At Sky's big Up Next event this past week, I got a look at some of the many, many shows and movies it's going to bring to UK viewers in the next couple of years, and some of these glimpses were even more secretive than I realised at the time. While plenty of the trailers I saw have been uploaded to YouTube in a trickle since then, others are clearly still under lock and key.
That's the case for War, one of the most anticipated shows in Sky's slate and the one I saw that I think is probably most likely to turn into a sensation. It's a co-production with HBO, which is always a good place to start, and Sky's clearly right behind it, since it's the first show I've heard of in a while to get a two-season order right out of the traps.
To start with, the show has a really interesting structure. Conceived as a legal drama, the two main characters will arguably be two legal firms, alongside the various staff members working at each one. The firms, Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne, will feature in the second season, as well, but not working on the same case.
In the first season, for which I saw a full trailer, Dominic West and Sienna Miller will be in major roles as a husband and wife going through what would be the biggest divorce case in British legal history (if it were real). That means things are going to get messy very quickly, as they rage at each other's expectations for how the pie will be sliced up and shared out.
Meanwhile, the lawyers working on their respective case files will be trying all sorts of underhand tactics to get a leg up on the opposition, including more than a little subterfuge. In fact, the trailer made it pretty clear that at least one junior lawyer will actually swap sides as a double agent, which is the sort of thing we can only hope doesn't happen in real life.
The trailer made it look like saucy, pacy and quick-witted stuff, and I can only assume that its creators looked at the enormous success of Succession and got inspired. While that show wasn't explicitly a legal drama, it had so much boardroom angst and legal chatter baked into its characters' machinations that I think it proved people still have an appetite for this sort of fare.
If War gets anything like the acclaim that Succession garnered, of course, then execs at Sky and HBO will likely be over the moon. I can't tell what I'm more curious about – when the show's trailer will actually come out, or when we'll find out who the guest stars will be for the second season's legal case.
