Fifth Season
Apple TV’s The Morning Show is a show about damage control.
Or rather, it’s about damaged people who are out of control.
Except that these particular people happen to be losing control in the full glare of network television lights and social media, struggling for oxygen between celebrity puff pieces and segments on managing job-related stress.
The hosts of The Morning Show are learning a bit about job-related stress in the series pilot. Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), a beloved morning news anchor, has just been exposed as a workplace sexual predator.
Series Producer Mimi Leder insists he’s not based on Matt Lauer, but basically he’s Matt Lauer.
He’s been summarily fired and his longtime co-host, Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), gets to announce it to their millions of fans. And then cut to commercial.
That two-minute break is all the time Alex gets to grapple with the shock of discovering her dearest friend and collaborator is a predator before she has to come back smiling for a cooking demonstration.
Alex is written as equal parts Katie Couric and Howard Beale (there will be occasional references to Network across the first two seasons), with a few shots of Norma Desmond thrown in. Her brand is defined by her relatability to women—which is ironic, considering that Alex is kind of horrible to women behind the scenes.
Well, she’s horrible to everybody, but it’s different with men: she steers in their wake (Mitch), she’s needy for their attention (Mark Duplass as her trauma-bonded producer Chip), and she fears their power over her (Billy Crudup as network news head Cory, toxic positivity in a suit). She understands men. She doesn’t know how to relate to her fellow female journalists except as rivals. And now that Mitch is gone, a lot of those women are going to be lying in wait.
So when she learns that Cory was planning to dump her before Mitch’s scandal broke—and probably still will, given her flattened ratings—Alex’s survival skills kick in. Her radar is on full alert for whatever peppy young journalist the network might be grooming to replace her. She either has to take control of the show or die.
It doesn’t take long for Her Peppiness to appear: Reese Witherspoon as Bradley Jackson, a reporter from a West Virginia affiliate who goes viral after she’s caught on video verbally skinning an angry protestor. Unlike Alex, Bradley isn’t pretending to be nice. Her whole strength—also her Achilles’s heel—is that she can’t censor herself. She’s everything that scripted morning television shouldn’t be. That makes her irresistible to viewers and lethal to Alex.
Alex can see that Cory is grooming Jackson to take over her seat—maybe in six months, maybe a year—so she steals a march on the network and announces to the world that Bradley will be her new co-host.
I finished the pilot wondering what if anything this show was going to become.
Was this an acid-tongued black comedy like Severance? Would it be heavy with conscience like Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom? Would we spend the rest of the series watching Bradley and Alex smile at the camera while tearing at each other’s flesh, or would we all get a high-minded lesson on fourth-wave feminism and #MeToo?
A little of everything, it turned out.
And yet ultimately all of my predictions turned out wrong. I’m glad they did. Every time I thought I had The Morning Show figured out, it surprised the hell out of me.
The biggest surprise is Aniston as Alex, who is likeability personified and yet violates the longtime TV truism that we must root for our heroes to win.
Win exactly what? There are no Game of Thrones-like stakes to Alex’s power play. If the network fires her, she still has her Manhattan apartment and her farm in Maine. Nor is this All About Eve: unlike Margot Channing, Alex doesn’t love the camera so much that losing to a younger rival would destroy her. It’s not even about the love of her fans: they appear not as faces but as a Greek chorus of tweets—praising her, mocking her, hashtagging Bradley as America’s new TV sweetheart.
But that’s the battlefield: not the television screen but the smartphone (unsurprising for a show aired by Apple). Her viewers’ fickle approval is all that keeps her enemies from devouring her. Aniston plays this as only a real celebrity can, with raw hysteria: life in the public eye is both heaven and hell.
This is where The Morning Show becomes more than just a televised catfight or a lecture on the patriarchy.
Alex’s real struggle isn’t with Bradley but with her feelings about Mitch. If she stands with her former partner—if she so much as suggests that his behavior is worthy of less than a public castration—then cancellation will be swift and certain. But how can she turn her back on someone she genuinely loves? And how can the person she loves be the same person who did what he’s accused of?
And if they are that close, who will believe that she didn’t know?
It was smart casting to put Steve Carell in the role.
The salt-and-pepper beard is working for him. In one of Season One’s most revealing episodes, we flash back to Mitch before his downfall. When he makes a raunchy remark to a female staffer, it’s easy to write off as an attempt to loosen things up instead of a cold-blooded way to gauge her vulnerability. His flirtiness isn’t a weapon, it’s camouflage.
But Mitch Kessler isn’t being accused of crossing the line on dirty jokes.
The New York Times has it that Mitch coerced sex out of a junior staffer and then arranged a promotion to shut her up. We eventually find out who leaked the story, but it’s no cliffhanger. What matters is that Mitch has done this kind of thing before, and everybody at the network watched him do it and nobody saw a thing.
It’s one thing to hear about this and another to watch it, which we do (the episode has a trigger warning).
Eventually that staffer, Hannah (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), will be shamed into committing suicide, and then everyone gets to deal with their guilt. Even squeaky-clean Bradley, who interviewed Hannah just hours before her death.
If the writers had simply presented Mitch as a monster, it would have been enough to satisfy the moral calculus that neatly divides the world between victims and groomers. But the showrunners went for the scarier truth. Seconds before he rapes her, he’s helping her get through a traumatic moment, and we get the feeling he means it. It’s too easy to say that lovable Mitch was a lie and rapist Mitch is the truth. Both men are the same person.
I well remember the public backlash against two adult survivors who accused Michael Jackson of molesting them as children: if he was abusing them, why stay friends with him? Was this about money? Both of them were forced to admit, humanly and imperfectly, that they still loved Jackson in spite of everything he did.
This is how so many victims have been blamed as careerists and gold-diggers.
It’s how Hannah came to see herself: by letting herself be bought off, she was forced to live with the shame of rape and the shame of profiting by it. And now it’s not just office gossip. She’s about to be outed to the world. This is how she dies.
In less capable hands, we would revel in Mitch’s downfall. Instead, Carell brings Mitch’s wounds to the surface: despite his narcissism and denials, he crawls painfully toward remorse and atonement. In Season One, these gestures are dismissed as a machiavellian ploy to exonerate himself. In Season Two they form the spine of a tragic subplot.
But Mitch is a side character, if a compelling one.
The engine of The Morning Show is Alex and Bradley. Their evolving relationship—from friends to enemies and back again—is about people who should work amazingly together but can’t. It’s not just that the patriarchy wedges women apart. Each one has what the other lacks, and they resent each other for it. Bradley knows how to tell the truth; Alex knows how to play the game. Both of these tend to get in the way of friendship.
Season One ends with a reckoning that should have made Alex and Bradley a united force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, Apple must have sent somebody a memo that #MeToo was out and #Covid was in, so they had to recalibrate the storyline (each season of The Morning Show lags real-world events by about a year).
The show is known for shifting alliances, but it gets crazy in Season Two.
Characters lob verbal grenades at each other before collapsing into tearful hugs. The reconciliation rarely outlasts the episode. They plot against each other, then with each other. Sometimes they do both at the same time.
Much of this happens on cell phones—excuse me, iPhones. I never want to hear the default Apple ringtone again. There are scenes where people read their visual voicemail. And dictate speech-to-text messages. And look up stories on Apple News. During Covid, The Morning Show talent even use their iPhones to report from their home studios. The only thing missing is a QR code to the Apple store.
This is more than just a false note. It’s a reminder that a show about the media can only be so honest with itself. You always have to worry about the sponsors.
We expect that a show about TV news will eventually have something to say about the news: not just the people who report it but our sometimes less than healthy reasons for watching. Crazy Howard Beale wasn’t the true madman of Network. That would be the executives keeping him on the air, and the rest of us shouting through our open windows. Broadcast News (which I reviewed earlier) deals in its own way with the danger of journalists becoming bigger than the stories they cover.
The Morning Show’s version of this is the public meltdown on camera, which both Alex and Bradley have, after which they go into hiding.
In real life, this would be a breach of contract. But this is what shame makes people do, or at least dream of doing. The difference being that most of us don’t have second homes to hide in.
Rising network executive Cory sees genius in the chaos. Billy Crudup excels at disappearing into his characters: it’s hard to believe this is the same guy who played a loose-limbed rock god in Almost Famous. Watching Cory take a soul-weary sigh before putting on his Joker smile, we see that he’s far from a perfect villain. He can be shattered. Just like the whole cast of The Morning Show.
Because ultimately, this is not a show about #MeToo or cancel culture, any more than it’s about journalism. It’s about having your mask ripped off in public. The Morning Show is not about the price of fame but the cost of shame.
It all comes to a head toward the Season Two climax, when rival journalist Maggie Brenner (Marcia Gay Harden) publishes a book revealing Alex’s darkest secret: her affair with Mitch. At this point, Bradley has every reason to hate Alex’s constant histrionics. Instead, in a smackdown interview with Maggie, she does a face turn.
“Who’s the worst person you ever slept with, Maggie?” Bradley asks with a steely Reese Witherspoon stare. “How terrible a person are you?”
Bradley’s gesture is one of allyship, not friendship.
At the close of Season Two, we still don’t know if Bradley and Alex will ever be friends. And while female allyship is a dominant theme of The Morning Show, it’s not the show’s beating heart. We are allies in public. Real friendship is private, and only people in a friendship know what it’s truly about. It might be as tangled as Alex’s is with Mitch, but that doesn’t make it less real. We are all a bit more fucked up than we want to seem to the world, and only our closest friends deal with who we really are.
That’s what shame does to people.
It makes us hide who we are, to each other and ourselves. Which is why, however agonizingly, shame must be aired. It’s the only way to reclaim ourselves. Ideally it’s done with the support of people who care about us; hopefully when there is still time to discover what else life has in store, in the clear light of morning.
