The Unfettered Critic – November 2021

Back when TVs still wore rabbit ears, rumors spread about “pay television.” Folks chuckled, “Will we have to drop quarters into a box? Who’s gonna come around to pick up the coins?”

“Streaming” was something only salmon in the Pacific Northwest cared about.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. The streaming bill comes in the mail—and we’re resigned to paying for Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, and, most recently, Apple+.

Why Apple+? Initially, it was because our purchase of new iPhones included a free trial subscription. We immediately noted some worthy programs, like For All Mankind and Ted Lasso, but we probably wouldn’t have stuck around beyond the freebie phase if we hadn’t stumbled across The Morning Show.

Based in part on foibles ripped from the monitors of The Today Show (and others), we found ourselves hooked. Think of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, jammed into a blender with Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, a hint of Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, and more than a soupçon of the dirty deeds attributed to the real-life personalities who inspired the “Me Too” movement.

That’s The Morning Show. Sharp, satirical, and fast-moving, with a brilliant cast—headed by Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. After imbibing the show’s first season for free, we opted to stick around for the second. What’s another five bucks (sigh) a month?

Aniston and Witherspoon portray a mismatched duo of newspersons of extremely different ilks. Aniston’s character, Alex Levy, is the polished on-air veteran; Witherspoon, as Bradley Jackson, is a young, impulsive small town journalist who’s become a household name after some gutsy but unprofessional behavior. Alex is considered a little “long in the tooth” to maintain her status as the reigning queen of morning TV. The network wouldn’t mind letting her move on (or even giving her a shove), but a scandal triggered by her longtime co-host (played slitheringly by Steve Carell) initiates a whole new scenario.

And that’s the cue for Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), the newly anointed head of the network’s entertainment and news divisions. He steps in to manipulate the future of the show within the show, the careers of the two women—and, dazzlingly, us.

Part intuitive media savant, part Svengali, with a dazzling smile that alternately charms and chills, Crudup is amazing. As an actor, he’s not as well known as his female co-stars. Yet his dynamic range of performances, from the egocentric rock star in Almost Famous, to England’s most renowned Shakespearian “actress” in Stage Beauty, have revealed him to be a supernova we just can’t look away from.

In The Morning Show, Crudup crackles with energy. He delivers philosophical rants, his face alit by an intense inner fire, that are anything but comforting. “People get their horrible news delivered to the palm of their hand 24/7,” he tells a producer in what ostensibly is a pep talk, “and they get it the way that they like it, colored the way that they want it. And news is awful, but humanity is addicted to it, and the whole world is depressed by it.”

From one minute to the next you can’t tell if Crudup’s Cory is devil or angel. He makes promises that never work quite the way he’d made them sound. But it’s clear that without his energy, the whole show within The Morning Show would burst like a bubble. We can’t predict where Cory is taking everyone—the timeframe to date has been pre-COVID, but that’s about to hit the show’s America like a tsunami. Whatever, we’re with him all the way, whether the path leads to flaming ruin or heaven’s gate.