An insurrection. A global pandemic. A racial reckoning. Billionaires jetting into space and spending $40 billion to acquire media companies. Russian data hacks. The overturning of abortion rights in America. Any of these news bites sound familiar? Most (if not all) of these global catastrophes have made headlines in the past four years. It’s been an exhausting time—the beginning of 2020 feels like an entire decade ago.
And somehow, The Morning Show manages to pack all of that and more into just 10 episodes in its third season.
(Warning: Slight spoilers for the first three episodes of The Morning Show Season 3.)
Since the second season debuted in 2021, the Apple TV+ series has jumped forward in time. Season 2 ended in March 2020 (as you may recall, a loaded time in history), and Season 3 picks up in the spring of 2022. An eerie tranquility has settled over the UBA newsroom. Alex (Jennifer Aniston) has her own show, Alex Unfiltered, a la Oprah’s bombshell interviews. Bradley (Reese Witherspoon)—who, for the record, has completely lost her Southern twang after three seasons—has finally been placed on evening news, happily complacent.
But at UBA, an equilibrium can’t stay for long. Let’s remember: The first season dealt with a sexual assault scandal surrounding one of The Morning Show’s lead anchors, Mitch (Steve Carrell), inspired by what the Today show went through with Matt Lauer. The second season started by ringing in 2020 in Times Square and, well, the rest is history. But while Seasons 1 and 2 focused on recreating one major 21st century news cycle, Season 3 instead wants to rehash everything.
The key plot line this season follows tech billionaire Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a half-assed reincarnation of Elon Musk who reads more like the clever and conniving Don Draper than the megalomaniacal, unfunny Twitter/X CEO. Nevertheless, Hamm is a charming presence—when is he not? Paul plans to send Alex and Cory (Billy Crudup) into space on his Hyperion One rocket in the first episode in an attempt to push UBA into a $40 billion deal that would name him CEO of the company. Cory is happy about his payday, but everyone else in the newsroom frets over what Paul's ownership would mean for the state of American journalism. (There’s a bit of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos threaded into Paul’s character, too.)
When it rains, it pours—while the newsroom is in a panic about the deal with Paul, they face even more disruption when a major hack targets the newsroom. UBA’s networks were being tapped and recorded for an incredibly long period of time—back to 2020, at the very least. The hackers demand $5o million, or every correspondence—emails, phone calls, performance reviews, you name it—will be leaked online. Cory advises that the leak could actually be great for ratings (UBA could win Emmys for their hack coverage!) and the board votes to not pay the ransom.
Thrust into a sale and a data breach, the newsroom goes into full panic mode, including a racial reckoning that is sparked by the leaks. Emails about the insurrection, which Bradley covered from inside The Capitol, surface. All the while, Paul Marks is waiting in the shadows, ready to infiltrate UBA and use the network as a mouthpiece for his tech projects.
The Morning Show has become, for lack of a better word, busy. The frenetic energy from Season 1 has exploded into a rushed cacophony of too much all at once. The series was stronger when there was one major storyline—i.e. Mitch’s departure, the pandemic—as opposed to attempting to check off a growing list of dozens of problems the poor UBA staffers face. Sure, journalism is a fevered, day-to-day industry; the show earns points for realism! But The Morning Show is still a TV show, and, thus, needn’t burden itself with covering every news cycle Americans have faced in the past four years.
Plus, while The Morning Show has always been anchored in somewhat true stories, the series has lost most of its fictionalized quality. The first season’s Mitch drama was so soapy, the finale soaked in sensationalism with events that would’ve never happened in an actual newsroom. But that was the fun of it! In Season 3, every storyline appears to be ripped straight from CNN and recreated with a copy maker. There’s a fine line somewhere between a show about the news and a show about the people who put on the news. The Morning Show is at its best when it leans into the latter idea, but Season 3 is caught in the unending web of world events. This season feels like an endless scroll through Pop Crave (the infamous Twitter news account)—but at lightspeed.
We lose a lot of time with the characters as a result of the unending new reports—Roe vs. Wade becomes a minor plot, UBA tries to get Russia to fess up to the hack, the list goes on—which is a shame, because the characters’ interpersonal drama is the most invigorating part of the show. Alex takes the biggest hit. Mitch (who, spoiler from Season 2, is dead) is reduced to an afterthought, only mentioned three or four times throughout the entire season. Bradley and Cory get juicy material, although the show’s only Emmy-winner (Crudup) could always use more screen time.
Newer characters like Stella (Greta Lee) and Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies) get far more to do than the show’s original cast, which is also befuddling—the original Morning Show worked because of its glitzy Aniston-Witherspoon-Carrell star power. That said, the one improvement seen in Season 3 is the addition of Nicole Beharie, who plays fierce new anchor Chris Hunter. But even Chris—who should be the face of the new Morning Show—competes against the bigger news stories at the center of the series. Ultimately, every character loses.
At this point, The Morning Show suffers from an apparent attempt to replicate what worked about Succession. The characters flock everywhere in plush jets, sporting crisp business formal as they do so. But Succession had a knack for balancing real world stories (like that of Murdoch family) with original plotlines, resulting in a damning critique of the American media industry. While The Morning Show once had similar poise—albeit much more melodramatic, which I did like!—the series has lost the plot. But perhaps that’s what happens when the news is far more intriguing than human imagination.
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