Sanjeev Bhaskar leads the split-up cast as Dhruv Kishan, a recently widowed father preparing to hand his Manchester family law firm to Aria. The move gives The Split Up its main engine at once: a succession fight inside a business built around family pressure, not a clean handover. The series shifts the franchise from London to Manchester and keeps the same basic setup, but with the Kishans at the center.
Dhruv Kishan in Manchester
Dhruv has spent decades building the firm from scratch, and the handover to Aria puts that work under direct strain. Ritu Arya plays Aria as driven and ambitious, which makes the transfer feel less like a ceremonial change of leadership and more like a test of control. In a family-law drama, ownership is never just business; here, it becomes the mechanism that drives every private exchange.
Luke joins Aria and Luke
Dimitri Leonidas plays Luke, the financial specialist brought into the firm even after he and Aria had a one-night stand at a conference a couple of years ago. That decision adds a practical complication the series can use immediately: Dhruv is expanding the business while placing two people with unfinished history into the same professional space. Danny Ashok plays Neal, Aria’s boyfriend, which gives the setup another pressure point without changing the basic succession story.
The Kishan family line
The Kishan household also includes Maya, played by Aysha Kala, and Kav, played by Arian Nik, while Mawaan Rizwan plays Ashok, a journalist-influencer. That wider family frame matters because the show is not just asking who runs the firm next, but who gets pulled into the fallout when the family business and the family itself overlap. The Split Up keeps the franchise formula intact, but the Manchester setting and the Kishans’ South Asian identity make this version feel more locally specific and less like a simple rerun.
For viewers, the immediate question is whether Aria can take control of the firm without being defined by Luke’s arrival or Neal’s presence. The opening setup already answers the bigger commercial question: this spinoff is built to turn succession, romance, and business succession into the same conflict, and Bhaskar gives it a clear center of gravity from the first episode.
