The Morning Show Season 3 review: The new media screw-up

Reese Witherspoon in a still from 'The Morning Show' Season 3.

“The world as we know it is over.

We are officially in the Thunderdome.

In five years, half of the streaming services will be gone or bought out.

In 10 years, the internet will be 3D.

You will literally be in people’s living rooms.

We need to build a time machine to take us to the future, and that is going to take real deep pockets.

Someone with more money than god.”

These are grand prophecies. And they are straight from the mouth of Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), the hard-talking, high-strung CEO of UBA, the television news network that’s the canvas for the prestige show that Apple TV launched in 2019. Over two seasons, the prestige rested not on what new it had to say or show about news television, but the other surefire winner on streaming: Stars. Jennifer Aniston as Alex Levy, the network’s longest and most adored anchor and Reese Witherspoon (also a producer on the show) as Bradley Jackson, mired in the wedges of belief (on-ground journalism or gimmicky studio segments?) return to Season 3.

Meanwhile, Cory bites much more than he can chew. He who planned to reformat the fictional UBA around the notion that “chaos is the new cocaine” is biting himself all over and also everyone around him in order to usurp the network’s board chairman, Cybil Richards (Holland Taylor), whose family owns the network over three generations. John Hamm promises to add some more spiffy oomph as Paul Marks, a tech billionaire who believes legacy media ought to be his next toy and offers the deal to Cory: Ask Alex to report from outer space, from inside his latest achievement, the majestic blue spacecraft Hyperion. Bradley ends up going and making that gravity-free kook of a reportage from up there.

This season introduces Greta Lee as Stella Bak, an executive who has joined the network to save it with post-millennial canniness about what works in the news these days. It also has Nicole Beharie as Christina Hunter, a former Olympic athlete and co-anchor of Alex. Karen Pittman as Mia Jordan and Mark Duplass as Charlie Black reprise their roles as distressed, disempowered executives with no hold over any of the big hustle and desperate measures going on at UBA’s top level to save the network from going bankrupt. The guy with the slick monster Hyperion is required, although Cybil, who is at odds with all the newness pronounces doom: “Paul Marks is gonna fold the news division into an algorithm or make it a mouthpiece for Hyperion. Whatever it is, we are fucked.” Cybil has less bravado about upholding the old guard when, after a mammoth “nuclear” hack into UBA’s system reveals that the grand old lady could also be racist — “Maybe UBA is a plantation, just with dental insurance,” mutters a producer, a woman of colour, after all the disgraceful leaks storm in to suffocate the network.

Political correctness and wokeism, the order of the age, is thankfully the saving grace of this otherwise chaotic show. And there’s the dazzling one liners and dialogues — even a few monologues — which keep the mood and tempo frantic.

There is a semblance of a realistic depiction of news TV in 2023 here with varied views on what can society do with the cancelled or why the most over-worked in a newsroom the most unacknowledged and least rewarded. In the last season, even as Alex reported with acute COVID-19 from her home during the pandemic to save the network, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carrell), Alex’s long-time co-anchor on The Morning Show died alone at a desolate Italian village after his election from UBA after serious #MeToo allegations.

Anniston’s character is more cynical than ever before and much weaker in her attempts to sell herself, and Anniston tunes in to the character’s disempowerment and the arc that follows thereafter to gain her power back without much relish. She has a monotone delivery and expression throughout Season 3. Witherspoon’s character goes to space and marvels and guffaws at it, and then vanishes for episodes after having gone blonde as well as experimented sexually to stay relevant in the web series scheme of things or perhaps because the show’s creators, Charlotte Stout and Mimi Leder (leading a team of directors) still haven’t figured out what to do with the character of Bradley — a star as well as misfit at the same time. In most of this season’s episodes, the characters circle jerking their way through to the hacking crisis and desperate attempts to rescue themselves from it.

The Morning Show shows a lot of what new Indian media in a few years. It isn’t a great show, but because of its packaging — the stars, the spiffy dialogues and keeping it timely — make it the only viable show on the ongoing or incoming media apocalypse in recent Streaming TV.

A new episode of The Morning Show Season 3 airs on Apple TV every Wednesday.