The women in the Defoe family excel at breaking things up. Of course, they do. They’re high-end London divorce lawyers.
The new Sundance series The Split explores whether the Defoes also possess the harder skill of figuring out what can be put back together, and how.
The Split, which premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET, incorporates many of the trappings of classic soap opera. The protagonists are all smart women with a vulnerable spot or quirk. Some of the men in their lives are worms, and some are saintly. Their professional cases drip with high drama and heart-rending poignancy.
For all that, The Split doesn’t play like a soap. The humor doesn’t feel like it’s sprinkled around in the same way.
Creator Abi Morgan, whose other works include The Hour, Sex Traffic, and The Iron Lady, writes The Split as if something more is at stake. The uniformly first-rate cast plays it the same way.
Ruth Defoe (Deborah Findlay, top) is the ruler and matriarch of the law firm that bears her name. Over 30 years, since her husband Oscar (Anthony Head) walked out of her life with no explanation, Ruth has built the go-to firm for rich and famous people who want to maximize their take or their savings from a divorce.
Her oldest daughter, Hannah (Nicola Walker, top and right), has grown into her right-hand woman, although Hannah sees the world a little differently from Ruth. Hannah would rather settle than litigate, a propensity that costs the firm money, and Hannah is happily married to Nathan (Stephen Mangan), who is witty, charming, and a great Dad to their three kids.
Nina (Annabel Scholey, top) is the second daughter, and while she’s also a lawyer, she lacks Hannah’s laser focus. She’s chronically late, she’s romantically ill-advised, and she thinks she’s not as accomplished a lawyer as Hannah.
The third daughter Rose (Fiona Button, top), five years younger than Nina, lives on the family periphery and when we meet her seems most focused on getting married.
The three sisters fight a lot, as sisters do in real life, and love each other with equal ferocity. After Oscar bailed, Ruth remolded the family into the Four Musketeers, united against a harsh world.
The question of family, and what it means, permeates The Split. The intra-family Defoe drama swings back and forth between focal point and backdrop to other dramas that, here again, contain more than a little soap DNA.
Oscar wants back into everyone’s life. Hannah’s long-ago flame Christie (Barry Atsma, left) has resurfaced.
Christie’s return wouldn’t be a big issue except that Hannah has made a bold career move herself. When the firm agrees to represent David MacKenzie (Stephen Tompkinson), a rich rat who wants to dump his loyal wife Goldie (Meera Syal), Hannah finds herself drawn to Goldie’s side.
That decision will reverberate through everyone’s life, making it impossible for any of our characters to avoid facing that original uncomfortable premise. If you’re thinking of splitting up with anyone who has been important in your life, you need a sense of what will happen next, what will it cost, and what, if anything, you can put together to replace it.
Conventional wisdom might suggest women are better than men at understanding this. The Split follows four smart women who will, among other things, test whether that’s true.