A Night At the Opera - The Morning Show s04e09: "Un Bel Dei"

There is a joy to manufactured drama.

On the one hand we can get an episode like this, which opens with Bradley Jackson (Ace Reporter) arriving in Belarus only for Belarusian TSA to arrest her and threaten arbitrary indictment. This was the cliffhanger last week, but now we get to spend this week’s episode focused on getting her out. Once it starts, though, it’s clear that this is the rest of the season and of course that means this is just a series of complications leading to a cliffhanger. We’ll figure out how it shakes out in next week’s finale.

On the other, we get Jon Hamm bombing around in a tux. Total smoke show.

It’s hard to be mad about that last one, but as with so many things on this show, pivoting hard into big plot requires a strong character foundation to help define the conours of the goings-on. When the plot is this grand and unshapely, it becomes really hard to hold onto the various elements. For a conspiracy thriller like this season of The Morning Show, it’s mostly about the vague shape of the thing rather than the ins and outs of all the particulars. Character can help with all of this, and in the show’s defense it’s really become quite simple: Bradley Jackson is investigating a massive UBA cover-up. Cory was in charge when it happened, but Celine (as we found out last episode) is mastermind who orchestrated the whole thing. Who Bradley’s interviewing, everything with Claire… none of that matters, really.

But it really is not clear what the show is about at this point. All of a sudden we’re bringing back tech bro Paul Marks to interface with a Belarusian oligarch to help affect Bradley’s release. Alex is desperate to get Bradley back because… she feels bad. And she cares. But it’s not really making grand pronouncements about the world at large. It’s just a vapid conspiracy that loosely touches on the various themes the show is playing with. There’s not really a larger argument.

This has been the biggest issue with the show this season. Now that the endgame is here, it’s doubtful they’ll be able to pull out of this tailspin.

Removing Bradley from the Equation

I don’t mean to pit Reese Witherspoon against Jennifer Aniston, but the two are co-leads of this high profile prestige television show. Since season two, their characters have been on wildly different narrative paths and the show has had a lot of trouble letting them intersect. It is strange to completely remove one from the narrative in the penultimate episode and leave this episode on the shoulders of the other. Outside of that first scene and a shot of her walking down a prison corridor, Witherspoon isn’t in the episode at all. Based on how things are going, she’s probably not going to have much of a role in the finale next week either. The show has completely stripped her character of any agency and has instead left her to rot at the mercy of Belarusian security forces while everyone else attempts to get her out of jail without ever leaving New York.

This means that Alex is getting the major arc for the season. After all, the show has been alternating between the leads every season. So much of what was memorable about season one is Bradley Jackson’s transition from Ace Reporter to host of a fluffy morning news show. Meanwhile, season two dealt with Alex’s return to TMS and trying to reconcile the person she knew in Mitch from the absolute monstrosity of what his actions begat. Last season was mostly about Bradley’s fall from grace as Ace Reporter who would also coverup a a major news story. If there was an arc for Alex, it was in her whirlwind relationship with Paul Marks, which was important but not nearly as devastating as the show seemed to treat it.

So it is Alex’s turn to be the center here. Bradley’s major arc ended a few episodes ago when she turned Claire over to the Feds.

The scope creep of four seasons

Again, the show is so, so far from its original remit that it really is difficult to figure out what to hold onto. The scene where Chris gives away her gold medals is the only time we’re really dealing with the eponymous TV show. It doesn’t feel like it has to do with anything.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Larger thematic topical issues boxed in the original premise in ways that were largely unsustainable. This inherent tension between larger cultural forces and a morning show built on puff pieces and hourly weather reports is what made the show so alluring in the first season. Hell, it’s what made the Matt Lauer scandal so enticing in the first place. The man rotted this bubble of sunshine to its very core by virtue of being a lurid-in-the-extreme sex pest.

But wanting to stay topical has meant the show has struggled with what to be about. Despite two years between each season the show has never really re-evaluated how to keep this going in a way that’s believable. If the show is going to build off these major topics, then it requires a container that can hold them. In this case, Alex’s promotion to UBA executive means she has the ability to share scenes with Celine and can be there when the hammer inevitably falls. With Cory on the periphery, it was probably the smartest move they made between seasons.

None of that helps the tonal whiplash of the entire opera sequence, which everyone involved treats like it’s a Mission: Impossible movie. The music, the camera angles, the intrigue, the significant glances. It’s more heist than cushy night at the opera.

To then swing back and remember that the show takes precious time to close off the Chris-doped-that-one-time story with a scene during a live taping of The Morning Show and it’s like watching two discordant shows that don’t quite match up. There’s a way to make this layered narrative inform on itself by contrast, but… there’s nothing here to connect it. It’s just plot. No thematics. And every time we go back to The Morning Show it’s becoming less and less clear why we should even care at this point.

Marion Cotillard’s really twirly mustache

With the revelation that Celine is the one responsible for the cover-up Bradley is investigating, the veil has dropped from Marion Cotillard’s performance. This is always a funny thing to see, where Cotillard (for how good she is) is now playing a different character relative to who she was just a few episodes ago. She’s more conniving, more shifty. The moment that Alex comes in to tell her about the Wolf River investigation, the show makes sure to play into the dramatic irony of the moment: Celine looks aside for a second, skeeved out at the risk of all this crumbling beneath her. No one else notices, but we do.

It’s a mark of Cotillard that she can sell this as well as she does. Even in the weird relationship she’s entering with Cory (following their drug-fueled revery that ended last week’s episode) it almost works, like it’s playing into this deep relationship between the two of them that the show hasn’t really explored. Maybe it’s just been too long to recall all the intricate movements of these characters, but this feels like their almost-affair come more or less out of nowhere. It strains credulity. Is this something that we’d established before now?

And also… I thought she really liked Miles? Or he was just a tool by which the show could more easily and definitively write out Stella?

This is not sustainable, though. In revealing Celine as the mastermind behind the Wolf River scandal, she’s not long for this world. It doesn’t seem reasonable to believe that her character is going to survive into next season. Especially considering Cory just happened to find a great packet of papers labeled “Wolf River”. How lucky for everyone that his mother died by suicide when she did and left him exactly the smoking gun he (and everyone else) might need to crack this case wide open. And right in the arm of a jacket, no less.

That’s fortunate, too. Because Paul Marks’ chief of staff called Celine to help tank the deal and now Bradley’s stuck for another episode. What a cliffhanger.

Stray observations…

• Bradley films her own arrest. Exactly what I’d expect from an Ace Reporter.
• Mia is back in the fold and the way we know the season’s ending is because Chip fills her in between scenes. She acts as Alex’s wingperson at the opera and even knows enough Russian to be able to intercept Dmitri’s brief fight with his wife. That’s mighty lucky.
• Call me an uncultured, but any amount of opera in narrative is too much opera. It doesn’t take long for the indulgence of opera singers to drag on. Part of why the opera house scene works so well in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is because Christopher McQuarrie made sure to integrate the opera’s sequence of events into the action sequence itself. He sets up that big tenor high note and we spend the run time waiting for that big note to come. And that makes every even slightly-high note carry a sense of menace.
• Paul Marks is single. Someone ring the dinner bell.
• Cory getting a call from his mom’s florist is hysterical. Nothing makes me laugh more than all of the work and planning she put into her death and its aftermath. All that’s missing is a call from her broker to tell him when it’s the opportune time to sell the shares she left him.
• Dmitri can’t do jack shit about getting Bradley out of jail? Because the oligarchy is itself subject to an intricate bureaucracy between oligarchs? Magnificent.
• Alex’s attempt to get Paul Marks to sell off his AI to Dmitri so Bradley can go free is the sort of crazy shit I watch this show for. Doing an end-run around U.S. government sanctions by having Paul Marks license the AI to UBA and then trying to “slip it” to Dmitri during the Olympics? The show clearly isn’t going to let that happen, but talk about robbing the audience of immense joy.
• Like come on, Alex. This plan took you less than ten seconds to come up with and you think a federal investigation won’t uncover it immediately? Bitch this is their job.
• “So you want to launder a tech deal through your ex-girlfriend?” Crush it, Tig.
• Ben doing his big “this is day one” speech is an opportunity for him to step up to the plate as the head of news. Watch. Next week he’ll stand up to Celine to report on her malfeasance in the Wolf River scandal. It’ll earn him a modicum of Mia’s respect.
• Line of the week: “I just leveraged the Head of News for a pod deal. My villain era is in full swing.”

We’ll see what happens next week. The preview pictures on the AppleTV website show off Alex and her dad at what looks like a press conference. Can’t believe that’s coming back. So… who knows.