‘Morning Show’ remains shallow, glossy and entertaining
Heavy is the head that wears the crown on the fourth season of “The Morning Show,” Apple TV+’s rollicking tentpole series about the rise and fall of various personalities at a TV news network. The men have been ousted. The women have won.
Some of them, anyway. Former TMS anchor Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) is finally in charge, having architected a merger of networks UBA and NBN together with Stella Bak (Greta Lee), who starts the season as CEO of the new network, UBN. The show picks up two years after the events of Season 3, with Stella and Alex running things alongside UBN board president Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard), a fabulous new villain in the “Morning Show” universe.
Alex and Stella aren’t loving their newfound power. The political landscape is mutating, the numbers are bad, and Celine — whose visionary drive and devious stratagems rival those of former UBA chief executive Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) — manages the unstable triumvirate they form through questionable compromises and trades. Result: Everyone’s looking for “leverage.” If the show’s older seasons were soapy, this one is downright operatic.
Viewers will recall that last season’s space shenanigans crashed down to earth when Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) revealed to Alex that the latter’s Elon Musk-type billionaire boyfriend Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) was surveilling them both and using the information he had acquired to silence her. Alex accordingly thwarted Marks’s takeover of UBA with help from Stella, who obtained damning evidence of his malfeasance from an old friend she tracked down in a zombie-hunting video game. (Got all that?) In the course of an afternoon, the ladies blackmailed Marks into withdrawing his bid, set up a potential merger between corporate behemoths UBA and UBN, and presented it to the board as an alternative to the merger with Marks’ company, Hyperion. Efficient!
Alex sadly dumps Marks and encourages him to “come clean to NASA” about masterminding the UBA hack to distract from a technical malfunction at the rocket launch. She also walks Bradley to the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building to confess to the FBI that she deleted evidence of her brother Hal’s activities on Jan. 6. What of Cory, the silver-tongued, morally gray executive with a heart of gold? He ends up ousted from the network while being investigated for sexual harassment.
“The Morning Show” is to drama what “Only Murders in the Building” is to whodunits: an excuse to splash around in a genre without getting bogged down in the details.
Set in the spring before the 2024 presidential election, the new season opens with Bradley teaching at a community college in West Virginia. Cory has turned to filmmaking but hits a snag when the Los Angeles fires interfere with an action sequence. Stella showcases her pet project, an AI program that turns Alex and the anchors into avatars who can deliver the news in dozens of languages. And Alex is dealing with staff blowback following a wave of layoffs.
She’s also struggling to stomach Stella and Celine’s decision to court right-wing conspiracy theorists via a Joe Rogan-style podcaster named Bro Hartman (Garrett Hedlund). Fans of Alex’s longtime assistant and devoted friend Chip Black (Mark Duplass) will be pleased to know he’s free and living his best life as a maker of documentaries.
As for the morning show, the current co-anchors are former Olympian Christina Hunter (the excellent Nicole Beharie) and weatherman Yanko Flores (Néstor Carbonell). Station manager and producer Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman) is still running TMS.
It’s a big canvas with a lot of characters; to the show’s credit, most of them get meaty storylines. The newcomers are excellent.
“The Morning Show” has nothing serious to say. It knows that, even as it manages to sustain a constant in-universe sense of emergency. But four seasons in, it remains shallow, glossy and awfully entertaining.
This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.