HBO's New Legal Thriller Series Is Officially One Of The Biggest Shows In The World

Published Oct 14, 2026, 12:15 PM EDT

Felipe Rangel is a Movie and TV Journalist ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more.

Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics."

HBO's new legal thriller series has quickly become one of the biggest TV shows in the world, and it leaves behind many huge series on an important chart. HBO's slate of TV shows in 2026 has been a packed one, with several hits. The most recent of those was a live-action DC series, Lanterns, which starred Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart in season 1. Before Lanterns, multiple Game of Thrones spin-offs found success on HBO this year, as both A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and House of the Dragon season 3 performed well.

Choose the movie with the higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

HBO's 2026 hit TV shows have traversed many genres, as seen by those sci-fi and fantasy series. That said, some of HBO's best TV shows to date have been legal thrillers. That list includes projects like The Night Of and Matthew Rhys' Perry Mason. Now, HBO is finding massive success through the new legal drama series War, an anthology that has already been renewed for season 2 and stars actors like Dominic West, Sienna Miller, Archie Renaux, Nick Mohammed, Emma Laird, and more. War has now found itself amid massive TV shows in the coveted Top 10 as season 1 airs.

All Rise As HBO's War Makes Its Way Through IMDB's Top 10 Chart

At the time of writing, War stands as the 8th most popular TV show on the IMDb charts, which is determined by the platform's users. While the show just fell two positions on the IMDb Top 10, it is still holding strong with many episodes left to air in season 1, meaning HBO's legal thriller series could climb higher in the following weeks. Right now, only the first two episodes of War season 1 have been released on HBO, with episode 3, "Chip Off the Block," set to arrive on HBO on Thursday, October 15. War season 1 consists of eight episodes.

On the IMDb chart, War has left behind hit shows like Netflix's Monster anthology, which came back this year for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, as well as shows like Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen, Paramount+'s new animated series Avatar: Seven Havens, Prime Video's Reacher and Neagley, The Mentalist, and many more. As for the TV shows that rank above HBO's War, that list is made up of Apple TV's spy thriller Slow Horses, Tom Hardy's crime thriller MobLand, Apple TV's sports comedy Ted Lasso, HBO's sci-fi Lanterns, Netflix's drama East of Eden and thriller Below, and Prime Video's Stephen King adaptation Carrie at #1.

War Season 2 Is Already On The Horizon

Image via MovieStillsDB

With six episodes still left to be aired of War season 1, the new HBO legal thriller series is likely to keep climbing higher on the IMDb chart, especially since many of the shows above it are no longer releasing new episodes at the moment. War stands tall at a stellar 87% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. Season 1 follows two law firms on opposite sides of a divorce battle between a tech entrepreneur husband and a movie star wife. War season 2 will star Marisa Tomei and Kelly Macdonald, with two rival law firms on a defamation case, leading to, well, War.