Tonal Chaos - The Morning Show s04e05: "Amari"

The Morning Show is not a good show.

For all that people talk about season one as some “really good show”, behind the veneer of a top-shelf cast (Reese Witherspoon & Jennifer Aniston AND Steve Carell?), glossy Apple TV+ production values, and the tackling of Very Important Topics (#MeToo) was a show full of batshit insane plots, nutty characters, and tonal schizophrenia. This got worse in season two, where the show decided to do a full-on exploration of the lead up to the COVID-19 pandemic because it was an important topic and this would help them continue to print the Emmys a show like this should get. Not that they super earn them (though they’re trying). The show gets nominations because they fit into the framework of what a show that earns nominations look like. It’s never gotten better.

What it has done, though, is gotten crazier. It’d be hard to top the madness of all of season two’s developments, but damn if they don’t try. This is a show that sent Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon/Ace Reporter) into space at the beginning of its third season1 and then devolved into an extended storyline about her being present at the Capitol on January 6, recording up her brother’s involvement in the insurrection, and then removing the bits of her footage with him as part of a coverup to obstruct the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the attack.

And that’s just like… one storyline in a season full of crazy shit. There’s a whole other plot where Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) starts sleeping with Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), who happens to be a thinly veiled Jeff Bezos allegory.

Now we’re in season four. The show’s timeline has jumped to 2024 (they like to be topical) and it seems like they’re trying to keep the show respectable and failing miserably. Unsurprising. You can’t really save this show. Being insane is in its DNA.

Shifting focus

“Amari” primarily focuses on the two lead black women in the cast. Morning Show executive producer Mia (Karen Pittman) recently quit her job running TMS because the studio boss (Greta Lee) passed her over for a promotion to be head of news (that’s a whole drama and there’s no time to cover that here). Meanwhile, former Olympian gold medalist turned TMS co-host Christine (Nicole Behaire) has been juggling her regular job with being the face of UBN’s coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. It helps that she’s a former gold medal Olympian herself.

To the show’s credit, moving the center of the narrative away from Alex and Bradley is the sort of creative space at which television thrives. There’s also something insanely cool about just how female-forward the show has become. While he was CEO, Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) was a major center for the show, but he’s lost all of that power, relegated to begging for relevance and pining over Bradley. Meanwhile Chip (Mark Duplass) used to be at the center of TMS, though now all they want to do is have him call Bradley from his car to update her on some development.

Additionally, the show gets to a lovely place in the end of the episode, where Mia and Chris team up to refute the allegations of the latter’s doping to be a better athlete. There’s a big emotional catharsis, where the former Olympian details the one time she took anabolic steroids to help her cope with a return to running after the premature birth (and subsequent death) of her son. To her credit as the one who helped guide her through the process, Mia proves her worth as a producer, pulling Chris through what should be a career ending scandal. She ends the episode basically telling Alex to fuck off.

The problem, though, is that the show goes through tons and tons of idiot plot to get there.

Repeating the same mistakes

This isn’t new. Last season’s “White Noise” did something similar, where it spent the entire episode concocting a convoluted narrative about a board member’s racist email. All of this so the subject of that email (weirdly enough: Christine) could have an on-air reckoning about how the email happened and how racist it was.

To get to this week’s catharsis, Christine (a TV personality for several years at this point and also with a background being a medal-winning black woman at the Olympics) loses her mind about seeing a random report about her doping and how that is the reason she won her medals. Instead of ignoring this article (which is “blowing up” on Twitter) she demands to get out in front of it, interrupting her busy schedule doing prep work for the Olympics (a full time job) to return to TMS as a guest host. Then, when her husband/manager tells her who did it (a former teammate), she gets drunk and drunk dials a voicemail cussing her former friend out. Of course, because all of this is vindictive play for attention, that voicemail winds up on a right-wing podcast talk show that records at UBN, which makes her look even worse.

A bit later, after she consults with Mia (who’s going through her own shit), she agrees to a sit down interview on said podcast talk show (because there’s no other in this universe) with her former friend/current troll… during which her friend sdelivers freaking receipts from the one time Christine really did take steroids… and we get a beautiful scene out of it but my god. How is she this outrageously stupid to wind up in this situation? And how is it no one is advising her to leave all of this shit alone? It is beneath her.

The most unprofessional characters on television

Viewers can live with silly plots, but what they can’t abide is something this recklessly annoying in the name of some emotional catharsis. It’s too many asks of the audience, especially when a show like this has long since burned all the good faith that the writers know what they’re doing.

And this is just the Christine story. This doesn’t even touch the story about Mia’s job interview, in which she walks out of the room and (still in the office) starts ecstatically celebrating and jumping around with her friend about how she basically already has the job. Like… where is the professionalism?

This is a question that comes back to the show again and again. Some of the more reckless stunts (like Bradley going off script during an interview in season one) can feel like the moves of a reckless maverick. But at a certain point, this unprofessionalism is completely unacceptable in any setting. Hell, this is a show where Alex literally skipped out on moderating a 2020 Democratic primary debate so she could have a heart to heart with former friend and disgraced sex pest Mitch Kessler. And it’s not like she excused herself. She basically ghosts the entire world, getting on a private plane like an hour before the broadcast and not telling anybody anything about it.

Considering this is what Alex did when she abandoned going to space… god she’s just so unprofessional.

Sure, there are points where impulses get the better of people. And given that Christine really did have that one moment of weakness that haunted her (even if it had nothing to do with the medals) it’s unsurprising that she drunk dials her former friend and leaves that voicemail. But it’s also completely insane that this person keeps their job and there’s basically no blowback for any of her behavior. The only thing that matters to the show is getting her to do the big emotional confession on the air. Nothing will get in the way of that.

Tension is part of its DNA

Where The Morning Show is best is when it’s in chaos with itself. The show presents as a modern prestige drama talking about important issues on a big sexy budget and with huge A-list stars at the center. These shows typically garner high profile attention and result in significant nominations from major Awards bodies. And that worked enough to garner multiple nominations for Outstanding Drama Series as well as for Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. And it’s not even just a “nominated show”. Billy Crudup has won Emmys twice for his role as Cory Ellison. This really did end up an Emmy winning show.

But at the same time it’s not something that anyone should take seriously. It tries for comedy, but it regularly doesn’t seem to realize just how silly and frivolous all of these stories are. It wants to treat its characters like they’re rich human beings with full lives, but none of them seem like the sort who would have success running a McDonalds franchise, much less a massive global media empire or even what’s basically The Today Show.

And this is why I’ll never stop watching it. The show is so completely up its own ass that it doesn’t realize when the tone of what they’re trying to accomplish is completely counter to the tone as it comes across in its final product. If this were on the CW, sure. But this is/was Apple TV+’s flagship series. It’s basically the show that launched the streaming platform’s line of original series. Its mere existence brings prestige and rep because there’s always a huge group of people who don’t watch it but see Aniston and Witherspoon and remember that it obliquely talked about Matt Lauer’s sex pest lifestyle and think that it means… something that it doesn’t to those who watch it.

Incompetency like this is fascinating, and every episode is me, my partner, and one of my very best friends screaming at the TV every five minutes because we’ve long since stopped suspending our disbelief and what we’re watching is truly nuts, especially considering its alleged pedigree. While nothing so far in this season has been as crazy as the one-two punch of “here’s how network upfronts work” tedium followed by “here’s what everyone did during COVID including Bradley Jackson going to the Capitol and seeing her brother and then covering it up”, it’s still a wild ride that perfectly fits into the “hate watch” ethos.

Because that scene with Christine confessing her sin and how that fed into a past trauma around her own motherhood etc. really was absolutely stellar.

But that’s just a small gulp of cool water in the middle of a desert where an endless parade of clown cars are doing donuts up and down the hills.