George Kay turns London’s biggest divorce into television’s sharpest legal game

George Kay builds pressure chambers. In Lupin, he turned a heist into a long game of perception, where the con’s architecture mattered as much as its execution. In Hijack, he sealed a plane and watched how people behave when the exits disappear. The pattern isn’t genre — it’s design: take a closed system, populate it with people who understand its rules better than anyone, then let the rules become the weapon. WAR applies that logic to the courtroom.

The series follows the explosive divorce of British tech entrepreneur Morgan Henderson and international film star Carla Duval — but that’s the case, not the show. The show is the two law firms assigned to fight it. Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne are the real antagonists, rival firms that exist to win, and the divorce becomes the board on which they play. Into that game steps Jonathan “Johnny” Warren, a young lawyer played by Archie Renaux, drawn into a world where, as the series frames it, ambition is currency and betrayal is strategy. Warren is the audience’s point of entry into a world that was already in motion before he arrived.

Kay created, wrote, and executive-produces the eight-episode series alongside lead director Ben Taylor, with New Pictures — a Banijay company — and Observatory Pictures as co-producers for HBO and Sky.

Archie Renaux as lawyer Johnny Warren at his desk surrounded by case files in WAR (HBO) — Image: HBO/Sky Originals

The two firms map onto two approaches to power. At Cathcarts & Sons, Nina Sosanya plays Beatrice “Queen Bea” Ubosi alongside Pip Torrens as the formidable St John Smallwood. At Taylor & Byrne, Phoebe Fox and James McArdle play Serena Byrne and Nicholas Taylor, partners in both firm and life. The ensemble extends to Celia Imrie, Nick Mohammed, Emma Laird, Archie Panjabi, and Honor Swinton Byrne, among others.

This is also a series that already knows what it is beyond season one. HBO and Sky greenlit WAR with a two-season order; production on the second series is already underway, with Marisa Tomei, Kelly Macdonald, and David Harewood leading a new legal battle — a defamation case handled by the same rival firms. The anthology structure is part of Kay’s design: different clients, different stakes, the same machinery grinding.

WAR debuts October 1 on HBO and streams on HBO Max in the United States, Latin America, Australia, Southeast Asia, France, and Belgium. In the United Kingdom and Ireland it airs on Sky and NOW on October 2; Germany, Switzerland, and Austria receive it on Sky and WOW. International distribution is handled by NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution.

Tags: HBO, war, Sienna Miller, Dominic West, George Kay, Sky