Admittedly, it’s difficult to top a season of television in which Reese Witherspoon orchestrated a January 6 cover-up and Jennifer Aniston fell for an Elon Musk stand-in and his phallic rocket.
However deranged it might have been, The Morning Show Season 3 left a high melodramatic bar for its fourth to clear. The latest installment, which kicks off on Sept. 17, once again does the impossible: after all that, it somehow becomes an absolute slog.
It’s never not hilarious to remember that, when Apple TV+ first launched in 2019, The Morning Show was supposed to be its flagship series. Since then, other workplace-set critical darlings like Severance and the recently revived Ted Lasso have bolstered the streamer in its stead. Still, The Morning Show lingers, a staggeringly expensive, star-studded prodigal child that only the corporation peddling iPhones could love.
To say that the series has always been cursed with poor timing is a criminal understatement. Initially pitched as a fictionalized take on ABC and NBC’s famed morning show rivalry, The Morning Show was retooled into a questionably tasteful #MeToo drama after the sexual assault allegations against ex-Today Show host Matt Lauer.
After recreating the early COVID days in nauseating detail in Season 2, its showrunners committed to perpetually stranding their protagonists roughly a year behind the present day. Given how much of a funhouse mirror 2020s America already is, being forced to relive such recent history can be a downright sickly viewing experience. But rest assured—as dark as our current timeline is, at least The Morning Show Season 4 doesn’t attempt to tackle last year’s presidential election.
Thankfully, the action picks up in April 2024 instead. Two years after the events of Season 3, the UBA network has merged with rival network NBN, creating the newly minted UBN. The Paris Olympics are on the horizon, and when veteran newswoman Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) gets involved in an Iranian athlete’s defection attempt—10 minutes into the premiere, mind you—during an interview, the UBN’s shaky legacy media foundation is once again in danger of crumbling.
It doesn’t help that she finds herself reluctantly drawn toward the network’s newly acquired manosphere-adjacent podcast bro, Brodie (Boyd Holbrook). Yes, this is the same woman who spent last season entangled with fictionalized Elon Musk. Alex, will you ever learn?!
Other key players have since scattered to the winds. Billy Crudup remains the only actor on this series who has a handle on The Morning Show’s slippery, campy tonal swings. His character, former network executive Cory Ellison, has decamped to Los Angeles to make Cannes-bound documentaries and crow into his phone about “making Chinatown for the post-truth era.” Only hints of blood in the water at UBN bring him slithering back to New York. It doesn’t hurt that his ex, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), is back in town to fill an open UBN anchor gig.
Yes, you read that right—only a few years after Bradley turned herself in to the FBI for her role in covering up her brother’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, she’s already back in the top seat with a light slap on the wrist. This time, she becomes embroiled in a whistleblower investigation aiming to shine a light on a deadly Ohio pollution scandal that the network supposedly helped bury.
Do The Morning Show’s writers know how ludicrous it is for a major character who tampered with January 6 footage to suddenly be trusted with exposing another cover-up? At this point, I’m truly not sure.
As baffling as the show’s attempts to interweave deranged character beats with real-world events have been, its supporting cast, at least, have historically been bright spots. Most of them are actors that I, for one, would much rather see in better projects. But we’re in a recession, so I’m content to know they’re cashing Apple checks.
Unfortunately, the rest of the UBN ensemble is stuck with uninspired, soapy storylines. And because none of these characters feel remotely like flesh-and-blood human beings, they drag helplessly despite the actors’ best efforts.
Stella Bak, (Greta Lee) who has been promoted to CEO, shuffles between increasingly desperate attempts to implement new A.I. tech into the newsroom and a sorely underwritten affair with UBN bigwig Celine Dumont’s (Marion Cotillard) husband, Miles (Aaron Pierre).
Stella’s attempts to get ahead have placed her at odds with Morning Show producer Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman), whom she promised to make head of news to no avail. Meanwhile, Morning Show co-host Christina Hunter’s (Nicole Beharie) working mom guilt is exacerbated when she’s accused of doping during her past athletic career. And that’s not even mentioning Alex and Cory’s parental issues.
Are you still following? I barely am, and I watched the entire thing. After becoming appointment yet widely mocked television in Season 3, The Morning Show has pulled back from covering exact political events. All we’re left with is vaguely late-stage Sorkian monologues that skew far more The Newsroom than The West Wing, if The Newsroom started losing interest in whether its characters were on the right side of history from one scene to the next.
Six years in, The Morning Show still wants to have it both ways, painting its characters as amoral strivers in a corrupt, faltering industry before turning around and proclaiming that their personal journalistic integrity is our society’s sole hope in the face of rampant misinformation.
One key scene sees one of UBN’s new A.I. chatbots hallucinate terribly during a presentation. It’s an ironic moment, given that the series’ attempts to deliver treatises on topics like corporate mistreatment of women of color and the political silencing of journalists read like generative A.I. prompts spat out in the cadence of a Democratic PAC.
Given its starry roster and Apple’s limitless well of resources, The Morning Show certainly isn’t in danger of the cancellations that befall so many of its TV peers. But without even watercooler, ripped-from-the-headlines lunacy to keep it afloat, how much longer until its stabs at prestige appeal become just as defunct as the shows that inspired it?
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