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It only takes watching about half an episode of The Split to realise there could never have been any other title for the BBC’s glossy new divorce drama. Of course, it features a family of lawyers who specialise in the ‘open heart surgery’ of divorce, but perhaps its most brilliant achievement is that it pursues its titular subject much further. Fans of writer Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, criminally short-lived vintage newsroom drama The Hour) will know to expect quality, and The Split is some of her best work yet. This layered and thematic miniseries is full of splits, fractures, abandonment.

While protagonist Hannah (Nicola Walker) is ostensibly dealing with high profile court cases and intense meeting-room stand-offs, she’s also recently left a family firm, Defoe’s, run by her overbearing, battleaxe mother Ruth (Deborah Findlay) and faces a rocky marriage to fertility lawyer Nathan (Stephen Mangan). Middle sister Nina (Annabel Scholey) seems permanently cast adrift by a string of flings and by trying to fill Hannah’s shoes at Defoe’s. Odd-one-out youngest child Rose (Fiona Button) broke with tradition by not becoming a lawyer, and is getting cold feet at the prospect of her upcoming wedding to lacklustre fiancé James (Rudi Dharmalingam). Even a split from thirty years ago has come back to haunt them with the return of the girls’ bescarfed and estranged father Oscar (Anthony Head).

If this is all sounding a bit soapy, it is true that the subplots can get a little over-the-top. The scene where the divorce of billionaire sports businessman Davey McKenzie (Stephen Tompkinson) sees cast-aside wife Goldie (Meera Syal) laughing maniacally on the floor of the cellar while downing her soon-to-be-ex’s most expensive bottles of red comes to mind, as does the tabloid-worthy case of a multilingual pre-nup between a glamour model and a Premier League footballer. Hannah seems to spend a lot of time contemplating an affair with Danish hunk Christie (Dutch actor Barry Atsma, though how a man with a jaw like that can have a name as boring as Barry I’ll never know). The old flame just happens to work at her new firm right under the nose of boss Zander (Chukwudi Iwuji). If this was an American show, it’d probably have already turned into Desperate Housewives 2.0.

But it isn’t. Sure, there are plenty of British too-wealthy cannot-compute-emotions must-stare-into-middle-distance moments, but The Split is gripping and its complex characters aren’t easily classified. Intimate camerawork turns London’s grey skyline and anonymous offices into a watchable landscape of broad, open-sky bridges, high-end houses, and cluttered flats. When Hannah and Nathan are joined by their children for playful, moustachioed French dinner dress-up, it’s even lively.

And it’s from a largely female team, too. Morgan is joined by Jane Eden and Louise Ironside in the writers’ room as well as director Jessica Hobbs and composer  Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the face of and force behind dark comedy sleeper hit Fleabag). It’s great to see the likes of Stephen Mangan getting stuck into some drama now he’s free of Episodes, but it’s Nicola Walker (Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax) who claims her leading role with vigour. Walker’s anguish in the final moments of the third hour – a howling, heartrending moment where she discovered her father had not left but been forcefully cut from her life – elevates a potentially soapy saga to serious, compelling drama.