The Morning Show Season 3 Is My Kind of Mess: Review
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The post The Morning Show Season 3 Is My Kind of Mess: Review appeared first on Consequence.
At a certain point, mid-way through Season 3 of The Morning Show, UBA exec Stella Bak (Greta Lee) tells an ad buyer that his wife back home might be dismayed by all the drama that surrounds her network. But really, says Stella, “I think she likes the mess.”
It’s a moment that feels like the show’s writers speaking directly to the critics — and this critic, at least, has come to agree with the sentiment. The Morning Show, starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Billy Crudup, has been a bonkers series since the beginning, a trend that continues as Season 3 explores a world still recovering from lockdown and all too aware of the political tempest that raged on January 6th.
Season 3 doesn’t just move the story forward, though; it cements the show’s status as high-brow soap, indulging in outlandish plot twists as well as sumptuous, aspirational aesthetics. Finally, an answer to the question: “What would And Just Like That be like if its characters really cared about the news?” It is a messy show, one where its beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes make terrible decision after terrible decision, and Season 3 leans into that like a lady exec who’s read too much Sheryl Sandberg.
When the first season of The Morning Show premiered, it did so as the flagship series for the launch of Apple TV+, with buckets of expectation heaped upon it. It wasn’t the only show launched on November 1st, 2019 — also premiering that day were Dickinson, See, and For All Mankind — but it had the biggest stars, the biggest buzz, and its own behind-the-scenes drama, with credited creator Jay Carson leaving the series and Kerry Ehrin taking the showrunning reigns prior to premiere to retool the show. (The third season has a new showrunner in Charlotte Stoudt of Homeland and Fosse/Verdon.)
For initial reviews, critics were given screeners for the first three episodes, critical response to which was notably underwhelming. “The pilot is an ungainly mishmash,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg wrote in 2019, continuing on to note that “the third episode then steers into the desired soapy goodness and gives both Aniston and Witherspoon the sort of juicy monologues you sense attracted the two stars.”
While The Morning Show Season 1 failed to deliver a nuanced prestige TV take on the #MeToo movement (or moment), a major flashback episode late in the season, featuring Steve Carell’s predatory Mitch Kessler seducing a fragile staffer, set a chain of events into motion that led to a genuinely intense and dramatic finale, one befitting any primetime soap — a vibe which continues strong into Season 3.
There was some indication that the second season might have attempted to pull back on the soapiness initially — but the storyline’s blunt inclusion of COVID made that impossible, because it came out in the fall of 2021, at a time when talking about the pandemic in anything resembling a nuanced fashion was impossible. (It’s still not really possible to talk about the pandemic with much nuance here in 2023, but Season 3 doesn’t let up on the COVID talk. In fact, this season features an episode flashing back to how various characters dealt with lockdown, a focus that brings up a lot of “too soon!” feels.)
The one thing that disqualifies The Morning Show from pure soap status is that it’s a series without heroes and villains, which is sometimes to its detriment — it seems like no one can do a bad thing without getting at least one relatable moment of reflection and regret. However, that seems to be an inevitable side effect of embracing its aforementioned mess, especially as alliances change (as do bed partners).
For Season 3, the show-within-the-show adds Christina Hunter (Nicole Beharie of Sleepy Hollow and Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.) as a new host with a sports background who won’t be easily cowed. But the biggest addition cast-wise to Season 3 is Jon Hamm as Paul Marks, whose character description can basically be boiled down to “What if Elon Musk was actually hot and competent?” Hamm’s actually a great fit for the series’ tone, and seeing his level of commitment goes a long way towards selling both the character as well as his emerging relationship with Alex (Aniston).
Accompanying Hamm is Tig Notaro as Paul Marks’ consigliere/fixer, the kind of role you’d expect to see Jonathan Banks or Harvey Keitel playing. Notaro’s signature drawl simultaneously elevates the role and also aligns it perfectly within the scope of soap which the show has embraced — because it’s a wild decision, one which complements so many other wild decisions The Morning Show makes regularly. Like, say, how it chose to say goodbye to ol’ Mitch Kessler in Season 2. Or everything to do with Season 3’s focus on Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon)’s award-winning coverage of January 6th, 2021.
The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
Because of course The Morning Show is still, in the end, focused not just on the very recent past, but how news organizations have chosen to cover it. In fact, no show has cared about TV news more since Aaron Sorkin spent three seasons of The Newsroom explaining how TV news should work (according to Aaron Sorkin).
The Newsroom proved to be sanctimonious at best because this sort of commentary on the very recent past can only come off as ultra-smug, or at its worst pandering. What makes The Morning Show Season 3 so watchable is that its intrinsically soapy qualities help undercut that smugness… while it tries to both reflect growing pessimism about the state of media today, and shine forth beautiful ideals about truth and journalism and the American way.
It’s messy, in short, but after three seasons that appears to be the comfort zone it’s found, and it’s led to some chaotic and deeply addictive television, one with enough self-awareness to actively mock the grandiose speeches of Cory Ellison (Crudup). Because as Stella would tell you, people might say they watch for the news, but really they’re in it for the drama. And nowadays, The Morning Show has no shortage of that.
The first two episodes of The Morning Show Season 3 premiere September 13th, 2023 on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping weekly on subsequent Wednesdays.
The Morning Show Season 3 Is My Kind of Mess: Review
Liz Shannon Miller
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