Hello fellow Binge Watchers and Holders of Actual Bar Cards,
HBO has sent us eight episodes of London lawyers going to war over a divorce. We showed the trailer to our London correspondent, a solicitor who asked to remain anonymous and then apologised for asking. His full review: “With respect, that is not how any of this works.” Four episodes in, we have questions, a drinking game, and a new favourite firm name. This week, Popcorn Jurisdiction goes to WAR.
Let’s get into it! ⚖😂
If this show is not your thing, check out our previous Popcorn Jurisdiction reviews (Suits, Goliath, The Lincoln Lawyer, Better Call Saul, The Good Wife, Legally Blonde).
Objection: this is unhinged. HBO and Sky have built a legal drama in which two London firms go to total war over a divorce, and the husband’s firm is called Cathcarts & Sons. Not & Associates. Not LLP. Sons. It is the only law firm name on television that is also a plumbing company in Leeds.
WAR was created by George Kay, the man behind Lupin and Hijack, which means every episode contains at least one person standing very still in a glass room while a string section panics. It premiered October 1. Four of eight episodes have aired. IMDb has the first three at 7.6, 7.7, and 7.9, which means the show, like an associate, improves the longer it is left alone.
Exhibit: two London firms, one divorce, and a lighting budget larger than most settlements.
Critics and legal commentators have warned that you should not watch this with a lawyer in the room. We are a newsletter made of lawyers. We watched it in a room made of lawyers. One of us paused episode two to say “that’s not how mediation works” and was told, correctly, to shut up. Here is the damage.
| Role: | Tech titan, client, menace. Keeps a law firm on retainer the way other men keep a boat: expensive, mostly for show, and somehow always your problem. |
| American Equivalent: | A founder who refers to his divorce as “a restructuring” and his honeytrap as “a compliance incident.” |
| Verdict: | ⚖ Sustained. Dominic West has played a philandering Baltimore detective and a philandering prince. The man is typecast as a prenup clause. |
| Role: | Film star, scorned spouse, head of her own private investigations unit. Decided the best discovery tool was a honeytrap. We have seen worse evidence collection in a federal MDL. We have not seen better lighting. |
| American Equivalent: | Any client who says “I have proof” and then hands you a screenshot of a screenshot of a text, taken on a different phone, in portrait mode. |
| London Note: | Our correspondent describes experimental theatre as “the actor’s equivalent of document review,” and the honeytrap as “frightfully bad form, though one admires the initiative.” |
| Role: | Partners in life and business at Taylor & Byrne, the only business structure in which the partnership dispute and the divorce could be consolidated for judicial economy. |
| American Equivalent: | The couple at the firm retreat who insist they never bring work home, while arguing about a filing at the dessert table. |
| Verdict: | Their onboarding deck is one slide that says “good luck.” Their HR department is a houseplant. |
| Pronunciation: | “Sinjin.” Yes. We checked. Twice. The English will spell a name one way and say it another purely to find out whether you went to the right school. |
| American Equivalent: | A name partner who has been “stepping back” since 2009, still has the corner office, and still signs the holiday card “warmly.” |
| Verdict: | Bills in guineas. If his office does not contain a taxidermied something, the production designer should be sanctioned. |
| Role: | A nickname that appears in no firm directory and every associate’s group chat. |
| American Equivalent: | The partner whose calendar invites say “quick chat” and have never once been quick, or a chat. |
| Verdict: | Every firm has a Queen Bea. If you cannot identify yours, it is you. |
| Role: | Will, per the press materials, “stop at nothing.” Gets pulled into a war between firms on day one. |
| American Equivalent: | A summer associate in week nine, the one before the offer letters go out. |
| Verdict: | His first day involves a mediation. A real first day involves an IT ticket, a lanyard, and learning which partner you never, ever reply-all to. |
| Role: | Trainees at Taylor & Byrne and best friends, which at a real firm is classified as trauma bonding and is not billable. |
| American Equivalent: | Two first-years who share a Westlaw password and a quiet, sustained panic. |
| Verdict: | We discourage best friends in the same class. Best friends compare hours. |
| Role: | Unclear. Gloriously unclear. Serves diva at every opportunity and appears to answer to no one, including the writers. |
| American Equivalent: | The person nobody can place on the org chart who has outlasted four managing partners and two rebrands. |
| Verdict: | We respect any professional whose title resists a billing code. |
He would like the following on the record, in order of how much they appear to upset him:
1. Nobody in England says “attorney.” You are a solicitor, a barrister, or “my lawyer, who is useless.” 2. Nobody has a “war room.” They have a meeting room with a broken radiator and a biscuit tin that is a matter of some dispute. 3. If two firms behaved like this in front of an actual family judge, the judge would ask them, very politely, whether they were quite well. 4. The honeytrap is, quote, “a bit much.” In England “a bit much” is the legal standard for a career-ending event.
He then said he would watch the rest anyway, “for the offices,” and asked that we not use his name. We have not. We have, however, used everything else.
| What Happens: | Morgan and Carla’s marriage hurtles toward divorce, and both sides stand up their war rooms. |
| Our Objection: | Naming a premiere “It’s Done” is the kind of confidence usually reserved for a client who emails “quick question” at 4:58 on a Friday. Nothing is done. The invoice is not even drafted. Also, in England “it’s done” is what you say when the kettle boils, and the whole show would have been forty minutes shorter if everyone had simply had a cup of tea. |
| IMDb: | 7.6. Higher than most of our performance reviews. |
| What Happens: | Johnny starts his first day, each team angles for the upper hand in mediation, and Serena tries to control the narrative. |
| Our Objection: | “No more nasty surprises” is the stated goal of every engagement letter ever drafted and the achieved outcome of none. Mediation, as depicted, has roughly 80% fewer sad sandwiches, zero retired judges telling a story about 1994, and nobody asking whether the room has a different outlet. |
| IMDb: | 7.7. The audience, like a mediator, is warming up slowly and charging for it. |
| What Happens: | The prenup is thrown into question, and Morgan’s relationship with his stepson, Gabe, becomes central to both firms’ plans. |
| Our Objection: | Both firms decide the best litigation strategy is a teenager. We have seen worse theories of the case, mostly in our own filings. In fairness, this is the most legally accurate episode so far, because an English prenup really is a strongly worded suggestion (see Exhibit D) and the stepson really is the only person in the show not billing anyone. |
| IMDb: | 7.9, the top mark so far. The audience, like a judge, perks up the moment somebody finally mentions the prenup. |
| What Happens: | Nick’s insecurities resurface during a crucial arbitration session, and Morgan begins to question Cathcarts’ tactics. |
| Our Objection: | A client questioning his firm’s tactics in episode four has either found a conscience or opened an invoice. Both are treatable. And “crucial arbitration session” is, in our experience, the legal term for a windowless room with one working outlet and a Danish nobody will touch. |
| IMDb: | Judgment reserved. Which, we are told, is British for “pending.” |
One reviewer, a practicing lawyer with the patience of a saint and the IMDb login of a man with nothing left to lose, filed the following objections. We are not going to argue with any of them. We are simply going to pour a drink.
In other words, the writers quietly moved the goalposts to an American-style divorce, where a honeytrap, a prenup fight, and a war room all make sense, and then set it in a country where the correct response to adultery is a government web form and a sigh.
Walter’s ruling: Watch it anyway. A procedurally accurate WAR would be a short film about a man filling out a form while a cat sleeps on the paperwork, and nobody has ever binged a form. Except us. At 11 p.m. On a filing deadline.
| Attorney / Solicitor | Nobody in England says “attorney.” If you say it in London, a man in a waistcoat will gently correct you and then charge you for the correction. |
| Solicitor / Barrister | Solicitors face the client. Barristers face the judge. Clerks face the money. Nobody faces the invoice. |
| Clerk / Talent Agent | A barrister’s clerk negotiates fees like an agent negotiating a sitcom renewal. Your rate is set by a man named Colin, and Colin has never once said “let me check with the partner.” |
| “My Learned Friend” / Opposing Counsel | English barristers call the other side “my learned friend,” which is adorable. In an American courtroom, “my learned friend” is a motion for sanctions, and the friend is already drafting it. |
| “With Respect” / Go to Hell | “With respect” means you are wrong. “With the greatest respect” means you are an idiot. “With the very greatest respect” means security has been called and is on its way up. |
| Wig / No Wig | Horsehair wigs live on in some criminal courts, but civil and family courts dropped them in 2008. A divorce drama therefore has no wigs, which is a relief for the production and a tragedy for our meme department. |
| Taking Silk / Making Equity Partner | Senior barristers “take silk” and become King’s Counsel, which sounds like a spa package. It is the English version of making equity partner, minus the compensation committee email that begins “after careful consideration.” |
| Dining at the Inn / Free Sandwich | To qualify as a barrister you attend sessions at an Inn of Court, which historically meant eating a set number of dinners there. Actual dinners. Candlelit. Our version is a free sandwich and an ethics CLE that runs long, and we still complain about the sandwich. |
| Bundle / Binder | The English call the trial binder a “bundle,” which sounds cosy, like something you would bring a newborn home in. It is 1,400 pages and the tabs are wrong. |
| Loser Pays / Everybody Pays | In England the loser usually pays the winner’s costs. In America everyone pays everyone, forever, and the only winner is whoever owns the e-discovery platform. |
| Reserved Judgment / Pending Motion | When an English judge reserves judgment, you wait weeks for a written decision. In federal court we call this a pending motion, and the wait is not a delay, it is a lifestyle. |
| Prenup / Strongly Worded Suggestion | In England a prenup carries weight but is not automatically binding [See, e.g., Radmacher v Granatino [2010] UKSC 42]. It is a strongly worded suggestion, like a firm’s “flexible” PTO policy. |
| The Show: | “Mediation is a blood sport.” |
| Reality: | “Mediation is a retired judge, a plate of sandwiches that gave up around noon, and a 14% discount on a block-billed invoice.” |
| The Show: | “The ambitious young lawyer stops at nothing.” |
| Reality: | “The ambitious young lawyer stops at the 7 p.m. free dinner and takes the second sandwich for later.” |
| The Show: | “Partners deliver devastating one-liners in glass elevators.” |
| Reality: | “Partners deliver ‘circling back on this’ from glass conference rooms nobody has cleaned since 2019.” |
| The Show: | “The honeytrap cracks the case wide open.” |
| Reality: | “The evidence is a screenshot, authenticated by a paralegal named Kevin, and opposing counsel objects under Rule 901 before Kevin finishes his sentence.” |
| The Show: | “The divorce of the century.” |
| Reality: | “Fourteen months of discovery disputes about who keeps the Peloton, which neither of them has used since the pandemic.” |
WAR is an anthology. Season two, already in production, swaps the divorce for a defamation case and imports Marisa Tomei, Kelly Macdonald, David Harewood, and Richard Schiff. Marisa Tomei once dismantled a prosecution’s entire forensic case with nothing but a knowledge of limited slip differentials, so we like her odds at the High Court. Richard Schiff has spent two decades looking disappointed on behalf of the American government and can now do it on behalf of a London firm, which is a lateral move with a better view.
English libel law has traditionally been friendlier to claimants than our First Amendment [See, e.g., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)], which means American litigators will watch season two the way you watch a horror movie: through your fingers, whispering “actual malice” at a screen that cannot hear you.
Please allow 20 weeks.
You get the tension of a BigLaw rivalry, the glamour of a client who has a publicist, and the comforting knowledge that somewhere in London a barrister is also being asked about utilization. The reviews are warm, the pace gets a few raised eyebrows, and the procedure gets a full cardiac event, which any litigator who has sat through a Friday afternoon deposition will find charming.
The one truly realistic thing about WAR is the ending nobody wants to admit. Both sides exhausted, both firms paid, and the only winner is whoever drafted the invoice. Congratulations. You have been practicing law in the realistic version all along, just with worse lighting and no honeytrap budget.
⚖ Sustained: the rival-firm grudge, the spite-founded boutique, the glass-walled conference rooms, and Budgie.
⚖ Overruled: any divorce that ends with a single winner, a no-fault system with this much fault, and any law firm named “& Sons” in a year with a number this high.
Walter, Editor-in-Law
(Licensed to practice sarcasm in all 50 states. Void in the Inns of Court.)
P.S. If this made you want to rewatch something with fewer accents and more billable anxiety, the Popcorn Jurisdiction archive is open and, unlike an English court, does not reserve judgment. [See, e.g., Nobody v. Asked, 404 U.S. 0 (2026)]
Know an English lawyer? Forward them this and ask whether “a bit much” is a legal standard. Do not expect a straight answer. Expect an apology, followed by a correction, followed by a second apology for the correction.
Share with 3 colleagues who have already paused episode two to explain mediation, and 1 opposing counsel you would describe, with the very greatest respect, as a learned friend.