HBO’s Billionaire Divorce Drama War Doesn’t Know What It’s Trying to Say

In the third episode of War, a legal drama from HBO and Britain’s Sky TV, a tech billionaire played by Dominic West makes a generous and degrading offer. He’ll give Steven (Robert Daws), one of many hirelings advising him in a nasty divorce, a wristwatch worth a million dollars if he disrobes “down to your socks, right now.” Steven’s initial response is a nervous giggle. Then he’s frantically unbuttoning his shirt. His point duly made, West’s character, Morgan Henderson, quickly stops the striptease. “For people like me, the word trust loses all meaning,” Morgan says. “There are no lengths to which people won’t go, there’s nothing they won’t do to debase themselves, to humiliate themselves, and you, if they think they can get a slice.” This is as close as the first season of War, premiering Oct. 1 on HBO, gets to a thesis statement. Created by Lupin and Hijack hitmaker George Kay, this planned anthology series set within the high-rent hallways of London’s elite law firms takes, as its debut subject, the protracted uncoupling of Morgan and his actress wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). The show is everything you’d expect from a prestige-branded drama: persuasively acted, aesthetical...