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Inside the opening minutes of Sky Atlantic’s legal thriller War, it’s obvious that tech slimeball Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) is a bounder, if not an outright cad. He’s receiving the Pioneer of the Year Award at a self-congratulatory glitz-fest, in recognition of the success of his “positive” networking platform Zephyr. He’s making a speech bemoaning the ways in which social media tears us apart. He appears arrogant yet overflowing with fake humility; sanctimonious but also, habitually untrustworthy. He calls for accountability online. But how about accountability irl? Before long, he’s demonstrating the depth of his commitment to straight-dealing by banging a seemingly random stranger half his age after a chance meeting in a corridor.
As it turns out, his encounter with Flora Monroe (Rose Williams) isn’t so random after all. She’s part of a plan cooked up by Morgan’s wife, famous but on-the-wane actress Carla Duval (Sienna Miller) to prove his faithlessness as she prepares to activate divorce proceedings. Before long, they’re both talking to their legal teams. Morgan is represented by posh, establishment-coded Cathcarts (they do their business in austere, wood-panelled rooms). Carla, meanwhile, has chosen scrappy husband-and-wife fronted Taylor & Byrne (who operate under unforgiving striplights). Let the fireworks begin.
Into this moneyed maelstrom wanders Archie Renaux’s Johnny Warren, a fast-talking, ambitious young lawyer who grew up in Peckham, has risen and fallen in New York and is looking to hustle his way back to the top. Soon, he’s working for Taylor & Byrne. Except he’s really a double agent; an inside man recruited by Cathcarts. Most of the women and a few of the men in the Taylor & Byrne office fancy the pants off him. And as it turns out, they’re not the only ones. It’s a tangled web that young Johnny is weaving, and it’s bound to end in tears.
Slick, stylish, nasty dramas like this rely on fine calibration. As such, West and Miller are perfectly cast – and perfectly cast together. Their characters are both overprivileged, self-regarding and calculating enough for us to relish whatever ignominy might await them. But crucially, they’re also funny and charismatic enough for us to care. Even when it crackles with loathing, their mutual chemistry is sufficiently potent for us to believe they might once have been a stormy but passionate couple.
To fully enjoy War, it’s probably necessary to suspend disbelief from time to time. As an illumination of the toxic cynicism of high-flying legal practitioners, it’s brutally effective, albeit somewhat cartoonish. At various points during the show’s eight episodes, you suspect (or at least hope) that an actual divorcing couple might have found a route to a settlement, particularly as there’s a child involved – the volatile teenager Gabriel (Aran Murphy). Obviously, this would not have been in the best interests of the battalions of lawyers and equally obviously, it wouldn’t have been in the interests of engaging TV drama either. As the creator of fun, credulity-stretching thrillers Lupin and Hijack, writer George Kay knows how to stretch realism right up to breaking point and get away with it.
Instead, the viciousness compounds. “If they play dirty,” promises Cathcarts lawyer Beatrice Ubosi (Nina Sosanya), “we will be total and utter filth.” The two main protagonists are gradually sidelined from the legal machinations and start to feel like props. The supporting cast are excellent value – Pip Torrens’ public school sadist turned Cathcarts partner St John could probably sustain a villainous series of his own, while Celia Imrie is sweetly deadly as Taylor & Byrne prosecutor Budgie.
The gradual foregrounding of the legal teams probably hints at the closest War gets to an existential point. There’s a memorable scene in which Morgan (hypothetically) demands that an employee strip “down to his socks” for a million pounds. As it turns out, he’s making a point about outrageous wealth – albeit a cruel and self-pitying one. Around about the time of your first £100m, he suggests, people will debase themselves for a piece of you. The more money you have, the more fanatically you need to guard it, and the more relentlessly other people will pursue it. “For people like me,” he says, “trust has no meaning.”
This doesn’t feel like an apologia for the multimillionaire mindset – quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a graphic illustration that having silly money offers luxury and security, but often at the expense of joy, love, and even basic personal autonomy. What that does to a person’s worldview is something the rest of us are currently forced to deal with on a daily basis, not least via the whims of the owners of the world’s most famous real-life social media platforms.
Still, any such grandstanding is little more than an undercurrent, if it’s there at all. This is a trivial but pleasurable thing, without any real heroes but finally, not without humanity. One of the tiny consolations of living in a world containing multibillionaires is the chance to scoff, with a clear conscience, at their haplessness. As such, War is an expertly assembled, victimless pleasure.
