The Morning Show

The Morning Show is high-voltage drama and big-time entertainment, a savage, scorching portrait of the TV news industry as a modern court of the Medicis where corporate genocide is coffee-break sport, where subordinates exist to be crushed and superiors to be sabotaged. It may not be exactly news that the most trusted men (and, these days, women) in America are anything but, but it's never been so convincingly demonstrated.

Aniston fully takes command and registers the best “serious” performance of her career while Witherspoon and Carell also are fully and convincingly invested. It all makes for a series that is anything but sunny side up.

It takes a little time to find its whip-smart footing, with the pilot trying too hard to make everyone sound clever for clever’s sake and some hoary speechifying, but once it gets going, The Morning Show has the addictive rush of great old-school TV dramas. Funny, biting, and with just the right dose of trashy zing, this is high-gloss soap—Broadcast News meets L.A. Law.

Because the creators have been able to take a headline-grabbing situation and make it relevant for those on the outside, “The Morning Show” bears watching. It’s one of those shows you didn't know you needed to watch.

As a mix of melodrama and well-written interactions that feel genuinely human, “The Morning Show” is fairly entrancing. Its characters, though big, are flawed in normal ways. ... The ending is almost operatic; not quite believable, yet emotionally satisfying. It killed me, I must confess.

What they arrive at by the end of the third episode is at least something soapily effective, an entertaining knot of contemporary babble that manages at times to emit a ring of truth. Aniston and Witherspoon are strong complements to one another, earning their enormous paychecks (each were paid a reported $1.25 million per episode) by riding this voluminous wave with confident precision.

It is a serious show that, in every frame and every performance, announces that it wants to be taken seriously. Based on the first three episodes, it is also a well-executed work of television that never lets you forget you’re watching a work of television.

“The Morning Show” doesn’t have the cinematic gravitas of the Showtime series “The Loudest Voice” or the Aaron Sorkin poetry of HBO’s “The Newsroom.” It’s more along the lines of the solid but underachieving “Sports Night” TV series from the late 1990s.

Propelled by its magnetic performances, the series is an uneasy, sometimes nauseating, and often fascinating examination of our still-unspooling current moment.

A smart, showy, and sometimes strained drama about women and control, men and #MeToo, and the evaporating line between news and entertainment.

“The Morning Show” offers engaging, soapy elements with a layer of resonant, semi-believable corporate politics on top.

The Morning Show favors soap opera over self-importance, making this newsroom a fun place to visit, especially if you like your headlines over the top. [11-24 Nov 2019, p.17]

The first three episodes made available to critics are remarkably flat for such a lavish venture. ... When The Morning Show finally gets its setup established, and starts to grapple with the consequences and the meaning of what Mitch has actually done, the show finds some momentum. It’s at its most fascinating, and meaningful, when it’s picking at the cultural scar tissue left by so many allegations.

If it takes a while to get a feel for most characters, Alex and Bradley come off as logical extensions of Aniston’s girls’-girl relatability and Witherspoon’s intensity. Yet the show doesn’t have the same depth or experimental spirit as the top tier of TV in 2019. Rather, it resembles a more muted Shonda Rhimes serial or a less smug Aaron Sorkin joint—it’s pithy and easy to watch but rarely as thought-provoking as you’d hope.

There are almost constant whiffs of very classy, intelligent people poking and prodding and preaching at you. When these arguments are as provocative and insightful as the creative team seems to believe, it’s fantastic. Delivered by a cast this stacked, how could it not be? But when it misses, the groan may as well be a foghorn. It can seem like a fool’s errand to engage in these issues in real-time, which is what makes the show both so impressive and susceptible to intense criticism.

The Morning Show is at its most engaging when [Jennifer Aniston's Alex Levy is] front and centre. If only the slightly rickety drama constructed around her had a clearer idea what it wants to be and for whom it is intended.

Apple TV+'s series is less about the intricacies of the business than the firestorms resulting when talent egos clash against management callousness. One might understand that more precisely after a slog through the first two episodes. But maybe audiences will forgive the clunky pacing and derivative scenes in those episodes, since "The Morning Show" less about the script than the performances and the star power.

The Morning Show is a fine drama. But when launching a streaming platform you expect people to pay for, you need more than fine. You need to break the mold and give us a TV show we didn’t even know we needed but cannot live without. The Morning Show is not that.

There is much that The Morning Show wants to chew on thematically, and to Ehrin’s credit it succeeds more often than it fails.

It’s honestly pretty fun to watch, all glossy and zippy. But it’s also fundamentally at war with itself.

It’s OK. Just OK. ... I was consistently underwhelmed by the show’s hazy point of view.

It’s not good, but it’s bad in an extremely satisfying (to me) way. Like The Newsroom and Smash before it, it is an earnest, mediocre, insider-y look at an insular entertainment world of extreme interest to New York media types.

To the extent The Morning Show is Apple's way of sounding the alarm for its new service, feel safe to hit the "snooze" button.

Simplified storytelling and giving viewers what they signed up for — Jen and Reese together 4ever — would have benefitted The Morning Show. Future episodes may reward us with those, but as far as first impressions go, this Morning Show made me want to hit the snooze button.

The Morning Show isn’t terrible. It has several excellent performances beyond Crudup’s. ... But the series is a well-polished snore.

After a brutally dull pilot and a meandering second episode, there are distinct hints in the third hour of a more satisfying and confident The Morning Show, one that actually gets value out of leading ladies Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.

Mostly "The Morning Show" is a show in search of itself, uncertain of what to say about the #MeToo movement and workplace misconduct, or how to explore those real world parallels (Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer). This is because "The Morning Show" is often a mashup of verisimilitude with outright balderdashery.

Aniston infuses Alex’s story with genuine emotion, and reminds us what a gifted dramatic actor she is. But the rest of the show lets her down. It’s a solid performance lost in a sea of jumbled ideas and missed opportunities.

Early tonal inconsistencies can be expected, but they still make these first three episodes hard to gauge and, worse still, there’s very little to just enjoy. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to compare an ongoing TV series about morning news to a two-hour film about the financial crisis. But if that can be entertaining and incisive, than this should be, well, either.

The Morning Show, as is standard for expensive dramas in the age of too much television, is also desperate to be About Something. And in that regard, it falls flat. Its politics are baffling – notably Bradley’s insistence on being neither politically red nor blue but “human” – and it’s not yet smart enough to say anything insightful when it comes to sexual misconduct in the workplace.

After three episodes, this tech company’s first venture into TV is good only at appearing to be good. It’s like something assembled in a cleanroom out of good-show parts from incompatible suppliers. Under the gleaming surface, as sleek and anodyne as an Apple Store, it is a kludge. ... Carell is good in his role, as are his co-stars. But they’re appearing in different shows.

A conspicuous fender bender, in which ambition has been rear-ended by self-importance, causing it to bump into a dump truck full of cliches.

“The Morning Show” can’t quite figure what it wants to be, waffling between a soapy take on super personalities like “All About Eve” and “serious” commentary on the state of the world like “The Newsroom.” A couple of the performances—and one in particular—keep it from being a complete disaster, but the show has a high degree of unearned self-importance.

The stakes are low, the writing is clichéd and the overwhelming vibe is one of disappointment and wasted potential. Rachel Green deserved better.

“The Morning Show” is less addictive train wreck than glum clunker, symptomatic of peak TV: it’s yet another lacquered, poorly structured ten-episode story, whose sparks are dampened as it becomes more earnest. The best bits just make you miss livelier shows. ... When the show finally looks more closely at the women Mitch has messed with, it’s only to exploit their trauma, mawkishly so. They can’t stay in focus, because the camera has been facing the wrong way.