The Split: Don’t judge the steamy goings-on in this London office

As you might expect from a breezy popular drama about divorce lawyers, The Split raises lots of questions.

One of them, perhaps the most important, is whether the concept of having it all is broad enough to include having it off. Tentatively, the answer seems to be yes if you’re a woman because you deserve it. If you’re a man, not so much.

This is series two of Abi Morgan’s drama of legal affairs but there is no impediment to starting here. All the important catch-up information is delivered efficiently.

The central back-story thing is that lawyer Nathan (Stephen Mangan) — mild husband of the central character, lawyer Hannah (Nicola Walker) — sowed wild oats in the last series and is still being punished.

What Nathan doesn’t know is that Hannah is having an affair with lawyer Christie (Barry Atsma), who makes her happy and guilty and wears a suit that is so fitted it looks like it belongs to a smaller man, which it probably does because all men are smaller once you stop idealising them.

Tight Christie is in the habit of interrupting Hannah’s intimate family occasions with incessant text messages about fish and Alaska. Possibly Nathan has noticed the ceaseless chirruping of Hannah’s iPhone but he’s too busy being male to process his emotions. “Stop trying so hard,” Hannah tells him in their chaste, dark bed. “Stop trying to make everything OK.”

Christie is Dutch and has given Hannah a set of keys with clogs on the keyring. “I don’t think they’re going to fit me,” says Hannah, the clog Cinderella, flirtatiously.

What else? Well, there is a lot of office stuff and the office stuff crosses over with the personal stuff because this is a drama in which sympathy wears a power blouse and carries a significant bag. Hannah keeps Polo mints in her bag, the better to mask the leaking smell of infidelity.

Hannah has sisters and a mother who are also on the job and fully engaged in the business of being flawed and fascinating and inappropriately girlish in a work environment, which wouldn’t be so bad except that the firm has merged with another, run by an actual man, Zander (Chukwudi Iwuji), who is gay, which wouldn’t be a thing in such a painstakingly inclusive environment except that Zander has engaged his fiancé Tyler (Damien Molony) as a management consultant to root out waste and read everyone’s work emails. So there’s that.