Another legal /lawyer drama with an impressive cast !!
Dominic West and Sienna Miller lead best British legal drama in years
A high-profile divorce battle is at the centre of Sky's dazzling and thoroughly entertaining new series.
The drama, which pits old school Cathcarts led by Beatrice Ubosi and St John Smallwood (Nina Sosanya and Pip Torrens in fine, malign form)
against the more right-on start-up Taylor & Byrne, helmed by husband and wife Nick Taylor and Serena Byrne (an equally impressive James McArdle and Phoebe Fox) – is a triumph, mostly.
In the battle for the spoils in the divorce of harrumphing tech billionaire Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and brittle film star Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), the firms are populated with a veritable selection box of characters.
Tech billionaire Morgan Henderson sleeps with a woman who secretly takes a photograph of them and sends it to his film star wife Carla.
Her lawyers Nicholas Taylor and Serena Byrne reel at their client's honeytrap tactics, but can't resist a case that might make their name.
Soon they are in a race with Morgan's lawyers Cathcarts & Sons to serve divorce papers first.
Legal drama, starring Dominic West and Sienna Miller
There’s someone-for-everyone played by an ensemble without a weak link.
And just when you’re deciding if your favourite is Emma Laird or Celia Imrie, Miles Jupp or Nick Mohammed, up pops Archie Panjabi.
It’s like when you go to the shop on Boxing Day, replete on Christmas chocolate, only to discover that the Mini Eggs are on the shelves.
You make room.
As for showing off an aspirational London, even those of us who actually live in London, are now entertaining a move to War’s shinier, fancier, cleaner London – and not just because flats at the Barbican appear to be affordable. War feels like an American show because it’s so self-assured and confident but it’s resolutely, defiantly, proudly a drama set in London.
With its pert-buttocked lawyer rumpy-pumpy and gay drug-fuelled toilet cubicle canoodling, but not a whisper of a barrister’s wig or glimpse inside a courtroom until its penultimate episode, War (https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/war-sky-legal-drama-trailer-newsupdate/) is no Rumpole of the Bailey.
But nor does it feel like Silk.
It goes in a different direction, is a different shape, from North Square.
It’s not middle of the road like New Street Law and it diverges dramatically from The Split.
In fact, George Kay’s glossy, smart, very high-end and thoroughly entertaining new show is quite unlike the British legal dramas that came before it.
You could just about call it a grown-up This Life but if you want to put it in proper context – establish precedent, if you will – better to look across the Atlantic to the spiritual home of the legal drama.
We may have had The Law longer than America but the US is somehow on more familiar terms with theirs than we are with ours in the UK.
I suspect this is related to having a written constitution (I know: they hardly ever mention it) but that fetishised document is the reason that firms like McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak and Lockhart & Gardner exist (fictionally) and occupy (very nice office) space in my brain.
As do – now – Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne.
For, from the get-go – the instantly credible names for the firms and its fancy opening titles – War feels very American.