There’s a Right Way and a Wrong Way to Watch HBO’s New Prestige Divorce Drama. Let Me Explain.

Television HBO’s War Is a Much Better Show If You Know Your Celebrity Gossip Pull up some Wikipedia personal life sections before hitting play. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? Oct 01, 202612:19 PM Photograph by Justin Downing/Sky/HBO Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. If your favourite part of Belle Burden’s divorce memoir Strangers was the sordid details of their financial breakdown, HBO has the show for you. War, premiering today on HBO and Sky, comes from creator George Kay, who’s also behind Lupin, Criminal, and Hijack. Already renewed for a second season, the show is designed as part-courtroom drama and part-divorce narrative, a story not just about the couple trying to break up, but about the lawyers helping them stay away from each other (or otherwise failing to do so). War follows a high profile couple through their contentious and public divorce, all while their lawyers run in circles trying to sway the split in their favor. Like plenty of prestige dramas on premium streamers, this show is all about money and power, but saliently, about who builds it in a marriage, and who gets to walk away with it when that marriage inevitably falls apart. Dominic West plays the appropriately smarmy Morgan Henderson, the philandering tech billionaire divorcing Sienna Miller’s Carla Duval, a famous actress determined to get half of her estranged husband’s net worth after supporting him through his very profitable career. Through the eight-episode season, they duke it out in mediation, then arbitration, and finally at trial, a worst-case scenario when it comes to splitting your assets with an ex. Fleshing out the rest of the cast are their many lawyers, all engaged in their own forms of mischief: Phoebe Fox and James McArdle as a couple who own their own firm and are defending Miller’s character (and desperately need to win in order to stay in business), and Archie Renaux as a former waiter and young lawyer working for Miller’s side, but supplying information to West’s legal team on the sly. War is, as a prestige drama, completely serviceable, a legal procedural that fits tightly in the structure of this returning miniseries. (The show has already started working on its second season, this time starring Marisa Tomei and Kelly Macdonald, about two rival law firms working on a defamation case.) West and Miller seem like a couple who have never actually met before, which works for how much they have to hate each other through the season. But the best way to watch War is with one eye on the very real cheating and divorce scandals that made the two leads more famous for their personal lives than for their careers. Sienna Miller was, for a time, known especially for being Jude Law’s wife. Engaged in 2004, Miller and Law were on the cover of gossip magazines every few weeks, seemingly, pouring in and out of London clubs, sweaty and beautiful with their slender limbs tangled up after a night of drink. Miller is one of the few women Law has dated and not had any children with, but in 2005, news broke that he had cheated on her with the nanny to his then-young children from his first marriage. “I want to publicly apologize to Sienna and our respective families for the pain that I have caused,” Law said in a public apology to Miller. It didn’t really matter that Law was the person who had the affair; Miller’s career seemed to stall immediately in the aftermath of the scandal. Even after breaking up for good, Miller was still stymied by her reputation as a party animal who couldn’t keep Law in her bed. She took a long break from acting before returning, and even still, she’s better known as someone’s ex than she is as an actor in her own right. West has had a more illustrious acting career than Miller—he’s maybe best known for his work on The Wire as Jimmy McNulty—but he too is famous for his dalliances. In 2020, he was caught kissing Lily James while shooting Pursuit of Love with her in Rome. In response to the release of the photos, West kissed his wife in front of the paparazzi and offered them a handwritten note that said, “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together. Thank you.” He was also caught by paparazzi hiding out in some bushes, ostensibly, which is exactly what you do when you think you’ve done nothing wrong. Miller and West were treated differently in their respective cuckold and cuckee dynamics at home. Miller spent most of her career being unfairly cast as a tempestuous party girl who couldn’t stop running after Law, a bad boy completely disinterested in being caught by his own wife. West was treated as an oddity—this goofy but attractive man hiding in the bushes while he sorta-cheats on his wife. He never even really had to account for it in public, instead calling the photos of him with James “an absurd situation” that “was deeply stressful for my wife and my kids.” A master at passive voice, West has given plenty of interviews where he extols the virtues of cheating, and of women who allow for it. “I think women should be more indulgent of affairs,” he said in 2016. “Everyone should turn a blind eye to men’s behavior between the ages of 40 and 50.” West is 56, just barely out of the adolescent period of his mid-life. But still, Miller has had to account for her ex-husband’s affairs far more than West has for his. Even now, she’s known publicly as the woman who Law cheated on. She hasn’t been on television since a three-episode stint as herself on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her last film credit is for this year’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. West, meanwhile, has continued to work steadily, even appearing for five seasons in The Affair on Showtime, which is about, well, an affair. While West gets to play with his own public legacy, Miller has mostly hidden from it until now. Miller and West aren’t their characters; West’s Morgan is more sinister in his wealth and control, and Carla more devious and manipulative. While Morgan is cheating on his wife, Carla is setting honeytraps for him. Whose side of the split you land on might say more about you than it does about these characters or about the show at large. But if you really want to enjoy War in a way that makes it leap out of the television, the way to do it is to consider the very real backstories of the actors leading the project. Fictionalized divorce and cheating is fun, sure, but feeling the undercurrent of the real thing? Well, you can’t make that up. Celebrities HBO TV Scandals Divorce