Stream It Or Skip It?
Apple just renewed The Morning Show for a fifth season, and why not? It stars two A-listers — Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon — and it was the streamer’s first tentpole show when it started in 2019. It continues to generate buzz. But it feels like it’s been some time since the show was actually any good. Will the fourth season continue the show’s decline or start a comeback?
Opening Shot: “April, 2024.” We see a promo for the Paris Olympic Games, to be covered by UBN, the network created by the UBA-NBN merger. Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) is shown talking about the coverage in English, then in many other languages.
The Gist: The promo is a test of the generative AI system that NBN’s CEO, Stella Bak (Greta Lee) and Ben (William Jackson Harper), the Head of Sports, hopes to deploy for their coverage of the Games, so a worldwide audience can watch in their native language.
Since the merger that Alex helped bring about, she’s still the face of the network and anchors her own show. But she also helps Stella run the network in an untitled capacity, and is able to hire and fire people. In fact, she regrets not firing Bro (Boyd Holbrook) — yes, his name is “Bro” — the host of a Joe Rogan-esque podcast that the network simulcasts; it’s a remnant of the NBN network that is extremely popular but goes against the image that they want to project, where the C-suite is mostly female.
As part of their Olympic coverage, Alex interviews a young Iranian fencer and her father. But when Alex gets a note from the father, a nuclear scientist, that they want to defect, she helps them do just that. That, of course, generates the ire of Stella and Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard), part of the French family that has an ownership stake in the network.
Stella determines that, to stay in the IOC’s good graces, that Alex be taken off interviews and Christina Hunter (Nicole Beharie) temporarily leave The Morning Show‘s anchor desk and go on the road. Executive producer Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman) comes up with a brilliant idea for a fill-in for Christina: Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon).
Bradley has been out of the business since she turned herself and her brother into the FBI in 2022. When Mia goes to West Virginia to ask her to return to the place that made her a star, Bradley isn’t sure she’s ready. But then she gets messages via a secure text app that UBN is covering up a scandal that may or may not be related to one of its corporate parents. That’s when she decided to go back, but her FBI contact is unsure it’s a good idea; Alex is also skeptical, even though she approved the idea.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At this point in its run, The Morning Show feels like a cross between The Newsroom and Grey’s Anatomy.
Our Take: Watching The Morning Show is an exhausting exercise if you’re not 100 percent into the drama that swirls around UBN, or whatever the network is being called these days. The fourth season has introduced us to a supposedly new paradigm at the network, with old characters in new jobs and new characters in… well, it’s hard to say sometimes what jobs they’re in. There are storylines on top of storylines. We haven’t even talked about deposed UBAers Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), whom we see in Hollywood trying to salvage a film that just lost its star, and Chip Black (Mark Duplass), who now produces documentaries.
It’s gotten to the point where the show doesn’t even seem to hew to the realities of what is going on in the recent-past world that it inhabits every season. The 2024 storylines seem to be geared towards the Paris Olympics, not the election, though there is a brief mention of Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. Given the results of that election and what’s happened since, it seems to be shortsighted for the show to not even get involved in how UBN and other networks covered it. Given that the January 6 attack on the Capital was a big part of the Season 3 storyline, the show’s avoidance of the election is a head-scratcher.
But the show feels less like a show about a news network these days (is UBN purely news anymore? Maybe it’s more NBC-like, otherwise why would they have won the bid to broadcast the Olympics?). It’s now more like a series of monologues between characters who are trying to figure out just what in the hell their jobs are and how they relate to each other.
The performances are, of course, fun to watch, and with Cotillard and Jeremy Irons, who plays Alex’s law professor father, joining the cast, showrunner Charlotte Stoudt has a lot of Oscar-winning firepower to call on. But the first episode of Season 4 felt endless because of the myriad of stories, none of which seem to be grounded in anything resembling the real media world right now.
Sex and Skin: Stella is having sex with someone on the DL, and we find out why later in the episode.
Parting Shot: Alex calls Cory, tells him that Bradley is going to be back on TMS, and says, “You and I are overdue for a catch-up. Don’t you think?”
Sleeper Star: Karen Pittman’s Mia continues to be the only person at UBN who seems to have her head on straight and still wants to produce a legitimate news show.
Most Pilot-y Line: Cory knocks on the screen door of the trailer of his star actress and gives a long speech about why people need a film like this during the era of superhero movies. “We are making Chinatown for the post-truth era,” he says. After the speech, his assistant comes to him to say that the star just quit. So he was speechifying to an empty trailer.
Our Call: SKIP IT. We’ve held out hope in the past that The Morning Show would control the impulse to spiral into flights of fancy and actually stick to the drama involved in trying to produce credible news shows in this trying media environment, but the fourth season has proven to us that this is not what the show is ever going to be about, and we’re just not into what it is trying to do.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Credit to Nypost AND Peoples
