Recently, on the great celebrity and media podcast Who? Weekly, co-host Lindsey Weber brought up the upcoming Apple TV+ series The Morning Show (November 1), perhaps the glitziest of the new streaming service’s first salvo of original programming. In response to the show’s maybe not-so-great first trailers, Weber wondered what movies and TV shows have actually gotten media, particularly television newsrooms, right. Had any? I thought of James L. Brooks’s wistful comedy Broadcast News. Maybe aspects of Network, grandly satirical as that film is. Perhaps even Up Close & Personal, written with gloopy romantic sentiment but workplace crackle by Joan Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne. Those kinda sorta feel at least somewhere approaching accurate, maybe?
But, then again, those are movies. Television series, by virtue (or onus) of length, maybe have to zoom in a bit more, get more granular, really show the mechanics of their settings hour by hour, thus risking more and more inaccuracy. A handful of series have tried the TV news feat, most recently Aaron Sorkin’s alternately zestily entertaining and deeply annoying The Newsroom, a windbag of a show that nonetheless occasionally hit bone with a bit of sharp, insistent writing. But did it get media people right? I’ve never worked in television, but I half suspect that no, it did not. And it certainly miscredited cable news as some one-time bastion of intelligence and principled journalism. (Maybe CNN was that once. Maybe.)
To expand on Weber’s question, why can’t anyone get this world right? Maybe it’s just that bizarrely few actors are good at imitating the practiced, Mid-Atlantic newscaster vocal affect perfected by TV news personalities—get that wrong, and the whole thing seems off. Or maybe it’s that it’s too easy to form assumptions about the people whose work is beamed into our homes and onto our phones without ever really considering that the process of translating the world is actually way more tedious and unsexy than the messages being relayed. The disconnect might be in trying to make that connection, between the stature of the news and that of its bearers.
The Morning Show tackles the world of broadcast media not through the lens of sober evening news, but by focusing on far more profitable daytime programs—Today, GMA, etc. Sure, the topics are lighter and the characters goofier, but morning shows still provide windows into the tensions and sordid compromises of big-money media. And they’re ripe for investigation right now, in the wake of Matt Lauer’s gnarly fall from grace. The Morning Show attempts to seize on this moment, and while the show doesn’t always work, there’s still something exciting about the trying.
Or I might just be a sucker for this stuff. I liked The Newsroom more frequently than I didn’t, mostly because it’s fun watching behind-the-scenes drama that also concerns the outside world. It’s a gas seeing characters do walk-and-talks with such wordy, self-important gusto. The pretense of competence is enough to satisfy in a time so devoid of the real thing. The Morning Show is wise to that appeal, sending its characters stomping and scrambling around, talkin’ fast and making mountains out of the relative molehills of their cushy lives.
Which isn’t to say the characters aren’t big. Jennifer Aniston plays Alex Levy, the mega-famous, longtime co-host of a Today Show-esque broadcast who is sent reeling when her beloved TV partner, Steve Carell’s Mitch Kessler, is fired for sexual misconduct. She’s a prominent woman tasked with soldiering on through a maelstrom of a man’s making, fighting to not be sucked under by Mitch’s downward spiral. Aniston plays that stress and resentment quite well, Alex’s anger commingling with sadness in compelling, and even thoughtful, ways. Aniston gets some good speeches to tear into, sustained bits of fury that are a welcome change of pace for an actress largely associated with wry lightness. Notably, Aniston also reads correctly as a morning show anchor, calibrating that certain studio-lit warmth bordered by crisp professionalism just right.
Much of The Morning Show’s pilot episode is bifurcated. There’s all the intriguing, if overly expositional, New York damage-control stuff, led well by Aniston. And then there’s Reese Witherspoon, far off in West Virginia as Bradley Jackson, a reporter for a middling conservative cable network (I think?—also, huh??) who goes viral when a video of her reaming out a coal mine protestor is posted online. What Bradley is arguing for in the video is, ultimately, an impassioned sort of centrism, a plea for Americans to see both sides of an issue with measured empathy, rather than getting bogged down in partisan certitude. There is, I guess, some grain of value in this muddled sentiment, but Bradley’s rant doesn’t really have the stuff of modern virality the way The Morning Show pretends it does. Really, Bradley is a device for the show to strike a pose of fairness, the way Sorkin has done with a bevvy of tough, smart conservative lady characters over the years.
In the pilot’s first half, the Witherspoon sections are not good. They’re mired in cliché and try to make a salient point that lacks any real conviction. Lecturing 2019 audiences on the problems of partisanship isn’t as daring, novel, or instructive as the show wants it to be. Witherspoon throws some old-school Reese pepper on the role, but Bradley remains more a rickety construction—an inadequate vessel for a vague argument—than an actual character.
Gradually, though, things evolve and deepen. Bradley is brought to New York to do a Morning Show segment about her viral video, and she and Alex have a cool on-air clash; nothing histrionic, but interestingly combative. The two actresses vibe well together, each approaching steely-eyed adversarialism from clever angles. Once they’re together, the show gets its blood up to match their energy, setting the story along a kind of dark, grownup Cinderella track, as Bradley is pulled out of obscurity and into the network scrum by Alex and others, to be used as chess piece and negotiation tactic. No one is a hero or a villain, exactly; they’re simply sharks wriggling around the same reef. All this stuff is a juicy lark, with more chewy speechifying and half-witty barbs thrown around like confetti.
Crucially, the actors seem to be enjoying themselves, from Billy Crudup as a sly and slickly weird exec, to Karen Pittman as a producer who sees her shot at advancement in Bradley, to Desean Terry as a swing anchor who feels passed over. I find it hard to complain about a project that involves so many good actors happily talking themselves into storms, even if some of what they’re saying has the tinny clang of the trite or over-generalized. I don’t think The Morning Show has much piercing insight into how news media works in the real world, but its imagined version is somehow convincing on its own terms, in its own context.
Where the show veers into real problems is when it checks in on Carell’s disgraced icon. It’s really not clear just how bad a guy the show wants Mitch to be. Is his inveighing against the overreaches of the #MeToo movement supposed to be at all sympathetic? I’m not sure, but I hope not. Certainly the show pitches Mitch as better than his sleazy film director friend (a shrewd Martin Short) who, the show is careful to note, really is a sexual predator. Does that mean Mitch wasn’t? Then what about the button under his desk, which closes and locks the door to his dressing room? (Ahem.) I’ve only seen three episodes, so maybe the Mitch stuff will gain some clarity later on, but so far I find myself wishing that the show just ignored him entirely and focused on the internal drama back at the show, as the crew tries to repair their reputation, defend their position at the top of the ratings, and adjust to a new reality.
The Morning Show has experienced a meta bit of drama behind its own scenes, with original creator and showrunner Jay Carson being ousted and replaced with Kerry Ehrin, partway through the production process. I’ll be curious to see what the later episodes look like, presumably when Ehrin was able to more fully assert her vision of the show rather than tweaking Carson’s original idea. Everyone involved is lucky to have director Mimi Leder on board to helm a number of episodes; she helps shape what might otherwise be a too-wobbly mess into something sleek and engaging. She really is perhaps the best director of high-gloss television drama working today.
So here we have a highly competent woman guiding two other highly competent women as they maneuver through a tangle of obstacles, trying to get somewhere good. What they arrive at by the end of the third episode is at least something soapily effective, an entertaining knot of contemporary babble that manages at times to emit a ring of truth. Aniston and Witherspoon are strong complements to one another, earning their enormous paychecks (each were paid a reported $1.25 million per episode) by riding this voluminous wave with confident precision. We’ll have to wait ever longer for a series about TV news that really seems to nail it, but for the time being, The Morning Show offers a fine bit of caffeination to tide us over.
