I’ll admit up front that I wasn’t a huge fan of season one of The Morning Show. While I enjoyed elements of the series – particularly the work of Steve Carrell as Mitch Kessler, who managed to make you not immediately turn against his odious character, even as it became clear that he was every inch a despicable person – the series suffered from never finding its narrative focus (is it a series about the inner workings of a morning talk show, a commentary on the Me Too movement and the men and women who get swept up in the accusations – the perpetrators, the silent watchers, and the victims, or is it a look at the cut throat nature of a career in media, where you can step on shoulders or stab your colleagues in the back to get ahead). That, compounded with the writers’ inability to flesh out any of the show’s central characters beyond some basic tropes (Alex is the poised professional climber, Bradley is the newbie with the backbone of steal who can manipulate those around her just as well as the seasoned pros, Chip the put-upon producer who can’t stand up to those with more clout than him, and Mitch, of course, the privileged cis straight white man who doesn’t understand why he’s in the wrong), made it an incredibly uneven season of television that was saved by the strong acting performances at its center. I was hoping that season two might be a bit more structured, with some true character development – and that the series would figure out what to do with Mitch and allow Carell the chance to dig deeper into the role. It only took about five minutes for me to realize that wouldn’t be the case.
Season two of The Morning Show isn’t bad. But it’s just not good television. And that stems from a continuation of the issues that were present in season one (a continued lack of character development and even less narrative structure), but with the added bonus of a host of conflicting, often confusing, storylines that never mesh into a coherent season arc and the choice to make the ticking time bomb of the season the impending arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic to New York City.*
*I don’t mind the use of Covid as a plot device considering the series takes place in the world of TV news, but the issue with using it as the timeline for the season – there’s a time jump forward and then back to kick off the season that is jarring and overly precious in its use – is that it becomes a Chekhovian plot device by the end of the season. Each cough, each time a date is given, every time a character gets on a plane or travels to a new location, we are conditioned to wait to see if this is the time someone will get sick. It casts a pall over the season and pulls focus away from the myriad of additional arcs that we are meant to be invested in. And this narrative choice is further harmed by the fact that the time spent laughing about how Covid isn’t a big deal or that it’s much ado about nothing doesn’t particularly play all that well at this particular time – yes, I suspect the writers assumed we wouldn’t be falling back into the throws of the pandemic this late in the game, but still, it’s not the best look.
I found myself frustrated a great deal while watching the series, because The Morning Show truly has one of the most talented casts on TV. Carell is great at finding layers within his performance that shouldn’t, by all rights, be there. Reese Witherspoon imbues depth to Bradley, while continuing to highlight that she is more than willing to do whatever is necessary to protect herself and get what she wants. Jennifer Aniston is surprisingly great with both the dark comedy aspects of the series and the more dramatic elements she’s asked to deliver on. Billy Crudup is clearly having a blast playing the show’s wild card (who often seems to be in a completely different series than the rest of the characters – one that might be a great deal more interesting to watch). And this season adds Julianna Margulies and Greta Lee to the cast – both of whom are sensational in their roles. A cast like this deserves to have complex and compelling storylines to accompany them.
Instead, they are left to make sense of characters who seemingly change motivation from episode to episode (Aniston is the victim of this throughout most of season two – with Alex going from zero to 60 in terms of personal and professional paranoia in the continued Mitch Kessler fallout, turning a cool and calculating character into a complete emotional mess, who is willing to all but torpedo her career without thinking twice), have no character growth yet continue on within the story (Carell does his best with Mitch, but the writers have no idea how to handle the character now that his whole story is out in the open, which means instead of making a choice for him to begin accepting his past or continue denying it, we get him refusing to do either and just taking up space), or suddenly showing new sides of their character with hardly any lead up (Witherspoon is forced to handle a new facet of Bradley’s character that was never so much as hinted at in season one, and while this reveal does deepen elements of Bradley’s character in positive ways, it also feels like it comes out of left field – and takes up a whole swatch of her arc for the season).
The season is so overstuffed with arcs – many of which do not feel organic or are poorly constructed (don’t even get me started on the overly simplistic dialogue that often serves as exposition dumps to explain just what is happening in a given scene – the introduction of Margulies’s character in episode three has some of the clunkiest dialogue I’ve seen in a show of this caliber – since the storylines don’t flow naturally from point to point, characters are asked to do the narrative heavy lifting by telling us just why they’ve done something seemingly out of character or just how this new potential catastrophe came about. With a clearer focus – and perhaps fewer characters to serve (poor Yanko gets bogged down with a messy and clumsy arc that all but sidelines him for much of the season – and indicates that he learned absolutely nothing from everything that happened around him in season one) – The Morning Show could have weathered some of its issues. But instead, this season feels like the writers took every hot button topic of the past year and threw them into scripts in hopes that something would resonate. But the problem with that is that in our current 24-hour news cycle, we’ve already churned through a lot of them on our own, so it feels stale to even broach them again. The Morning Show has what I like to call the Newsroom problem: By relying on current news to create a serialized drama that will air months later, you run the risk of tackling topics that we don’t care all that much about anymore. Or, as with the Covid arc, you run the risk of touching on something that is still raging and doesn’t feel right to dramatize at this moment.
I really wanted to like this season – I wanted to slide into the murky world of UBA and The Morning Show and see these men and women navigate office politics, interpersonal issues, and just what Mitch Kessler’s next act might entail. What I got instead was a barrage of plot lines that never gelled into a cohesive or coherent season, full of far too many characters to adequately serve, and a cast that deserves a hell of a lot better than what they received. In a TV landscape that now contains a host of shows about rich people behaving badly, with narrative arcs that feel tight, characters that are complex and interesting, and writers that understand their onscreen talent and write to their strengths, The Morning Show feels like a missed opportunity to tell a different and compelling story. What happens in the wake of a massive scandal, where employees have been complicit, where employees have been victimized and not heard or supported, where a star was brought down and a producer died? How does that show go on? How does the network survive? How do those who knew – or knew enough – live with their decisions? And how does that disgraced monster come to terms with his actions? Answering those questions would have made for a hell of a season. Unfortunately, The Morning Show wasn’t interested in doing that. Which is a damn shame.
The Morning Show’s second season premieres on Friday, September 17, airing weekly. All ten episodes of the season were provided for review.
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