If Michelle and Robert King, the nerdy masterminds behind fizzy legal dramas The Good Wife and The Good Fight took a trip to London and decided to make a TV show there, it might look and sound and move a lot like War, a new HBO and Sky co-production premiering here in the States on October 1. It’s a show about lawyers, of the tough and competent but still human kind, bustling around sleek offices as they flex their cultural and media savvy and negotiate a glossy high-profile case. It’s sometimes sharply funny, sometimes a little corny. It’s soapy and sophisticated at once, like maybe the best TV should be. That sounds pretty Kings to me. 

But War, created by George Kay, also brings to mind the HBO cult favorite Industry, another portrait of powerful people scrambling around London in the pursuit of money. War is significantly kinder than that relentlessly bleak series, though, and does less courting of a young-millennial audience. This is a mushier, more sentimental, more middle-aged show, though still a sexy and exciting one. I devoured it in one sitting, which I of course don’t recommend. Better to savor the sleekness week to week—save the bingeing for cheaper popcorn. 

At the center of the show are a husband and wife careening toward divorce. Morgan (Dominic West) is the billionaire inventor of a social media app that sounds a lot like Bluesky: it was dreamed up as a kinder, safer alternative to all the monstrous, bot-ridden horrors of other platforms. Carla (Sienna Miller) is a famous actress of . . . well, perhaps Sienna Miller proportions. She’s starred in movies and beauty campaigns but is past her career peak, and has faced some derision for her work and for her off-set activities. Morgan has the financial upper-hand, and certainly the connections in law and government, but one must never underestimate the power of a movie star to bend public opinion her way.