Add The Split Up to your watchlist

In 2024, when Abi Morgan ended her hit legal drama The Split (starring Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan), she kept a promise she’d made to herself when she was first devising the series almost a decade earlier.

“I conceived The Split as three series, in the hope that I’d get the commissions to explore three series of Defoe family stories, which, thankfully, I did,” she says. And then, aside from a two-part special set in Spain, she stopped writing it. “I knew that if I kept writing the Defoes, I was going to take them into more and more melodramatic territory and it wouldn’t be The Split any more.”

In television, such integrity is admirable – but it also left a void, a Split-shaped space in the viewing habits of its devoted audience, in the BBC’s schedules and in Morgan’s own life.

“It’s so nice to have a show that people love – I love the show – and the BBC were saying, ‘We love the show, too. Is there any way there could be a different iteration?’

“There was much discussion about a different family to the Defoes – one that we don’t see on screen so often – and setting it in a different city, which would be as important to the new show as London was to The Split. It wasn’t until we decided that the family should be South Asian and to set the show in Manchester that it popped for me and I thought, ‘This is great.’”

The final piece of the puzzle was bringing on lead writer Ursula Rani Sarma who, Morgan says, has “with her writing team and with the creative team picked up what we put down, embraced it and made it their own”.

And so, The Split Up was born. The series feels noisier and younger than its predecessor and it’s definitely more diverse with Sanjeev Bhaskar (Goodness Gracious Me, Unforgotten) and Ritu Arya (The Umbrella Academy, Barbie) leading the cast as father Dhruv and daughter Aria, who between them run the family law firm – not always harmoniously. Hardly ever harmoniously, in fact. Almost our first encounter with Dhruv and Aria sees the recently widowed Dhruv reneging on a promise to step down from leading the firm he founded and anoint Aria as his successor. Aria, the eldest of Dhruv’s three children, is not best pleased. On top of the office politics, there’s family politics and, of course, romantic entanglements.

For Morgan, what binds The Split Up to The Split is that “they both put the major in the minor”. “Although the major drama is ‘We have to get this FDA signed by X o’clock’, the real drama is always with the people you love – the fallout between a father and daughter, the missteps between siblings, the emotional affairs between colleagues, the personal slights between husband and wife.” Gareth McLean

The Split Up is coming soon to BBC One