursday 9 p.m. slot — The Pitt's old territory — and is airing it as a mainline HBO drama rather than a streaming-only title. The anthology-by-season structure is the cleverest long-term bet in the package: one headline-making case per season means the show can rotate new stars through the same rival-firms engine for years, the way The White Lotus rotates resorts. London's elite law firms, with their wigs, their chambers, and their bottomless billable hours, turn out to be a fresh stage for television's oldest ritual — society arguing with itself in public, in wigs, with everything at stake. If season one is the opening argument, the defamation case of season two is the cross-examination. The 83% is watching.