War

George Kay has built War around a simple idea: a divorce between very rich people is not a legal process but a campaign, and the lawyers are the generals. Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and Carla Duval (Sienna Miller) end up on opposite sides of a marriage coming apart in public, and the series follows the fight over eight episodes. That is the whole engine. It is a good one, and for most of its length Kay keeps it turning.

We should say plainly that we enjoyed it. It is a series about people being cruel to one another in good tailoring, and we found ourselves leaning forward in the scenes where a settlement figure is said out loud and nobody blinks. Kay’s dialogue is quick and unfussy. People say what they want and then lie about why, and the series trusts us to notice the gap without pointing at it.

West plays Henderson with the confidence of a man who has never lost an argument he cared about, and the pleasure is watching that confidence get tested. He is loud when it suits him and quiet when it suits him more. Miller does something harder. Duval is the one who has to be underestimated, by the other characters and by us, and Miller lets the underestimation happen for a long time before she does anything about it. When she finally does, in a scene we will not describe, we were more shaken than a series this glossy has any right to make us. It is a small moment, a look held a beat too long across a table, and it lands because Miller has spent four episodes not asking for our attention.

The supporting cast is a list of people who make British television better by turning up. Nina Sosanya’s Beatrice Ubosi, called Queen Bea by everyone in earshot, is the one at every table who has already worked out what the others are going to say before they say it. Pip Torrens, as St John Smallwood, does his usual trick of making a man seem both harmless and dangerous in the same sentence. Celia Imrie’s Budgie is given less to do than we wanted, and every scene she is in is better for her. Nick Mohammed, as Michael Stefanou, is the one character who seems to find the whole business faintly ridiculous, and the series is wise enough to keep him around as a corrective. Phoebe Fox, James McArdle and Archie Renaux carry the younger strand, and Fox in particular gives Serena Byrne a hardness the writing does not always ask for.

Ben Taylor directs, and he keeps the rooms bright and the pace brisk. There is not much lingering. Scenes end when the point is made, which is rarer than it should be in an eight-episode drama, and the cutting between the two camps is clean enough that we always knew who had the upper hand that week.

The flaw is the length. Eight episodes is a long time to spend on one divorce, however rich the parties, and around the midpoint the series starts inventing complications to keep the fight going. Some of these are good. Some of them are there because the episode had to be an hour. We were bored for a stretch of episode five, and then slightly annoyed, because the writing in episodes one to four had been too sharp to need padding. Kay recovers, and the final run gets its nerve back, but the sag is real and a reader with limited evenings should know about it.

There is also a question the series never quite answers, which is whether it likes these people. It laughs at them. It admires their clothes and their houses. It is not sure whether we are meant to want any of them to win, and by the end we were not sure either. That may be deliberate. It also makes the last episodes cooler than they should be.

If legal drama is your genre, and you enjoy watching clever people be horrible for money, this is a good week’s viewing. Watch it two episodes at a time, and skip nothing in the first four.