WAR

A celebrity divorce lands on two rival London law firms and the eight-episode first season watches them circle each other over the spoils. Sienna Miller plays Carla Duval, a movie star filing against her tech-mogul husband Morgan Henderson, played by Dominic West. Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne are the firms doing the actual fighting, with Archie Renaux as a hungry junior lawyer trying to make his bones on the case. Created by George Kay (Lupin, Hijack), directed by Ben Taylor. Sky and HBO co-production, premium gloss, suits that cost more than cars.

The leads are the whole reason this exists and they deliver. West does the specific thing he's good at, a rich man whose charm has calcified into something colder, and Miller plays the kind of movie-star-in-crisis role that lets her be both brittle and canny in the same shot. George Kay knows how to open an episode: the pilot moves. The production design is doing a lot of silent work, glass offices and good tailoring, and Ben Taylor shoots the law-firm interiors like a thriller. When the lawyers are strategizing against each other, the dialogue has snap. Renaux is a real find in a thankless ambitious-young-man slot.

After a brisk opening, the show starts stacking subplots and side characters faster than it can service them, and the middle hour sags. TV Guide's complaint lands: this wants to be in the Succession/Industry neighborhood without the teeth. The clients, the actual celebrities whose lives are being carved up, keep getting pushed to the margins so we can watch the lawyers have another meeting about the lawyers. The interpersonal beats outside the office are rote. For a show called War, the stakes stay oddly comfortable, and nobody on screen seems in danger of losing anything they can't replace by lunch.

If you watched The Split and wanted the same thing with a bigger budget and a nastier bite, you're the audience. Fans of The Undoing, Big Little Lies, the Apple TV Presumed Innocent remake, anyone who likes watching rich people fight in rooms with good light. You'll bail if you came in expecting Industry's cruelty or Succession's velocity. Procedural purists will twitch at how often legal mechanics bend for the plot. If "handsome people in handsome rooms arguing calmly" is your signal that it's time to check your phone, this is a check-your-phone show.

BACKGROUND TV is correct because the ambition and the execution don't line up. The cast is better than the scripts, the direction is more interesting than the structure, and the show's instinct whenever a scene gets dangerous is to pull back toward a conference-room reset. It's not preachy, which is to its credit, and it isn't trying to lecture anyone about marriage, money or celebrity. It just doesn't push on any of them hard enough to leave a mark. You'll follow it fine with laundry folding in your lap. You won't miss a plot point if you glance away for a text. That's the tier.