The Morning Show season 2 is a period piece for a period we’d all rather forget
Despite the impressive talent of its star-studded cast, season 2 gets bogged down by COVID and “cancel culture”
TV Reviews The Morning Show
The Morning Show’s season-one finale blew up in a spectacular fashion in 2019. Season two kicks off with New Year’s Eve 2020 (in an episode titled “My Least Favorite Year”), so it appears that the TMS crew will not get a break from the series’ typical overload of drama and conflict. Executive producer Mimi Leder recently told The A.V. Club that while they were preparing for the season, COVID hit, and they decided to go all in on the pandemic “because we are a news show reflecting the world and we felt we could tell the story of the three months leading into COVID because we all lived it and experienced it.”
Perhaps Leder and her team hoped that the darkest days would be behind us by the time The Morning Show’s second season aired, so that this collection of episodes would serve as a chronicle of such a pivotal moment in global history. The problem is that we’re still in the thick of the pandemic, so reliving the moments when it was revealed that Tom Hanks had COVID or that the NBA was shutting down for the season seems redundant at best and painful at worst. Freaking out about contact tracing sounds downright quaint at this point, and overcrowded ERs are unfortunately still overly familiar. None of this can be blamed on The Morning Show, of course, but it also doesn’t really make for appointment viewing in this overstuffed age.
Still, people might tune in just to see the star-studded cast, whose already overwhelming supply of talent expands this season. The All About Eve dynamic between Alex (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) that fueled season one fizzles out in season two, as both characters are off on independent plot paths. While Witherspoon could play “plucky upstart” in her sleep at this point, her character is granted more dimension this season, thanks to a close relationship with her new mentor, UBA nighttime news star Laura Peterson (a welcome Julianna Margulies). As her troubled home life merges with her successful professional one, Bradley learns the painful lesson of how hard it is to keep anything under wraps once you’re an actual celebrity.
Aniston appears determined to win a post-Friends Emmy as Alex, the narcissist with a heart of gold. (It’s hard to imagine a show where the catchphrase of Jennifer Aniston’s character appears to be “Fuck you!”, but here we are.) TMS obliges by pummeling her with a cruel streak of physical ailments, as well as an abundance of emotional showdowns. The actor never fails to rise to the occasion. Crudup continues to masterfully pull strings as likable Machiavellian network exec Cory, but even his velvet MasterCard voice can’t quite sell the increasingly outlandish metaphors The Morning Show gives him to spin as life lessons, from space shuttles to pinball machines.
The show also remains committed to Carell’s disgraced character Mitch, now exiled in paradise, although you have to wonder if that devotion would exist if anyone but Steve Carell was playing him (and doing such an amazing job at it). Season two attempts to explore whether someone as outright deplorable and destructive as the sexually predatory Mitch can try to educate and redeem himself enough to become worthy of forgiveness, even though the knee-jerk audience reaction is likely to be a resounding “nope.” (And also, “why?”) Valeria Golino is wasted as Mitch’s admiring new acquaintance who is for some reason determined to overlook his famous, egregiously long list of transgressions.
The Morning Show could probably chug along just fine as is, an award-worthy series that despite focusing on the ins and outs of its central morning show is a soap opera at heart. But the series seems determined to make Valuable Statements—which, granted, did work well in season one, with the focus on several aspects of the #MeToo movement. Season two is less successful in this arena: Beyond the unfortunate COVID slant, it also unwisely delves into “cancel culture.” Mitch is ostensibly cancelled, but as he’s a multimillionaire wiling away on an opulent estate, the phrase “cry me a river” comes to mind. Alex is worried that she herself will be besieged by pitchforks after a tell-all book by journalist Maggie Brener (Marcia Gay Harden) comes out, but she has more than a golden parachute; she has a golden penthouse.
It’s interesting to see how much their personal and professional value rises and falls with their Twitter feeds, but these are people who don’t even procure their own water bottles or aspirin tablets, and haven’t for years. This level of privilege automatically makes them less-than-sympathetic characters, “cancelled” or not.
Fortunately, The Morning Show boasts an abundance of intriguing characters—and appealing actors. It’s easier to relate to someone like hardworking Mia (Karen Pittman), who has been thrust into a position of leadership and immense responsibility due to all of The Morning Show’s turmoil, even as she still grapples with the fallout after her affair with Mitch was revealed last season. Or Stella (the excellent Greta Lee), a millennial executive dealing with agism and racism as she tries to drag this relic of a show into the 21st century (who actually gets their information from the national morning news anymore?). Even hapless producer Chip (Mark Duplass), who has been at Alex’s beck and call for 15 years, may have finally reached his breaking point. In the glittery world of morning news TV, these more approachable characters—and the exemplary performances by the actors who portray them—help keep The Morning Show (relatively) down to earth. Compelling performers and their interpersonal storylines make The Morning Show watchable, even as the series’ lecturing threatens to push the audience out of reach.
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I really enjoyed the first episode (and the first season as a whole).Looking forward to seeing more!
Yeah we watched S2E1 last night, it was pretty good. I quite liked S1 as well.
Not for nothing, who wants to watch a show that wants to redeem Matt Lauer? It’s such a weird hill to build a billion dollar flagship tv show on.I love Greta Lee ever since she came on the scene (to my awareness) as Homeless Heidi in High Maintenance, but…this show just shouldn’t exist
I don’t put Lauer and ‘cancel culture’ in the same zip code. The latter is public overreaction to what in the scheme is a relatively minor transgression. Serial sexual assault and harassment in the office is something else entirely.
Wow, was going to say the same thing. The show tried to have its cake and eat it, too, by making its Lauer stand in far less creepy than the real deal. But, yeah, that story is over. As the article points out, if it wasn’t Steve Carrell, this character would be gone and we’d never look back. Who cares? It’s not an interesting story and not one this show should waste its time on.
So I’m going to make a show, and George Clooney is going to play my Harvey Weinstein stand-in, only in our world he only ever asked for clothed massages (which somehow in no way diminishes and insults everybody who suffered at his hands) and then in season 2 he gets to bang, say, Marg Helgenberger, and complain about how he got cancelled by the woke mob. That’s not completely fucking disgusting at all, right?I mean, it sounds like Apple thinks making Carrell’s character not as culpable is a GOOD thing and doesn’t read as just denying what Lauer did.
Clooney is too busy for your show, he’s making a docu-series about Jim Jordan.
is he really? I love that idea! but who plays Jim Jordan in the fiction adaptation on HBO? Who can properly not pull off that terrible haircut?
That’s what I read somewhere on the I net so it must be true. Channing Tatum.
Yeah, if Steve Carell has an ironclad contract that you can’t get out of, stick him on a monitor in the background doing a mea culpa once or twice during the season and otherwise pay him to do nothing.
I vote we meet Mitch’s twin, who gets hired as the new intern.
At the end of season 1, they had already resoundingly answered the question of “can Mitch be redeemed?” with a resounding “no!” IMHO by revealing additional disgusting context to his abuse of co-workers, to the point that the writers basically tore the character a new arsehole. So reading that they’re going back to the well with this character is disappointing. Carell gave a great performance in S1, totally unlike anything I’ve ever seen him do before, but they should’ve resisted the temptation.
This seems to compound a thing I fucking can’t stand to even think about anymore, which is people who had the luxury of chilling at home during the pandemic complaining about how they’re going crazy from cabin fever or whatever. Some of us worked in warehouses for twelve hour shifts, not even being told that the reason so-and-so didn’t come to work today is because they’re in the fucking ICU. I’m sorry you’re tired of your apartment, and you’ve gotten bored of Animal Crossing. Boo fucking hoo.
I can say with certainty that while things worked out for me staying home during the pandemic’s worst days, I would much rather have worked at those factories…but if your boss didn’t tell you your coworkers were infected you need to lawyer up and take him on.
I hear you—as an ICU nurse, I haven’t gotten a break, though I feel for those who want to work but were put on furlough because the job or lack of customers caused a prolonged lull. I long for the days when I had an older lady with a simple, treatable pneumonia and a chest pain guy who simply forgot to take his meds and needed a little tuning up. This last wave of unvaccinated, severely ill Covid patients are taking a toll. They do well for a bit and then when they should be on the upswing? BAM! They take a downturn and are now, fully, desperately, in the fight of their lives. Yep, wish there even a few days when I could complain about being home and “resting too much”.
Jesus. Thank you for doing what you’re doing, but man do I wish these unvaccinated fucks would just stay home and try to pray it away with ivermectin instead of fucking your brain up by running to the hospital.
Half and half with regards to these types…Sometimes stay home and do fine without any problems and other times they stay until it gets so bad they need a higher level of care, and then treatment is far behind and difficult to catch up and end up with weeks of recovery. Because this particular illness doesn’t behave itself, there is a percentage who do well day after day and all of a sudden just fail! But yes there is another subset who don’t believe enough in medicine or science for the vaccine but when they get even a tiny bit of symptoms, freak out, fall apart and want everything done (even though they are stable with maybe a stuffy nose and loss of smell/taste and not needing oxygen) and run to the hospital to find there are no beds for them anyway! Strange times for an ICU nurse nowadays, I tell ya…
My wife never worked from home, ostensibly because “someone had to answer the phone when the lady who answers the phone is on lunch break.” Because we can’t figure out a way to forward a phone to any other technological device, I guess. I work in a school in a state that basically said “Eh…” and have been “at work” since August of 2020. A local parent had a very well-liked Facebook post where she basically said “They need to get the kids back in school because I owe myself a trip to Starbucks.”So yeah, I get that being in your own house all that time is boring and probably not fun. The people who had to do that had the luxury to do so because millions of other people didn’t have that option.
Should you not be allowed to complain about your circumstances because there are people who have it worse?I mean, sure, working in a warehouse probably sucks balls but being isolated at home also sucks and those people have every right to bitch and moan, just like you’re doing.C’mon. Have some compassion for other people’s experiences. Complaining isn’t reserved only for those have it the absolute worst. If that’s the case, you’d be out of line right now for sharing your feelings.
It’s a bit tone deaf. How did Gal Gadot singing Imagine make you feel?
Horny!
They don’t bother me as much as the people who take out their pandemic frustrations on other people. The people throwing a tantrum because an employee of a grocery store or restaurant asked you to comply with mask rules (rules they have no power over) or tell you that the product you want isn’t in stock because the demand exceeded the supply (both scenarios I’ve personally dealt with) just makes a bad situation worse. Those are the people, imo, who need to grow the hell up.
Yeah, this review makes me not want to watch this season at all. I thought the first season was super dumb, but at least watchable and I surprised myself by actually finishing it.But I have no desire to spend time on a 1.5 year later Covid retrospective. Ugh, who needs that?
I feel like Cheyenne in Superstore. “That was, like, early pandemic.” We’ve moved on.
“The All About Eve dynamic between Alex (Jennifer Aniston) and
Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) that fueled season one fizzles out in season
two, as both characters are off on independent plot paths.”In the show’s defense, that conflict has been organically put to bed. The characters are no longer at odds, they’ve bonded strongly, and it’s wise that they show doesn’t try to artificially prolong a conflict that has no reason to exist anymore.(I’m looking in your direction, “Cobra Kai.”)
“Season two attempts to explore whether someone as outright deplorable and destructive as the sexually predatory Mitch can try to educate and redeem himself enough to become worthy of forgiveness, even though the knee-jerk audience reaction is likely to be a resounding “nope.” (And also, “why?”)“
Haven’t seen S2 yet but it’s interesting to see how many people missed the brilliant nuance of the first season. I guess a lot of the scenes were intentionally left open to interpretation. But I came away from it not thinking Mitch was a monster at all.
Anniston really is dynamite in season one, that scene in her red pant suit staring down the board of directors is great. Crudup is a great shark too. I think there’s a story worth telling of women who are complicit in sexual harassment in Hollywood. the industry knows how to silence not just women abused but also women who whistleblow, so I understand the need to explore Anniston and Carells relationship in season one, and Witherspoon’s black and white judgement. But I don’t need a redemption arc for Carell’s character, I thought Martin Short’s reflection of what a creep they both are is all we need.
In the show’s view, Martin Short’s character existed to show was a REAL creep was like, thus letting Mitch even further off the hook, since Mitch was shown as being horrified by what Short was talking about.
that’s fair, I read it as Mitch recognizing that he is entirely similar to Short’s character, and that’s what made him uneasy despite going back into denial about his assaults.
That’s a solid reading, too, and I think both can be true.
I just gotta wonder what’s the point of examining the Mitch character anymore. Maybe an episode to close him out and really destroy him but what he did lead to the death of a character last season and given he had crossed the line of no return before that, he basically plummeted the cliff of “I don’t want to see your face anymore”….So…why?
Oddly, Jennifer Aniston is played and as the cagey veteran and Reese Withespoon like some spunky newcomer determined to replace her. Yet they are only 7 years apart in age.
At first I thought you were right, that Aniston and Witherspoon had only 7 years’ difference in age. But then I checked IMDb and it says Jennifer Aniston was born in 1992, and Reese Witherspoon was born a year earlier, in 1990.
I think that it’s worth making art about that strange, heady period right before and at the beginning of the pandemic, if only because I can’t think of any other period of time like it. It was such a strange, slipstream thing, an eternal overcast Sunday afternoon with a deluge of bad news at all times.But the time to make it is five years from now, when (god willing) this is all behind us. It is certainly not now.
We made tons of war movies during World War II. Cinema has always reflected current goings-on.
Those were actually World War I movies.
(I can’t tell if you are kidding, if so, I apologize). Wikipedia lists at least a 100 WW2 movies made during WW2 (I stopped counting).(I have never used this many parenthetical statements in a comment).
Those films weren’t shot on Normandy Beach during D-Day then shown to soldiers and their families in hospitals as entertainment. A better point of comparison would be the Great Depression. And Sullivan’s Travels.
War movies were certainly viewed by members of the armed forces. And for that matter, civilian populations under direct threat (e.g., in the UK) regularly went to see movies like Mrs. Miniver that were exactly about their experiences.
At one point, soldiers were sent the movie I Accuse My Parents, a movie in which a hapless young man turns to crime because his parents are too busy arguing and drinking. Now, do you think soldiers would be relieved to watch a simple film in which problems are a lot less gruesome and tragic as trench warfare, or would some feel resentful about a kid blaming his parents for a life of crime while they’re facing death and dismemberment in a brutal war? I’d say probably a bit of both…
Yes, but those had a practical point — “Buy more War Bonds to fund our boys on the front line” and all that.
World War 2 is an interesting one because it was so unique. There aren’t many movies at all about the Korean War, and the most famous movies about Vietnam came out after the war ended (two exceptions were The Green Berets and Hearts and Minds, which would make for one hell of a double feature). There wasn’t really another war that inspired as many movies about itself. Part of that was probably the “total war” mindset, where every part of society oriented itself around the war. Part of it may have been that the nazis weaponized movies so effectively that other countries decided to do the same. And the war took on a mythic quality right after it ended. But the even more intriguing facet to me is that World War 2 was fought by people who grew up with movies and whose parents did not. Similarly, there aren’t many early 90s movies about the Gulf War or early 2000s movies about the War on Terror, but those things started appearing in video games very quickly. Now I’m kind of wondering how the representation of wars in “generational” media helps shape the mindset of the young people who actually fight in them.
I just…don’t want to watch anything about COVID. It isn’t entertaining, it’s just depressing. I’ll pass on this.
it also doesn’t really make for appointment viewing in this overstuffed age.- The A.V. Club
I find the show fascinating; I think there’s probably a lot of truth blended with the over the top drama of it. Is it in my top faves? Nah. It gets overstuffed and convoluted, but I’d watch this over any self-righteous pandering Aaron Sorkin joint of the same genre. The acting is top notch and it’s fun to watch everyone work with their roles. If you gave these scripts to other people they wouldn’t be the same characters – even the relatively minor roles.
Well that first episode was a slog to get through. Even on shows where the main character is a not great person, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, there are compelling stories and the characters are well written, and you see motivation for how they behave. Also, don’t most millionaire tv personalities have someone bring them firewood? Having Aniston fake chop wood was ridiculous, as was that stupid manuscript she’s writing, where she’s comparing herself to the character in The Red Shoes. Stay tuned for the twist… whatever. I know I’m going to hate watch it, just to see how bad it gets.