When American viewers first met
Dominic West in The Wire we were led to believe his Jimmy McNulty was
the typical detective in a broken system who just cared too much. Even before
the first season was over it became clear he was a drinking, womanizing
narcissistic personality who thought he was smarter than anyone in the
Baltimore Police department and who pissed on authority as a matter of course
in order to prove that point.
Since then he has used his roguish
good looks and charm to become one of the most brilliant forces in television
someone whose handsome appearance belies a self-centered and frequently hollow
man. He has used it to play such historical figures as Oliver Cromwell and most
famously Prince Charles in the final two seasons of The Crown, the
untrustworthy news anchor in The Hour and in his other major American TV
role Noah Solloway in The Affair a married father whose midlife crisis
leads him to first blow up his marriage and then his entire life.
Sienna Miller is also British but has
frequently portrayed American roles in quite a few TV series. She played the
romantic lead in the cult hit Keen Eddie, a complicated Tippi Hedren who
had a different view of Hitchcock in the HBO TV movie The Girl, Beth Ailes,
who stood by her man and may have been willfully blind to him in The Loudest
Voice. Her most recent work – in Netflix's Anatomy Of a Scandal had
her playing a British socialite at the center of a sexual consent case.
For all their brilliant work neither
Miller nor West have gotten their fair amount of recognition in American
television. West has been nominated for several Golden Globes but only received
his first and only Emmy nomination for the final season of The Crown and
Miller has received nothing from the Emmys over her twenty year career. That
both of them have been cast as leads in HBO in War is the biggest draw
of this collaboration between American and British Television that on HBO
frequently leads to brilliant drama.
War is planned to be an anthology drama that every season will
focus on a battle between two rival British
law firms: Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne. In a page from the playbook of the
work of Armando Iannucci both firms see each other as the real enemy and their
clients are always the chess pieces in their battles even though they are
titans of industry elsewhere. On one side Taylor and Byrne are played by James
McCardle and Phoebe Fox respectively, though essentially they take marching
orders from Joy Budge (the always brilliant Celia Imrie). On the other side are
the main players of John Smallwood (Pip Torrens) and Bella Croft (Honor Byrne).
Both are essentially playing for publicity and billable hours and both care
more about winning then what it is best for the marriage or in many cases the
client.
One such case is Taylor and Byrne's
new hire Johnny Warren (Archie Renaux). Back in London working blue collar jobs
after as of yet still undisclosed failure in New York that blew up his career
he has been hired by Taylor & Byrne to work their most recent divorce case.
All bluster and very little ability they don't know yet that he's been hired as
a mole to gain advantage in the most recent divorce case by Cathcart. My mind
immediately goes back to Damages where Ellen Parsons seemingly impressed
Patty Hewes with her ability but was only being used by the firm as a pawn to
gain an advantage in a high profile class action. Johnny knows his role in this
game but it's not clear in the first two episodes how far he'll go.
West plays Morgan Henderson a social
media guru who receives a major award in the opening of the Pilot. Not long
after he goes back to his hotel with a woman, who is very clearly not his wife,
says he doesn't do this and then goes to bed with her. The woman in question
takes a selfie with the two in bed and then makes a call. "It's done,"
she says.
She is in fact a friend of Carla
Duval, played by Miller in a way that is clearly meant to remind us of Nicole
Kidman. Carla then goes to great subterranean lengths to se Taylor and Byrne and
tell them that her husband has been having multiple affairs and she wanted to
learn the truth. "I want to take
him for every penny he has," she
tells them. "And he's got quite a few." Taylor and Byrne go back to
their firm to realize the legality of this – or more appropriately, how they can
get around without admitting they have – and are worried because Morgan's firm
is Cathcart.
Morgan knows what is going on and he
then sees Smallwood to discuss his situation. He doesn't reveal that he's had
an affair, of course, and he wants to discuss the level of exposure in regard
to his prenup. Smallwood tells him its ironclad and there's no way to break it,
save for infidelity. Morgan assures him he's been faithful. Smallwood goes back
to his firm now certain that Morgan is lying to him and to prepare for the
worst – or rather what Taylor and Byrne will do.
And sure enough Johnny reveals the
truth about Flora to them which is a leak. This leads to the turning of the
tables where rather then Flora serving papers to Morgan on her red carpet, Morgan's
lawyers do so to her. The next step is mediation which neither attorney wants
because it will offset their billable hours. "There's no such thing as an
amicable divorce," Croft says. "Not at these price points,"
Smallwood points out.
The mediator as always is the only one
thinking clearly, pointing out that if they can resolve this now this will end
up being a financial and emotional drain on everybody involved. Morgan doesn't want
to settle and West is very good showing the disdain he has for the whole
process as well as the fact he can't get out of his own way. There's always a
common theme of a manchild at the center of all of West's work, something that
neither money nor power can ever fill and its wonderful watching Smallwood and Croft
time and again take the piss out of him
as they urge him to settle because they clearly know their client. "I know
he's coming around. There are fewer expletives with each no," Smallwood says.
War is a brilliant chess match in which we watch so many
people who are the masters of the universe unable to control their pieces
because of the randomness of their clients and those involved. This is
particularly clear with Flora, who is an out of work actress who Carla was more
than willing to use as a pawn and didn't really care what happened to her
afterwards. When Taylor tries to find a
way to get her to sign the NDA her mother (against Flora's advice) demands a
shakedown of 20,000 pounds. Johnny intercepts this and gives the information to
Cathcart first shaking things up, then giving the information to his bosses.
The writers make it very clear he is more than willing to use her as much as
anyone else, but Flora seems unwilling to acknowledge that she has clearly
fallen for Morgan – and its increasingly becoming clear that Johnny feels the
same for Flora.
This is a deceptively simple series
that inverts the idea of the legal drama and takes a look at a part of it we
haven't seen on TV in years: corporate law and criminal law are very much the
level of broadcast drama, but family law has rarely even gotten storylines on
TV much less its own series. It also helps that, as with nearly everything
else, the British do everything so much better than we Americans do: I can't
see War possibly working without all the subtlety and wit of the lines
and the way so many of the digs are delivered with accents. And I already find
it an improvement on Succession where the primary draw seemed to be
Brian Cox saying "F--- off!" a record none of times. Its so much more
effective when Smallwood asked about a response to a proffer says it wasn't appropriate:
"But it begins with F and ends in 'you?" So much funnier and it
actually has a payoff that same episode.
War has already been renewed for a second season even before
the first season debuted, something that has increasingly gone out of style
with freshmen series as the market of television continues to contract. And this is easily the first new show of the
2026 fall season that genuinely has the seeds of brilliance in it. I don't know
what chances Miller and West have for award nominations in the months to come
but War shows that neither has lost a step in two decades. To paraphrase
the mediator, that's the ideal outcome for these actors I'd like to see and for
the show itself.
My score: 4.25 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment