Marion Cotillard Joins the List of 'The Morning Show' Actors Who Deserve So Much Better

If “The Performance Transcends the Writing” is your favorite genre of television, there is hardly a better show for you than Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, which features a conga-line of A-list talents doing the absolute best they can with what they have to work with. No one has tried this hard to sell material as mediocre since
Thomas Sadoski was the first to tell the pilots of a United flight that the President had killed Osama Bin Laden in Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom.

It’s not just Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston who are paid handsomely to overdeliver. There’s also Billy Crudup, who actually won an Emmy for turning shit into gold. There’s Steve Carell, who had the unenviable task of playing a Matt Lauer type with whom we were occasionally supposed to sympathize. And we sometimes did! We know how exceptional Greta Lee is thanks to films like Past Lives, and in The Morning Show, she does brilliant work as a put-upon executive who had to string along poor Natalie Morales in a thankless throwaway role for four episodes.

There’s also Jon Hamm, forced to play an Elon Musk type instead of the much more fitting cowboy villain of Fargo. Remember Nicole Beharie, who they brought in for what felt like a sizeable role only for her character to fall by the wayside over the course of season three? Or Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who … well, we don’t like to talk about what they did to her. Even Julianna Margulies — not a great person, but a great actress — was given material far beneath her talents.

The latest likely to join the ranks? Marion Cotillard, an Oscar winner who deserves to lead a show beneath her talents, but instead will be served up a “meaty role” as Celine Dumont, “a savvy operator from a storied European family.” I have no idea what to expect from that, but I do know I’ll be watching because no show wastes talent as successfully as The Morning Show. It’s a real treat to watch them flush the GDP of a small country down the toilet in exchange for shiny, mediocre TV. No one does it better!