‘Suits’ Meets ‘Succession’ in HBO Max’s Near-Perfect 1-Season Legal Thriller

Published Oct 8, 2026, 7:32 PM EDT Amanda M. Castro is a Network TV writer at Collider and a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, where she is an Associate Editor, and The U.S. Sun, where she previously served as a Senior Consumer Reporter. She specializes in network television coverage, delivering sharp, thoughtful analysis of long-running procedural hits and ambitious new dramas across broadcast TV. At Collider, Amanda explores character arcs, storytelling trends, and the cultural impact of network series that keep audiences tuning in week after week. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Amanda is bilingual and holds a degree in Communication, Film, and Media Studies from the University of New Haven. Plenty of television shows depict rich people behaving badly, and even more legal dramas show lawyers behaving worse. HBO Max’s War somehow combines the two into something far more entertaining than it has any right to be. Created by George Kay, the mind behind Hijack and Lupin, the eight-episode legal drama takes Suits' vicious workplace maneuvering, throws it into the moneyed, morally slippery world of Succession, and adds a spectacularly ugly celebrity divorce to the mix. The result is a series where nobody can quite be trusted, everyone has something to lose, and winning rarely has much to do with justice. That premise starts with Morgan Henderson (Dominic West), a tech mogul whose carefully maintained public image begins to crack after he cheats on his wife. The problem is that his wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), is an internationally famous movie star who has already decided their decade-long marriage is over. There's another problem: Carla didn’t just catch Morgan cheating because she engineered the circumstances herself, using a young woman named Flora (Rose Williams) as a honey trap and obtaining photographic evidence of the encounter. If that sounds like an extreme way to begin divorce proceedings, War is only getting started. What Is ‘War’ About? HBO Max’s Legal Thriller Turns Divorce Into a Blood Sport Image via HBO Carla hires Taylor & Byrne, a relatively young London firm run by married partners Serena Byrne (Phoebe Fox) and Nicholas Taylor (James McArdle), to take on Morgan. Morgan, meanwhile, turns to the imposing Cathcarts, an old-school firm with the money, connections and ruthlessness to make life very difficult for the opposition. At the center of that team are Beatrice “Queen Bea” Ubosi (Nina Sosanya) and St. John Smallwood (Pip Torrens), the latter of whom seems to regard legal proceedings less as a profession than as an opportunity to make everyone else miserable. The divorce itself quickly becomes much bigger than whether Morgan cheated. They have a prenuptial agreement to challenge, enormous sums of money at stake, questions over assets and reputation, and a public-relations battle running alongside the legal one. Morgan and Carla's lawyers constantly look for the next pressure point, a document, a photograph, a careless remark, or an embarrassing secret that can become ammunition. Divorce court has never been this cutthroat. Kay also understands the importance of making the battle visually legible. Taylor & Byrne operates out of bright, glass-heavy offices that project openness and collaboration, while Cathcarts occupies a darker world of mahogany, leather, and old money. The firms read as opposing philosophies before anyone says a word, even as their methods become increasingly hard to distinguish. Dominic West and Sienna Miller Anchor ‘War’ With a Juicy Central Conflict Image via HBO West and Miller make the central marriage compelling because War doesn’t reduce Morgan and Carla to cartoon villains. Beneath the cheating, manipulation, and increasingly vicious legal strategies is evidence that these two people once loved each other. Their interactions with Carla’s 16-year-old son, Gabriel (Aran Murphy), occasionally expose the emotional wreckage underneath all the maneuvering. The series doesn’t always dig that deep, but those glimpses give the chaos some weight. The lawyers are arguably even more entertaining. Fox and McArdle give Serena and Nicholas an easy intimacy that contrasts with Morgan and Carla’s increasingly hostile relationship. Sosanya’s Beatrice has the controlled confidence of someone who's spent years knowing exactly how much power she has, while Torrens steals practically every scene as the wonderfully unpleasant St. John. Then there’s Archie Renaux’s Johnny Warren, an ambitious young lawyer from Peckham whose mysterious past and desperate desire to prove himself make him War's closest thing to a traditional audience surrogate. Johnny also embodies one of the show’s larger themes: in this world, talent is useful, but knowing how to play the game matters more. Everyone is watching everyone else, everyone is collecting leverage, and everyone understands that the person who appears to have the advantage in one episode could be scrambling for cover in the next. HBO Max’s ‘War’ Makes Legal Drama Ridiculously Addictive Image via HBO Each episode of War pushes the divorce to the next stage of the legal process while finding new ways for the two sides to escalate their feud. Mediation becomes another battlefield, the courtroom another performance—even the press can be weaponized. Kay keeps the story moving without losing sight of the characters. Betrayals, reversals, and plenty of “oh, you have got to be kidding me” moments abound, but the series rarely feels like it is throwing twists at the wall just to keep things moving. The pieces keep shifting, and watching the lawyers figure out how to exploit those changes is half the fun. War certainly reaches for greater thematic depth — money, celebrity, gender, reputation, and the damage divorce can inflict on families — but its greatest strength is knowing exactly what kind of television it wants to be. This isn’t a solemn examination of marriage collapsing under the weight of wealth and fame. It’s a glossy, vicious, and often hilarious legal slugfest populated by people with more money than sense and lawyers who know exactly how to exploit it. War takes the addictive, professional chess game of Suits and combines it with the corrosive wealth and interpersonal warfare of Succession, then drops both into a celebrity divorce where every secret could be worth millions. It’s not always interested in being profound. It is, however, extremely interested in keeping you watching, and for eight episodes, it succeeds. War Release Date October 1, 2026