War on HBO: Sienna Miller and Dominic West face off in glossy celebrity divorce drama

You have to hand it to Dominic West.

If another actor had a supposed cheating scandal in his recent history (those Lily James photos, that handwritten “our marriage is strong” note, and the press conference with his wife in front of her ancestral literal castle), they might steer clear of playing an onscreen philanderer.

But then again, West isn’t a stranger to those roles having portrayed perhaps the most famous adulterer of the 20th century, Prince Charles in The Crown, and a lead in a show called The Affair. One guess what that’s about.

Or maybe that’s the point. There’s almost a shorthand of West-as-cheating-husband, and it’s something that we, as a culture, have become inured to, so it’s not so shocking and unforgivable.

Because HBO series War needs to put West and Sienna Miller on something of an equal footing as two halves of a celebrity couple fighting it out in a divorce battle. If it’s too one-sided, then where’s the tension?

West plays Morgan Henderson, a businessman who founded a “good” social media platform that sees itself as an antidote to toxic online communities – perhaps this is why it’s valued at only £1 billion.

Miller’s character is Carla Duval, a famous actor who was once an A-lister, but whose starpower has worn off and is now doing second-tier films and experimental theatre.

The story kicks off with Morgan cheating on Carla after an awards night, but it turns out the other woman (Rose Williams) is a friend of Carla’s and the assignation had been a honey trap to prove what she’s known throughout their marriage – that he has a wandering dick.

It’s something her lawyers, the recently set-up firm Taylor & Byrne run by husband-and-wife team Serena (Phoebe Fox) and Nick (James McArdle), doesn’t want to know about, but will have to deal with.

Morgan suspects something is afoot when he sees Carla photographed in Paris with her lawyers, and so his legal team, the old-school establishment Cathcarts, try to be proactive.

Moments before he poses with her on the red carpet of her latest film premiere, Carla is served divorce papers by a “fan” on the rope line. Is not exactly what happened to Olivia Wilde as she was about to present at CinemaCon, but it’s also not-not what happened. The evocation is clear.

In the middle of all this is Johnny (Archie Renaux), an ambitious go-getter from a working class background who has left his lawyer job in New York under a cloud, and lands a position at Taylor & Byrne working on Carla’s case.

Except, he’s secretly already working as a mole for Cathcarts, whose underhanded tactics are being deployed primarily by the ice-cold St John (Pip Torrens), pronounced in that grand British way as “Sinjin”, David (Miles Jupp) and Beatrice (Nina Sosanya).

Other supporting cast includes Nick Mohammed, Celia Imrie, Archie Panjabie, Honor Swinton Byrne, Shaheen Jafargholi, Emma Laird and Australian actor Kartanya Maynard.

Across eight episodes, the power shifts between the two camps as one side gets something over the other, and then back again until the culmination in court.

Most of the twists and revelations are designed to be pulpy thrills, a series of mini cliffhangers that keeps you ticking along – the threat of a corporate takeover, an illicit sexual relationship, a trouble-making mother, a disastrous talk-show appearance.

But it all amounts to something prosaic. The problem here is that the characters aren’t particularly compelling, and the format of the series is centred on the lawyers rather than their splashy clients.

The idea is that every season – and it’s already been renewed for a second – there’s a new legal “war” based on a different case that will see Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne once again facing off against each other.

The Taylor & Byrne side is better developed and we see the anxieties of the newbie players whose whole enterprise could be unspooled by a big loss. But the Cathcarts side is all caricature of unscrupulous upper-crust lawyers who smirk and sneer.

What you want is more of West and Miller – his character is afforded more shading than hers, but they’re both kind of wasted here. When you can’t really hook into either, the series has lost its emotional core.

War, created by George Kay (Lupin, Hijack), also has a tendency to overexplain itself, and there are multiple expository scenes of characters explaining to each other the basics of a case or law practice that everyone in that room should already know.

As a diversion, War is perfectly obliging, but it lacks the oomph a series with this much talent and gloss should have.

War is streaming on HBO Max