I have a complicated relationship with a lot of television, particularly shows that are set in the behind-the-scenes world of the industry. By definition, I’m a target audience, since it’s a world that I’ve lived in for most of my adult life. But with that perspective, I’m likely to be far more judgmental on attention to detail but the recognizability of the characters or incidents involved. I accept the facts that creative license is often taken and that for legal reasons the story can’t quite be what actually happened.
But in the case of THE MORNING SHOW that blurring of reality has been a lot more egregious than others which preceded and followed it, and the latest season which dropped last week on Apple TV+ has perhaps strayed farther than ever from it. More to the point, it has now doubled down on the underlying concept of female empowerment, which makes me feel even more than in past seasons that I’m crashing some sort of Lilith Fair party which I’m specifically not invited to.
I get that’s a particularly uncomfortable subject for someone like me to address. Maybe it’s better that I allow how showrunner Charlotte Stoudt addressed the issue when questioned by THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s overly enabling Jackie Strause in a piece that dropped yesterday in conjunction with S4/E2:
There was a bit of wish fulfillment when you write these stories. It’s fun to see women be nakedly ambitious. It’s fun to hear them just say the quiet thing out loud, and be really mouthy and push back. I really delight in that. Things will happen in our lives and we bring them into the writers room, and my advice when something terrible happens is to find a way to get it on the page. It’s very, very cathartic. Whether it be your mother or an executive saying something to you, like “ouch,” you can write it in. That is the fun of writing television. Or when you think of that great comeback, but you think of it a week later, we’ll just put it in the script.
And there’s definitely a lot of opportunities for that in what we’ve already seen. Yes, Reese Witherspoon’s fetching Bradley Jackson and Jennifer Aniston’s kvetching Alex Levy are back and better than ever, frenemies reunited as neccessity becomes (natch) the mother of invention and Jackson is called out of “retirement” to helm the TMS desk she voluntarily gave up in season three when she became the face of internal scandal. As Strause reminds, they’re hardly alone:
Across the board – Alex, Bradley, Celine (Marion Cotillard), Mia (Karen Pittman), Stella (Greta Lee) and Chris (Nicole Beharie) – all of the women on this show are seeking empowerment, power, or a second chance. They are all are elevated this season; very badass in their quests.
And they’ve got even more company via a surprise that was revealed last night via THE WRAP’s Jose Alejandro Bastidas —so SPOILER ALERT!!!!:
(T)he identity of Bradley Jackson’s anonymous source was revealed to be a person from the show’s past…Claire Conway (Bel Powley), a former production assistant on the show’s fictional “TMS” in Seasons 1 and 2, is the one who encouraged Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) to return to the anchor desk so she could investigate a cover-up within the company’s walls.
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She didn’t get justice in regards to Hannah’s (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) death … I think she’s decided to become more radical,” Stoudt told TheWrap of where we find Hannah in Season 4. “The show is always asking ‘How can you achieve change?’ Alex represents trying to change things from the inside. Bradley straddles inside and outside, and is a little split on either space. Claire is very definitely on the outside.”
The upshot is an even soapier product than what we’ve seen in past seasons, with men pushed even further to the sidelines and essentially there for eye candy and comic relief. Former network honcho Cory (Billy Crudup) has been reduced to a Hollywood producer who somehow can’t find an A-list actress to star in his movie because, ya know, “toxic environment”. Newcomer Aaron Pierre, cast as Celine’s husband, is immediately seen post-coitus with his rippling bronzed back muscles glistening in afterglow and we later learn he’s also getting in on with the ambitious and determined Stella as well. Stella’s merely trying to figure out how to keep the network’s newly obtained Olympics rights amidst Alex’s misguided journalistic instincts that undermine her newly assigned executive duties–a job, as veteran viewers know, she helped lock down by sleeping with Jon Hamm’s Elon Musk-ish Paul Marks, who’s got more than a few issues of his own to deal with this season for his own glistening deltoids to be seen. And there’s a new Joe Rogan/Alex Jones mashup in Boyd Holbrook’s immediately loathsome podcaster who actually has the name “Bro”. Character notwithstanding, you get the sense that somehow at least one of these women will find a way to get his deltoids naked and sap his testosterone at some point.
Since the show was initially based on Brian Stelter’s revealing look inside THE TODAY SHOW that documented the tumultuous era where Matt Lauer, Katie Couric and Savannah Guthrie were among the key players in that real-life drama, the setting is a thinly disguised version of 30 ROCK–indeed, the out-of-context car chase that opens the first episode clearly takes place on Sixth Avenue just north of NBC’s art deco main entrance. Except 30 ROCK actually tried to be funny. My laughter in this case comes from the overexaggeration of both that “naked ambition” and the liberties that Stoudt has taken to shape these characters in her “vision”.
Sorry to say, I’m not the only one buying it. ROGER EBERT.com’s resident ex-partner Richard Roeper didn’t hold back his dismay in his review from last week:
As always, it’s a visually arresting show, with great-looking characters forever stepping out on wraparound balconies with breathtaking views of Manhattan, and expensive-looking set pieces involving a large-scale protest on the streets of New York City, as well as some exquisitely choreographed cloak-and-dagger stuff transpiring during a Puccini opera recital. Alas, by the time we get to that latter sequence, “TMS” has taken so many ludicrous and often ham-handed turns that the entire vehicle has flown off a cliff. It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down in a heap of self-important nonsense.
And VARIETY’s Alison Herman reminded that not every woman is relating all that much either:
“The Morning Show” has always felt a bit like it was generated by AI — like if someone prompted Sora to make “The Newsroom” vaguely about #MeToo, or conceive the most flattering possible lighting for actresses over 40. So when the show adds AI to its bubbling stew of topical references in the opening minutes of Season 4, with media CEO Stella Bak (Greta Lee) introducing a deepfaked stable of anchors theoretically able to report the news in any language ahead of the 2024 Olympics, the subplot has an air of inevitability. The characters of “The Morning Show” love nothing more than to grandstand about the truth, but “The Morning Show” itself revels in flashy toys and a glossy, well-packaged surface.
I had already come down from my initial high when the show first dropped which I mused about when Season 3 dropped two falls ago. I’m still watching, to be sure, only more like I did the recently completed final season of AND JUST LIKE THAT… And while THE MORNING SHOW has been picked up for a fifth and apparently final season, it seems like even my friends at Apple and their otherwise zealotic supporters have begun to move on as well. A new season of SLOW HORSES has dropped at roughly the same time, and that’s the one that the cultural elite at THE RINGER’s PRESTIGE TV have chosen to niggle and snark their way through. The fact that THE MORNING SHOW isn’t even getting a clear lane to generate Golden Globes buzz says a lot about how less confident they seem to be that this season will get even nominated, let alone emerge victorious. Let’s just say we’ve previously seen better from just about everyone involved.
And I suppose, for that reason alone, I’m mourning MORNING a bit more than before. That’s my reality, along with my less-than-perfect deltoids.
Until next time…