Review: Can divorce be satisfying? It certainly is in 'War'

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Set us as preferred “War,” premiering Thursday on HBO, is the satisfying story of a divorce, or rather the prelude to a divorce.It’s the first installment of an anthology series in which law firms go head to head, or around the back, as lawyers and clients work out extracurricular business of their own.

A sort of “Beef” meets “The Good Wife” or “The Good Fight,” or whatever legal drama you prefer.Morgan Henderson (Dominic West), a tech mogul, and Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), a movie star, have been married a good long time, but are growing apart.As we get underway, Morgan, who has made a practice of infidelity, sleeps with a young woman (Rose Williams as Flora Monroe), a friend of Carla’s who presents her with an evidentiary Polaroid of the two in bed.

(Morgan is asleep.) It’s a trap! A honeytrap.And then the lawyers come in.The bone of contention here is money, of which there is a lot at stake, and you may reasonably wonder why we should care about these rich people’s problems, when there’s enough dough to keep everyone in diamonds and Ferraris until the revolution comes.

Indeed, the divorce itself — though it is part of what will keep viewers returning through the eight-episode series, as the case moves educationally from mediation to arbitration to courtroom — is really a sort of MacGuffin, a device to set characters in motion in an attractive setting.There’s some suggestion of trouble at Zephyr, the nontoxic social media site Morgan created and whose purity he jealously guards — as if! — while Carla, though she’s got a big new movie out, is approaching the age when female actors struggle to get roles.

But however the spoils are divided, Morgan and Carla will continue to live at a level at which the word “comfortable” has no real meaning.Representing Carla is the young firm of Ta...