'The Morning Show' Is Not Dumb Enough To Be This Irrelevant

I miss the idiocy of season two of The Morning Show, back when Steve Carell was playing Matt Lauer, living somewhere in Europe, having an affair with a French woman who didn’t care, and driving to his death off a cliff while going out to buy a pack of cigarettes. I miss the lesbian affair between Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) and Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies), the occasional appearance of Holland Taylor to chew some scenery, and the mess. All that mess!

The thing about The Morning Show is that it either needs to be a messy but entertaining soap opera or offer slightly tone-deaf commentary on America’s political and social landscape. I miss when it flexed its MeToo muscle and mocked Elon Musk types who were also as dead sexy as Jon Hamm.

The Morning Show needs to be bad but fun or good but relevant. Right now, it’s mostly neither. In the fourth season, the writers decided to avoid politics altogether, which is a strange choice for a show about a news program when the only thing the news cares about right now is politics. This season takes place before the election, yet the show hasn’t even mentioned the biggest event of 2024. The Newsroom would have made a meal out of 2024! It would’ve been a smug, self-righteous meal that left everyone cringing, but it would’ve been a meal!

The Morning Show, instead, is dealing with the network’s cover-up of some vague environmental disaster that killed a bunch of birds and maybe some people, like it’s 1998 and people still cared about A Civil Action. It’s not really clear, and I don’t think it even matters, except to pit characters against each other. In this week’s episode, the door blew off a fake commercial airline, and it looked like the series might revisit the Boeing tragedies of five years ago, but it didn’t even go there. It was mostly just an excuse to stop Yanko from doing a ridiculous on-air proposal to his wife because the character might be having second thoughts after someone from his past returned for the first time since 2019, and we’re supposed to remember what that was even about? (Yanko and Claire had a consensual workplace affair in a minor subplot during season one, FYI.)

Remember all the complaints last season about the lack of screen time for Nicole Beharie’s character? Did they fix that? They did not. She’s probably had ten minutes of screen time total this season. Meanwhile, Karen Pittman’s Mia is out, at least temporarily, because she quit after being passed over as head of the news. Again. And Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy is preoccupied with her father’s plagiarism scandal, which mostly exists so the show can bring in Jeremy Irons to be mean. It’s what Jeremy Irons does best.

Granted, the season isn’t a total waste. Cory (Billy Crudup) is still his delightfully slimy, charming self, and he and Bradley Jackson are having an affair that’s only interesting because Bradley just found out her secret boyfriend is behind the cover-up she’s investigating. Also, it’s weird because Reese Witherspoon characters don’t date Cory types, although Reese Witherspoon herself decidedly does.

Far more interesting, though, is what’s going on between Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard) — the new head of the company — and her husband, Miles (Aaron Pierre), who’s having an affair with Stella (Greta Lee), while Cory holds all the secrets. Can The Morning Show just be about this? Because this is delicious, and I’m very excited to see what Celine does after discovering the affair. I just wish the series didn’t have to spend so much time on the stars, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, because it’s like a cat standing in front of the television while you’re trying to watch the good stuff. Only I can’t wave them away. I’ve tried!

And that’s my assessment of season four of The Morning Show so far: it needs more mess or more politics. What it can’t do is hug the center line because no one ever veers off a cliff that way.