It has taken time, but ‘The Morning Show’, one of the emblematic series of Apple TV+, starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, has finally assumed its status as a melodrama (we could well say soap opera) and has given in to surprises narratives, business betrayals and bed troubles. No more dissembling.
This fiction set on the sets and offices of a television channel was presented in 2019 with some airs of seriousness, echoing the echoes of #MeToo with a plot about sexual harassment and cancel culture. The effects of the pandemic were portrayed in the second season and racial discrimination was also introduced into the conversation, a topic that has continued in the new episodes, now available in full on the platform.
This time the conjunction of conflicts has been more than ambitious: as a backdrop appear the riots in the Capitol, the war in Ukraine, the repeal of the abortion law in the United States, cyber attacks and the aerospace race between millionaires. There it is nothing.
Since its inception, one of the hallmarks of ‘The Morning Show’ has been its connection with our present, but that has also become its Achilles heel. It wants to be in so many places – in all the places, really – that it has lost credibility as prestige fiction but has placed itself at the top of the ‘Series in which anything can happen’ ranking.
At this point, ‘The Morning Show’ does not come to ask for coherence, but to enjoy the roller coaster: characters who change their minds every two episodes, timely ‘flashbacks’ that fill in gaps in the script, imminent dismissals, lesbian romances, returns of forgotten characters and incomprehensible absences that make everything much more agile (does anyone remember that Aniston’s character has a daughter who must be somewhere wondering what is happening with her mother?).
Television then and now
In this third season the center of operations remains the same, the UBA chain, a generalist channel that tries to overcome its economic difficulties with a large sales operation. That in times of platforms we talk about an open chain (a ‘network’, as they are known in the United States) is the type of anachronism that the series champions and claims.
If in the first episodes the old guard seemed to be the great enemy (a misogynistic and racist industry that had to be gotten rid of), now the replacement could be even worse: UBA is going to be acquired by a billionaire named Paul Marks who is trying to command rockets to space. Yes, Elon’s shadow is long… Played by Jon Hamm (forever Donald Draper), this new character enters into a secret relationship with Aniston, an idyll that includes hacking, snitching and journalistic dilemmas.
Although she and Reese Witherspoon, the channel’s star hosts, continue to rule the roost, another female character stands out from the rest. This is Stella (played by Greta Lee, whom we just saw in the movie ‘Past Lives’), a very smart executive who dresses very well and whose turn may come to be in charge if her boss Cory Anderson (an interpretation bordering on the Billy Crudup’s psychopathy) steps aside.
Of course, since we still remember ‘Succession’, everything related to the shareholders’ meeting is a bit embarrassing because it is schematic and, furthermore, to want to reflect on what happened the day before yesterday, this series lacks the ingenuity of ‘The Good Fight’ ‘ or the robustness of ‘The Newsroom’, which at the time also wanted to draw that parallel between reality and fiction.
However, none of the previous ones had Witherspoon paranoid about believing she is being spied on, nor Aniston realizing that she has been deceived by the man she has been sleeping with. They also care about democracy and the defense of the truth, but does that matter to anyone?
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