Television series

The Split

Name: The Split
Genre: Drama, Legal
Released: 2018
Cast: Nicola Walker, Deborah Findlay, Annabel Scholey, Stephen Mangan, Fiona Button

The Split follows the Defoe women, three lawyer sisters and their formidable mother, working London's poshest divorce courts while their own marriages quietly come apart. It's glossy, talky, unashamedly soapy in the best sense — expensive rooms, expensive tears — but Nicola Walker anchors it with real feeling. Watch it for smart women arguing beautifully dressed, love that curdles slowly, and the particular ache of a family firm that can't stop litigating itself.

TVMaze rating

8.0

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Nicola Walker again, this time chasing decades-old murders with the same weary decency and flickers of humour she brings to Hannah. If you fell for her rhythms here, this is more of that warmth wrapped around a mystery.

But It's a police procedural at heart, not a domestic drama, so the marriage-and-family ache you loved in The Split is mostly gone.

Big Little Lies2017

Glossy, gorgeous women with expensive kitchens and unbearable secrets — same appetite for watching wealthy lives crack open, with a starrier cast and a nastier undertow.

But The murder-mystery scaffolding and Monterey soap-opera excess push it further from realism than The Split ever goes.

Doctor Foster2015

A British marriage dissolving in devastating, addictive real time — Suranne Jones is magnificent, and the writing has the same eye for how cruelty hides inside politeness.

But It tips into melodrama and vengeance-thriller territory that The Split, for all its heightened moments, mostly resists.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Scener ur ett äktenskap1973

The Split is a plush, populated descendant of this: Bergman strips the marriage-autopsy down to its bones, no courtroom, no sisters, no jokes, just the thing itself laid bare.

Six episodes of a marriage examined with surgical, unbearable honesty — the work that essentially invented the genre The Split plays in, decades before anyone thought to make divorce glamorous.

But It's subtitled, static, and utterly unglossy — two people talking in rooms for hours, with none of the legal plotting or ensemble cast to break the tension.

The Good Wife2009

Courtroom brilliance tangled up with a crumbling marriage, episode after satisfying episode — if you liked watching sharp women out-lawyer everyone while their personal lives smoulder, this is the mothership.

But It's American, corporate-law rather than divorce, and seven seasons long — a much bigger commitment than one series of The Split.

Marriage Story2019

The film equivalent of everything The Split does across ten hours, compressed into two devastating ones — divorce as grief, love curdling into procedure, extraordinary performances.

But It's raw and unrelentingly sad with none of The Split's wit or gloss to soften the blow.

Apple Tree Yard2017

Emily Watson as a woman whose comfortable, successful life detonates from the inside — same fascination with what respectable people hide, same London professional-class setting.

But It swerves into thriller territory with a court case at its centre, a darker and twistier ride than The Split's.

Silk2011no page yet

Barristers, chambers politics, and Maxine Peake holding a room together by sheer will — for the legal-world texture and the pleasure of watching smart people argue for a living.

But It's criminal law, not family law, and cares more about cases than the lawyers' home lives.

Grace and Frankie2015

Divorce as a late-life liberation rather than a wound — funnier, warmer, and proof that starting over can be its own kind of romance.

But It's a broad American sitcom, tonally miles from The Split's wine-dark British melancholy.

Kramer vs. Kramer1979

The original prestige divorce drama — a film that quietly invented the genre's central question of who gets to keep the life you built together.

But It's dated in places and told entirely from the father's perspective, missing The Split's female-led vantage point.

Succession2018

Both shows are really about firms that happen to be families, where professional rivalry and blood loyalty tangle until you can't tell where the business ends and the wound begins.

Swap divorce lawyers for media moguls and you get the same engine: a family business where love, money and inheritance are impossible to separate, and every dinner is a negotiation.

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Selling Sunset2019no page yet

Strip away the legal drama and The Split is also about women competing and colliding inside one glossy female-run business; Selling Sunset just does it without the script, the wit, or the shame.

An all-female workplace full of alliances, betrayals and unbelievable interiors — if the Defoe office politics were the bit you loved most, this gives you that, shamelessly amplified.

But It's reality television, unscripted and gleefully trashy — there's no writing, no Nicola Walker, just very rich people and their feelings about each other.