Ever since Succession signed off, HBO has been hunting for its next big-buzz drama. Plenty of shows have tried to fill that void, but War might be the one with the most direct lineage. It's got the obscene wealth, the power suits, and those sterile high-rise offices where deals—and reputations—are shredded over sparkling water. HBO clearly sees the potential: they ordered two seasons upfront, even before the first episode aired.
Created by George Kay (known for Lupin), War drops us into the cutthroat world of London's elite divorce lawyers. The case at the center of Season 1 is the explosive split between Morgan Henderson (Dominic West), a tech billionaire with an ego as vast as his penthouse suite, and Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), a movie star watching her spotlight dim. Carla's set a honeypot trap to catch Morgan cheating, but he's filed his own petition to get ahead of the fallout. The two firms battling it out—old-money powerhouse Cathcarts and scrappy upstart Taylor & Byrne—have a long-standing feud that makes the divorce look almost civil.
The ensemble is stacked: Archie Renaux, Phoebe Fox, Nina Sosanya, Pip Torrens, and Celia Imrie all bring depth to a cast that makes the lawyers just as compelling as the couple paying them. Renaux plays Johnny Warren, a young lawyer hired by Taylor & Byrne while secretly feeding intel to Cathcarts. It's a double-agent storyline that could easily tip into melodrama, but Renaux grounds it—Johnny's a kid from Peckham too hungry to care about ethics, and you can't help but root for him even when he's being terrible.
West is perfectly cast as a man baffled that his actions have consequences—think Jimmy McNulty with a tech fortune. Morgan is punchable from the jump, moving through the breakup with wounded entitlement and bad-faith tactics, convinced he's the victim. Miller gives Carla a brittle edge that makes her sympathetic even when she's orchestrating PR warfare that would make a Kardashian publicist flinch. The show asks you to pick a side, then spends every episode making that harder.
The real firepower, though, is in the supporting cast. Pip Torrens is venomous as St. John Smallwood, a Cathcarts partner who guarantees the nastiest outcome. Nina Sosanya's Beatrice Ubosi runs the other side with razor-sharp authority—one critic compared her to Miranda Priestly. Kay's writing gives everyone enough to do, so no one feels wasted.
Of course, the Succession comparison cuts both ways. War doesn't yet have the same escalation—the tension starts high and stays there, without the layered character revelations that made the Roys so compelling. But Succession Season 1 had its own growing pains. War has the raw materials, and it has less time to course-correct since Season 2 will be an entirely new story.
Season 2 shifts to a defamation lawsuit, with Marisa Tomei, Kelly Macdonald, and David Harewood joining the cast. The anthology structure means the law firms are the constant, the cases rotate—a smart model that lets the show reinvent itself yearly without losing its institutional backbone. Whether any Season 1 cast returns is unconfirmed, but it doesn't have to.
Nobody's going to confuse War for Succession—it lacks the Shakespearean family psychodrama and the luxury porn. But it's got a deep bench of British actors chewing through gorgeous sets, a divorce case trashy enough to keep you gossiping between episodes, and the good sense to know that watching powerful people destroy each other is what HBO does best. If you're craving that fix, this is your show. And with an early renewal, you won't have to wait long for more.
