For three seasons, The Morning Show has specialized in provoking a particular type of reaction: something deranged or ill-conceived happens, I shout “nooooo” at my screen and remain slightly stupefied as the show barrels ahead, unrestrained by logic, subtlety or sense.
There’s usually one moment per season that sums up the show’s harebrained, groan-worthy attempt to portray the cutthroat world of New York television media. In the first, it was when Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s show producer Hannah, sexually assaulted years earlier by the disgraced morning show host Mitch Kessler, died dramatically by suicide – evidence that the show’s predominant mode was melodrama. The second season was an expensive masterpiece of bad decisions: dramatizing the pandemic, sending Mitch off an Italian cliff in his car, pairing Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) with her fellow morning news anchor Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies) in a shoehorned romance designed for internet shipping.
