The Morning Show Season 2: Is Jennifer Aniston’s Apple Show Worth Watching?

The Morning Show, created by Jay Carson and inspired by a book by CNN reporter Brian Stelter, was one of the first hints that Apple TV Plus could become a thing: The behind-the-scenes drama not only featured two of the biggest TV sitcom stars who breathed new life into the streaming age: Jennifer Aniston from Friends and The officeSteve Carrel – playing alongside acclaimed actors like Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crudup and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, but was influential at the awards, earning the streamer his first emmy (Best Supporting Actor in a Dramatic Series, for Billy Crudup). Now, the show is headlining what looks like a promising series of fall premieres for the tech giant’s streaming service, hoping to entice fans of season 1 and spark interest in Apple’s television push.

The Morning Show It’s also one of the most visible disasters on television, a drama in which immensely talented actors play characters who behave in inexplicable ways in a story that hardly seems to have a clue as to what it’s about. Season 1 began as a post # MeToo story about the aftermath of a sexual misconduct scandal: When beloved morning news anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carrel) is denounced as an alleged predator, his co-host Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) along with the entire cast and crew must deal with the consequences. From there, things skyrocket, both for the characters and for the real-world viewers.

Do you want on that ride? Let’s find out with this Polygon-compatible survey.

The Morning Show is for you if …

… you vibrate with the phrase “chaos is the new cocaine”

Photo: Apple TV Plus

Here is the biggest hook The Morning ShowArsenal of: Things are always falling apart. The Mitch Kessler scandal puts his entire show, and the network that hosts it, in a state of panic where everyone tries to cover their butts and hopes they weren’t involved as someone who allowed their behavior. There are really no heroes here, but there are heroic conflicts, as Alex Levy fights for control of her show while the network wants to oust her, perhaps in favor of local journalist Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon), whose sudden viral fame catapults her into the chair. co-anchor as a replacement for Mitch.

… you like shows with a ridiculous twist on real world events

The first season of The Morning Show is extremely concerned with telling a post-# MeToo story, and his premise has strong parallels with the real world accusations against Today is the show host Matt Lauer. But it’s also a show about people who work on television news, and the news they report is, in large part, things that actually happened. Season 1 episodes saw the Morning program coverage team the California wildfires that ravaged the state in the late 2010s, and Season 2 is set in the early months of 2020, as the world slowly learns the scope and severity of the coronavirus pandemic.

TV dramas aren’t always good at this. Like Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The news room, The Morning Show often indulges in holiness and at the same time too preoccupied with melodrama to make a convincing case for why These real world events add to the story. To the series’ credit, he often leans more on the latter than the former. Despite all its mistakes and thematic clutter when it comes to referencing very recent history, The Morning Show it’s sublime when it comes to watching people implode – a trend from season 2 continues as characters realize they haven’t moved from last season’s events as much as they thought.

… Littlefinger is your favorite part of Game of Thrones

It is perhaps unfair that Billy Crudup is, so far, the only cast or crew member in The Morning Show to win an Emmy, but once you look at it, it’s hard to get mad. Crudup plays the scheming network executive Cory Ellison, most recently in charge of the company’s news division after establishing himself on the entertainment side. Like game of ThronesLittlefinger, Ellison is an opportunistic deaf-mute, taking advantage of a terrible crisis to improve his fortune in the company and make the eponymous Morning program an even greater success.

Unlike Littlefinger, Crudup plays Ellison as a man who is always dialed at 11, with each line delivered as if he just consumed three yards of coke and is trying to convince you to give him a personal sex tape. Is magnetic.

… You don’t mind a show about the trials and tribulations of rich and not very good people

While the morning show is apparently about news and navigating abuses by the powerful, it’s actually about celebrity. The morning television news is a strange space to operate, and The Morning Show makes it clear. Producers and talent foster a parasocial relationship with their audience, and threats to that relationship must be handled at any cost. The series is careful to show the human cost when such celebrity is abused, but in the long run, it focuses disproportionately on the anguish and difficulty of The Morning ShowThe cast and crew face responsibility and try to capture their own complicity.

Season 2 suggests that these characters aren’t doing a great job of it. Many early episodes attempt to rebuild the status quo The Morning Show it erupted at the end of season 1, when Alex goes off-script during a broadcast to implicate the network in a cover-up of the Mitch Kessler scandal, costing him his job and shaking the network’s hierarchy. This can make it sound like a bummer – the show is no longer propellant, a series of small hurricanes caught in the wake of a larger one. Instead, he looks back, tripping over himself to get his characters back to where they were.

Maybe that’s the point: by the time I’m done, The Morning Show Season 2 is a story about how the powerful try to hold on to their power and relevance, and how disappearing is a fate worse than death when one has achieved fame. The show talks about a great game and turns on all kinds of issues – the racism, the uncertainty, and the initial pandemic response and cancellation culture are there. But mostly it’s a show about selling your soul to be number one in your field, and the ghosts that haunt you if you stay in it long enough. You can’t leave this shit behind.

The Morning Show is available to stream on Apple TV Plus, with new episodes on Fridays..