‘The Morning Show’ Embraces Soap Opera Tones for Watchable-Yet-Messy Third Season (Review)
What is the future of linear TV news programming in the era of the metaverse, where people consume their news 240 characters or one TikTok video at a time? Where a notification on an app is enough for us to consider we’re caught up with everything that is going on in the world? This has been a question that Apple’s The Morning Show has addressed here and there throughout its first two seasons, but one that is at the very core of the third season, whose first two episodes are now available to stream on the platform.
UBA’s (the fictitious network at the core of The Morning Show) financial struggles in the post-pandemic world (the season takes place in May 2022, two years and two months after we last left off), where people have even less time than before to sit down and watch TV, have led its CEO Cory Ellison (the ever-wonderful Billy Crudup, whose shtick is starting to wear thin, but still manages to bring enough new stuff to his performance to make it different from previous seasons) to start making budget cuts. No major anchors have been furloughed so far, but all divisions at the company are feeling the scissors. In the end, this is all part of a larger plan by Cory, in which he pretends to sell the company to “someone with more money than God”, as Crudup so eloquently puts it in the trailer.
That’s the perfect segue to introduce Jon Hamm’s Paul Marks, a recurrent character in the new season who leaves a big impression and has us thirsty for more over the first few episodes, but who was also ruined by the end by safe writing. He’s an all-too-obvious Elon Musk knock-off, a self-made billionaire whose company is leading the efforts in the aerospace frontier. While there seems to be something off about him since the very beginning, his charm and charisma, along with his saying the right things and making the logical moves, seem to put the audience in an uneasy state with him even if we can’t quite figure out why.
Nicole Beharie as Christina Hunter in Apple TV Plus’ “The Morning Show”.
Marks may be one of the fascinating new additions to the crew, but. he’s far from the only one. Tig Notaro plays his assistant and also leaves a very good impression, but the new character that steals the show in the first half of the season is Nicole Beharie’s Chris Hunter, a new anchor at the Morning Show who not only has a lot of personality, but she’s also electric to watch — her impact on the first four-ish episodes was so big, her scaling down in the second half of the season was one of the reasons that held those final episodes back (among other things). If we’re talking about enchanting performances, though, and we’ve already moved past Billy Crudup, we have to talk about Greta Lee: not only did she give the performance of the year (so far) in Past Lives, she returns as Stella Bak after an amazing turn in the second season and absolutely nails it — making her decision to join the third Tron film at Disney all the more puzzling. This girl is going places.
The Morning Show can be best described as a $20M-per-episode soap opera trying to capture a mix between Succession and The Newsroom. The third season finds Alex Levy (Jennifer Anniston) as a twice-per-week anchor at UBA’s morning show, as she now has transitioned into her own interview-style show in the network’s streaming service, UBA Plus (“I am unprecedented” is Anniston’s trailer line that perfectly captures what to expect from Alex in the new season — just corny and unrealistic lines, one after another). Her former co-anchor at The Morning Show, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), has also moved away from that timeslot and is now sitting on the Evening News chair, something she’s dreamed of for a long time. The two characters still remain the core of the show, even if the storylines have moved past them and The Morning Show has essentially become a true ensemble series. The season makes a point of giving small arcs to characters we’ve barely heard speak so far, and also more prominent roles to some that have been lurking in the background.
Reese Witherspoon as Bradley Jackson and Billy Crudup as Cory Ellison in Apple TV Plus’ “The Morning Show”.
Despite that, the third season of The Morning Show is severely held back by a pulpy tone that takes any realism out of the situation. As a perfect example, Paul Marks’ $40-billion acquisition of UBA took less than two weeks to complete (the DOJ wouldn’t have even opened the files in that time). Microsoft and Activision could use some of that. And despite that, some of the characters in the series are hit with hard truths and devastating moments in their lives that feel very real thanks to the performances but definitely not because of the clunky editing, which is always trying to move things along as opposed to letting the weight of each moment leave an impact on the viewer. This is especially true for Bradley’s storyline in the season, as well as Mia Jordan’s (Karen Pittman), but maybe not as much for Alex’s. Witherspoon is not only given much deeper material to act from, what she does with it is also much more impactful than the one-note performance by Anniston, who has been making the same facial expression since the beginning of the show.
The series has already been renewed for a fourth season, which is a bit of a head-scratcher as the (messy) finale seems like a good place to close it up, even if it also leaves the door open for more story to tell. It’s turned into a guilty pleasure of sorts at this point — it makes no sense, some of the characters (Alex) are unbearable, and it’s so convoluted, yet I found myself hitting Play on the next episode as soon as credits rolled. I just needed to know where the story was going, and I expect more people to feel like that. If you’re waiting for your favorite soap to come back, or even a new season of your favorite reality show, Apple has got you covered.
The first two episodes of The Morning Show season 3 are currently streaming on Apple TV Plus. New episodes will come out every Wednesday.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
