By Lili Loofbourow
The thing about “The Morning Show” is that it feels like a morning show: frothy, forgettable and fun. It shouldn’t.
The Apple TV+ series, now in its third season, is serious – at least on paper. It has wrestled with some of the messier ethical quandaries of its time. Two major characters have died in the process!
The show originated as a #MeToo metatext about the harried and hard-working folks who make morning television for a fictional network called UBA.
You could think of it as a user’s guide to a toxic workplace, with beleaguered subordinates such as Chip (Mark Duplass) and Mia (Karen Pittman) desperately trying to make the show work while coddling the spoiled stars and making unreasonable demands.
The stars in question were Mitch Kessler, a Matt Lauer type played by Steve Carell, whose charm and celebrity enabled him to prey on – and professionally sideline – female subordinates.
And Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), his co-anchor, who started the series in a state of precarity: it was felt that she was ageing, so the network was in the process of forcing her out.
Carell’s charisma was key to the show’s most interesting and ambitious project: making the sexual harasser likeable.
“The Morning Show” ably demonstrated how easy it would be to like Mitch, and root for him, over his far less appealing co-anchor.
Alex, mired in paralysing challenges unique to her age and gender, lacked Mitch’s ease. Forced to even sleep a particular way for work (so as not to crush one side of her face), Alex was acting under extreme personal constraints while Mitch was comparatively free to indulge his impulses.
Aniston, whose charisma is off the charts when she chooses, reined that superpower in: her Alex has spent the show’s run cycling through an unappealing combination of grasping careerism and bursts of principle.
One of the show’s early objectives was to explore complicity in larger patterns of dysfunction. People knew what Mitch Kessler was doing and put the show and their careers – and Mitch, and the production – over the victims.
This is serious stuff. The first season had Alex writhing throughout the public relations crisis because of the moral intractability of her position. She was not innocent, and she was a nightmare boss herself.
When she condemned Mitch, it was simply true that “speaking out” and doing the right thing – publicly condemning one of her dearest friends – doubled as craven self-preservation.
The second season only leaned further into the messiness, spending hours with Mitch as he moped in an Italian villa while a documentarian captured his introspective turn.
The stakes of the show didn’t just expand to include the malefactor’s subjectivity and despair.
It also posited, albeit obliquely, that in a corporate environment like the one at UBA, where the network pandered to its male star and “encouraged” others to follow suit, the predator may not have fully realised he was predating.
These are thorny, sophisticated problems, but the resolutions are usually simplistic, even pat. Brief epiphanies tend to be presented as vaguely redemptive signs that better intentions can win, and that basic sunniness degrades the long shadows the show’s more tragic events should cast.
The show’s frenetic and bubbly aesthetic (captured well by its mesmerising opening sequence) works against the seriousness of the plot.
The breakthroughs, in other words, are always a little contaminated by the morning-show format. The suicide of one of Kessler’s victims in the first season was devastating in the moment, but it doesn’t hang over the show at all.
It’s like when a morning news gang talks about a mass shooting, then segues to chatting about what kind of coffee they like best.
Despite all those bids for seriousness, “The Morning Show” is a silly, sometimes soapy show at heart, and it’s fun to watch for that reason.
The series’s tonal buoyancy isn’t helped by the fact that Billy Crudup's irrepressible character, Cory Ellison, the network’s most impish executive, loves mess.
Not because it represents an honest struggle, but because it’s good for business.
In the third season, UBA is in trouble. The streaming branch is languishing. The pandemic took its toll. Vultures are circling.
Cory is trying to save the network with all the ingenuity he can muster, courting funders while battling the board. One promising investor is Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a billionaire with a sideline in space travel.
It feels as if Apple TV+ has been trying for a while to make Crudup its Hamm.
Crudup even plays a Don Draper-type salesman in the network’s mediocre ’60s-era dramedy “Hello Tomorrow!” It’s kind of fun, therefore, to watch a Crudup vs Hamm showdown.
It’s a sign of mission drift, however, that Cory is trying to save UBA and the viewer is supposed to align with him. The network that started off as a toxic encapsulation of dynamics plaguing many office environments is being treated more like a family that Cory, as Corporate Dad, is trying to save.
Look, Crudup is delightful as Cory. One can understand why the writing might have drifted his way.
But his role has hypertrophied to the point where he’s starting to seem more like the show’s main character than an amiable, unpredictable antagonist.
To its credit, the series kind of acknowledges that, and seems to be trying to pitch this turn toward the network as “a family” as a way of imagining a better workplace.
There are overt discussions about how Stella (Greta Lee), Cory's No. 2, can help make UBA a place that does everything right.
She tries, too, to rein him in: “Cory, people are dying,” she says when he shares his plan to air the interview with Mitch.
“They’re getting shot and suffocated. Watching Mitch meditate on his sins in some fancy Italian villa, that feels tone-deaf.”
(That was refreshing to hear, because one of “The Morning Show’s” funnier but not-quite-intentional running gags is that the best adversarial journalism consists of members of the same network interviewing one another on the air.)
Anyway. The show that used to be about the misery of lowly subordinates has turned into one about executive alliances. Stella, who once worked with Marks, ends up having to choose between her two business dads, and one doesn’t get the sense that the show sees corporate “dadhood” as much of a problem.
Mitch Kessler the lech is gone and Daddy Cory is here! This is the simplistic stuff I mean. “We're a family” is hardly a recipe for a healthy workplace.
In fact, it’s exactly the mistake Carell made as a nightmare boss in his other show!
Flashbacks to the pandemic prove that the show has too many storylines to juggle. It isn’t even about the “morning show” any more. The bouncing dots from the opening sequences have scattered.
Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), the ethical hothead brought in to co-anchor the morning show with Alex, has moved to evening news, and her plots have very little overlap with the main gang’s. Alex is working on her own show, for streaming, and vying for more power behind the scenes.
Mia and Chip, who were the “ordinary Joes” at the heart of the series, play vastly diminished roles, while Cory, the billionaire and Alex play weird power games.
Stella would be fascinating if the show didn’t have to speed-run through her arc.
So, sure, it’s all a little glossy and undercooked. “The Morning Show” got fluffier when it stopped being about the dark underbelly of a silly little morning show and became an earnest drama about the fate of a network instead.
But hey: it’s still a lot of fun to watch – maybe over a pastry, with a cup of coffee.
∎ “The Morning Show” season 3 is streaming on Apple TV+.