Antepenultimate Sadness - The Morning Show s04e08: "The Parent Trap"

Whenever it rounds the corner into its endgame, The Morning Show takes an episode to slow down and do some character work. In the first season this was quite good, where the flashback to Las Vegas showed the culture that enabled Mitch Kessler’s grotesquerie. In the following season it was laughable in the extremel, where the fallout from Mitch’s death slammed on the breaks for the sort of tone deaf fallout that justifies watching this pitchy show. Most recently it’s a bit of a damp squib, where Alex and Chip fall apart over the running of TMS while Laura confronts Bradley on her covering up Hal’s involvement in Jan 6.

In its fourth season, “The Parent Trap” explores the complicated parent/child relationships Alex & Cory have with their father and mother respectively. It’s a fairly morose episode, something the writers clearly designed to give great actors the opportunity to bounce of each other. Jennifer Aniston in particular gets an excellent monologue as she tries to unpack why things with her father have been so rough for her entire life. Billy Crudup, meanwhile, has to spend the entire time in the brash exasperation that defines his character and mix it with the indignity of his mother telling him she’s going to die by suicide and then doing it. The two regulars give solid performances, and pairing them opposite Jeremy Irons and Lindsay Duncan means the show is going to get some fireworks.

That being said, these water sips in the desert all drink from the same drunken trench. Even if the goal is to get its audience to feel things and care, it continues this trend of trying to discern what the point of this show even is at this point.

Long Live The King

The joy of prestige television is getting great actors on a weekly basis. The promise of having this profile and budget means an actor like Jeremy Irons has incentive to show up.

His part feels meaty, or at least , it’s obvious why he took it in the first place. He’s playing opposite Jennifer Aniston. He’s having to grapple with “might-be-a-bad-dad” and also finds himself embroiled in a scandal that he might have plagiarized from one of his students. It fits into the show’s determination to be a show about the ethics of journalism and telling truth to power, never mind that the show is ostensibly about a fluffy morning show where the hosts will wear aprons for cooking segments and the in-house weather person will bring in a bunch of doves for a gimmicky on-air proposal.

But the show also thinks it’s a good idea to give Jeremy Irons a storyline where his heavy drinking results in him publicly urinating. Of course, that then turns up on Instagram and everyone knows about it immediately. To defend himself (against the plagiarism allegations) he wants to go on the air on TMS for an interview, something Alex flatly refuses. And then, when he’s wandering around the UBA offices he comes across Bro’s live broadcast of The Talk Back Show and (because I guess Bro is mad that Alex kicked him out after they boned last week) Bro has him on to just expound at length about life and journalism and the truth.

Now… why does all of this happen?

Alex has been working for WEEKS to get a sit down interview with Joe Biden and is in the final stage of negotiations. After planning and pageantry, it’s happening. Finally. But no sooner has she secured the basic framework for the interview than her dad’s rant on Bro’s show leads the White House to call it off.

And then Alex and her dad get into a screaming match where they work through all their lingering traumas and why they’ve always had such a contentious relationship.

This is the same exact problem as “White Noise” and “Amari”, where it feels like the show picks a big dramatic moment and then works backwards for how to get there. They could try to build to something organically, but that’s not how this show functions.

Take, for instance, the way that the White House only comes up in this episode. The Morning Show has made no effort to even thread this as a potential storyline for Alex. Instead, it costs on the non-diegetic knowledge that getting a sit down with the President is generally a huge deal. Never mind she’s securing it in June of 2024 with the administration’s comms team telling her to “keep open the first two weeks of July.” Like. Guys. I’ve watched this show. It’s not hard to take a leap that Biden is going to take the debate stage on June 27. And now the show has just set up Alex to be the person to whom his comms team turns for an interview to try to save the corpse of his presidency.

But the show relies on that inherent tension to pull Alex through the “this is the last straw” of her relationship with her father.

Mix in that with the lowbrow of “Alex’s dad drunkenly pissed on a statue of Nathan Hale” and we’re at the reason why it doesn’t matter that Jennifer Aniston and Jeremy Irons act the shit out of their confrontation. The weird complex trauma of their relationship might be interesting, but the show so regularly delves into this artificial, manufactured nonsense that it means when they pivot to organic, fabulous acting and real bedrock emotion it makes the entire thing feel hollow. It’s not even refrigerator logic. You don’t need to get off the couch for it to sink in how weird it all is.

It’s a puppet show… with a wig

On the other side of that is Cory’s mom’s euthanasia. If nothing else, giving Lindsay Duncan the opportunity to be incredibly emotive as she tells her son she’s decided to die today is basically worth the price of admission. Opposite her, Billy Crudup is fabulous, bringing Cory’s consistent smug indignation to the idea that he arrogantly knows his mom is not going to die by suicide.

Looking back on it, it’s hard to be even mad at seeing my favorite character on the show give an emotional performance opposite one of my favorite actors.

She dies watching him do the most ridiculous, silly puppet show I could imagine, drifting off to sleep as he does the performance and finally succumbing while his back is turned. It’s hard to be mad at it from a character standpoint, and to be honest a mother dying by watching her son be goofy and wild sounds like a wonderful way to go out. Returning to Cory after the sun goes down, finding him sitting with her in abject loss and grief while her body lies asleep on that bench… it’s tremendously affecting.

But The Morning Show can’t turn it off. Even if the puppet show weren’t weird and bizarre, there’s still the moment when her watch beeps and he finds a note saying “Coroner’s coming”. And… again. What is the tonal point of this? Because when it happened we laughed at the ridiculousness of (even in death) his mom being like “time’s up”. Is the show wanting to reach a point where it cements home just how well she planned all of this? Because… god that’s funny. And I don’t think it’s supposed to be.

The Spectre of Bradley Jackson

On either side of these lengthy detours is Bradley Jackson.

Aside from the first scene in Alex’s apartment, Reese Witherspoon basically has the week off. The fallout of Claire’s arrest last episode is something that only comes up tangentially, with Alex and Bradley having yet another rift between them.

Between seasons was an extended metatext about Witherspoon and Aniston not having scenes together because of internal drama. There’s a very obvious reason for this: the two characters are not on the same track they’ve been in since season one. There they were co-anchors on The Morning Show, and they constantly butted heads when it came to internal show politics.

As the series has continued, the two have flitted in and out of the anchor desk on the eponymous television program, and this season began with neither of them occupying either chair. Bradley was off in West Virginia for FBI-caused exile, while Alex has used the leverage of her killing the Paul Marks deal to take a more managerial/executive role at UBA. This mirrors how every season starts, where the time skip means one or both of them is in a new situation and a lot of the show resuming its function is trying to catch up on what’s happened since we last left the characters.

But this divergence has meant it’s been harder and harder to get Witherspoon and Aniston in the same room together for shareable scenes. If only the show had the same commitment to kinetic television as he does for emotional catharsis.

With this episode, though, Alex & Bradley have a fight over Bradley’s conduct in managing this investigation. Burning Claire as a source and needing to go off to Belarus to do an in-person interview1 and how she needs Alex to sign off on the waiver to travel is all a ton to deal with.

Setting aside that there’s no way the FBI is going to let her leave the fucking country given literally everything that’s happened, it’s wild to shoot the entire sequence in a series of one-shots, instead of milking the drama by putting Witherspoon & Aniston playing in a frame together. It makes sense that Miguel Arteta blocks the scene so they’re across the kitchen from each other, a physical representation of the distance between the two of them. But it continues the trend of the series not playing to its strengths and using its best tools to make good television.

It also doesn’t help the “they don’t shoot scenes together” rumors that are going to continue.

But this scope creep has been a problem for this show and it’s going to as such for the foreseeable future. It is always going to get worse. We should allow shows to grow and evolve, but the premise of The Morning Show as a #MeToo response only works for that first season. We’ve long since hit the point where every week is an unwieldy surprise. Following season one, the show had a lot of blank canvas on which to stake their claim. The decision to make it about real events and set it in a slightly-off version of our reality has meant that there’s less focus on the show working as a real television series. Alex can want to move up in the company, Bradley can want to continue to be a full time journalist. But these things don’t play well together and it’s added to the unwieldiness of the show.

Because by the time we get to the last scene and Alex going to Bradley’s apartment only to find Chip there (inverting the beginning of the episode) and there’s a threat of “where’s Bradley” it leaves the show in a super weird place. We’re back into Bradley’s mystery as the driving force of a season that’s felt insanely directionless.

What? Are they seriously going to Belarus next week? We have two episodes left. Who are they kidding?

More importantly, it continues the trend of what the hell the show is even doing. Bradley can view the coverup as the most important thing it the world, but it’s not so urgent that we can’t take some time to have Alex’s dad pee on statues and Cory’s mother die by suicide. I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised by The Morning Show, especially not when they do a ridiculous episode like this once per year and shove it in this slot. But doing this in this slot in a season that feels like it’s not about anything doesn’t make for a beautiful, engaging emotional story. It’s just another oddly shaped puzzle piece that’s sticking out in a peculiar way. So very much like modern art.

Stray observations

• We also get the laying out of Celine and her brother as the masterminds of all the evil shit going on. I mean… sure.
• Also there’s an extended subplot about how gross and shitty the Seine is and that’s pretty funny.
• Miles not showing up again really makes it feel like Miles was only in the show to write off Greta Lee. Maybe that’ll turn around in the next two weeks, but as with this show, skepticism is the best advice here.
• Alex’s dad commenting about how Alex has “a terrible time with men” feels so weird. Also it shouldn’t be surprising, but Alex putting herself in this situation with Bro and then getting into a small tiff about it is par for the course with a show this filled with unprofessionals.
• I’m all for a show that wants to discuss free speech and holding truth to power, but it’s such a wild platitude for the show to really go after. Again, the core of this show is The Today Show and they’re trying to make it about these grand big fights. At least The Newsroom pretended like it was doing news.
• Quote of the week: “Liberté, egalité, and most definitely fraternité.” Bro really knows how to corner that market on people who like phrases that originated with the French Revolution.

Next week… I guess there’s something at an opera? Weird.