The Morning Show serves up a fresh scandal [Apple TV+ review]

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The Morning Show review: Karen Pittman finally gets a chance to shine.
Karen Pittman finally gets a chance to shine.
Photo: Apple TV+

This week on The Morning Show, Cory throws everyone a curveball in his attempt to salvage Hannah’s reputation. Bradley, Daniel, Chip, Mia, Yanko, Stella and Laura all go into a panic.

And so, the Apple TV+ show about a morning news show enters crisis mode again. Is it too late to stop the train wreck? Or will Cory’s strategy work?

The Morning Show review: ‘A Private Person’

Last week, UBA exec Cory Ellison (played by Billy Crudup) called upstart anchor Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) for advice. He’s frantically trying to kill a story about deceased Morning Show booker Hannah Shoenfeld (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). His goal? Stopping her father’s lawsuit against the network.

Cory is informed reliably that the only thing that will kill the story about Hannah will be an even more salacious story. So he calls Bradley to ask permission to do what he thinks is the right thing: Leak something scandalous to get the press to forget about the allegations about Hannah. What Bradley doesn’t know is that the story he’s going to leak is that she’s in a secret bisexual in a relationship with Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies), another UBA anchor.

Alex takes cover

Aside from that, all eyes are on Chip (Mark Duplass) because Alex (Jennifer Aniston) is on sick leave and they’re frantically trying to fill the ratings gap while she convalesces. Alex is obviously partly just in hiding. As the press tour for Maggie Brener’s book continues, revelations pour forth about Alex’s relationship with disgraced ex-Morning Show anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell). Alex threatened to sue Maggie but they both know that won’t happen. So instead, she’s hiding until the media storm blows over. Chip is lying when he says he knows exactly where she is, but he figures as long as they don’t need her, no one needs to know that she’s gone AWOL.

Cory suggests that Laura fill in for Alex, which means she’ll be co-anchoring with Bradley just in time for the story about their relationship to break. Bradley’s former addict brother, Hal (Joe Tippett), chooses right now to visit, and so Bradley must put herself back in the closet for the day rather than spend the night with Laura, just as they seem ready to take their relationship to the next step.

… and Daniel and Yanko blow it

Meanwhile, Daniel Henderson (Desean Terry) blows an interview with another UBA TV star (Dave Foley), and in general is pissing everyone off enough that they’re all but looking for an excuse to fire him. Weatherman Yanko’s (Néstor Carbonell) also close to getting fired. Stella (Greta Lee) suspends him for fighting the guy on the street last week and he has another freak out, which leads to one of the show’s funnier exchanges.

“I say ‘spirit animal,’ I’m a racist,” Yanko says. “I beat up a racist, I get suspended. I can’t win. What am I supposed to do?”

“The weather,” Stella replies. The show should know by now that just pointing this stuff out isn’t as satisfying as doing something about it but that’s The Morning Show in a nutshell.

What if that is your unhealthy choice

Simply watching Billy Crudup wrestle with his decision to out Bradley becomes the highlight of this week’s episode, titled “A Private Person.” It’s a colossally shitty thing to do, and the show doesn’t seem to know that. However, it does us all the favor of giving Crudup center stage during his crisis.

The lowlight of the episode follows when the story about Bradley and Laura breaks. Bradley undergoes a paranoid freakout, complete with quick cuts and bullet-fast camera movements. The Morning Show frequently fumbles big moments like this. For some reason, the Apple TV+ flagship drama proves as bad at visual language as it can be good at performance notes.

Producer Mia Jordan (Karen Pittman) finally gets a centerpiece moment after spending so much time as texture. A story about Mitch targeting black women starts making the rounds right as the story about Bradley and Laura breaks, and she loses it.

It’s a feature rather than a bug that so many of the show’s side characters never really get to do anything of substance to the main story, and I appreciate seeing Pittman get to do a little more heavy lifting. Shame about the circumstances, but I’ll take it.

This week in bad current events

COVID-19 finally makes The Morning Show, just in time for references to the movie Carrie and famed ice skating comedy team Frick and Frack, so that kinda balances out the series’ desperate need to seem relevant. Every time there’s a cultural reference on this show, I get more intense West Wing flashbacks than usual. Also, Chip gets called “a mediocre white man” — which is true — but man does that sound insincere coming from this show.

The Morning Show on Apple TV+

New episodes of The Morning Show arrive on Apple TV+ on Fridays.

Rated: TV-MA

Watch on: Apple TV+

Watch on: Apple TV+

Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the director of 25 feature films, and the author of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.

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