The Morning Show‘s Billy Crudup on humanity’s slow march towards progress

Note: The following contains minor spoilers for the first episode of The Morning Show season two on Apple TV+. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t even watch trailers lest you learn too much, go watch the show and then come back.

Cory Ellison is back in business, buddies. Billy Crudup’s charismatic television executive has once again risen to the top of The Morning Show and now seems bound and determined to make all his sacrifices and risks pay off. But while Ellison seems like a well-intended liberal guy, he’s also beholden to a not-so-liberal public and corporate board, and facing down a rather substantial scandal inside UBA’s big daytime show. Oh, and also there’s the looming threat of COVID-19. So how is he going to get all his ideas through?

We asked Crudup just that in a recent video interview—and how did he get back in power in the first place? As he teased to us, “Like most things that The Morning Show attempts to explore, there’s a lot of gray area with somebody who appears to be trying to do something good in humanity’s march towards progress. He may have had to cut some corners friends with the enemy. I’m sure he’ll be in desperate need of a metaphorical shower afterwards.”

Is it even possible to make a massive corporation move overnight? Maybe not, according to Crudup:

“One of the challenges we’re confronting socially is the things that we’re demanding be changed and altered as to more closely align with the things that have been promised, they haven’t changed because they’re really hard to change. The gravity and the inertia behind the status quo is so significant that it rarely changes or even alters slightly during one’s lifetime. They’re usually generational, century-long efforts.

Because we live in a world where people get instant gratification through social media and the Internet, we have this assumption that if we have an enlightened Internet, then we should have an enlightened corporate structure, when in fact it takes an enormous amount of effort over lifetimes to really get the kind of significant change that we’re demanding now.

I think what you’re seeing with Cory is somebody who is facing that on the ground. He is in the boardroom meeting with the establishment and watches them immobilized and entrenched in their seats of power. It is no small feat that we’re all undertaking disrupting that, and I think Corey is confronting the very real possibility that it may not happen in his lifetime.”

The Morning Show’s new season premiered today on Apple TV+. New episodes drop every Friday on the streaming service.