It’s the biggest question I have left about Apple TV’s The Morning Show, as a critic who has now watched two seasons of the program: Why does this program always feel about two steps behind the times?The first season was an extended dramatization of a Matt Lauer-style #metoo scandal, which debuted about two years after Lauer was fired by NBC’s Today show in real life after receiving a complaint about “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” The current season has used last year’s emergence of the pandemic as a backdrop, telling a story that includes its Lauer avatar – played by a mopey, philosophical Steve Carell – killing himself in a car crash.Launched the same day Apple TV+ debuted in 2019, The Morning Show was supposed to be star-studded evidence that Apple was a player in the original scripted series streaming game.
But another reason this series feels so out-of-step to me — someone who watches the broadcast networks’ morning shows practically every weekday – is because of who The Morning Show features as top anchors on its fictional program.For most of series’ two seasons, the top anchors have been white people.
And when the program’s Black executive producer literally begs him to come back, Daniel refuses, saying, if he returns, “I’ll keep languishing, waiting for a seat at the table, when I can make a table of my own.”Huh? He is offered the job he’s been whining about not getting for nearly two seasons, and he turns it down?The producer who calls Daniel, Karen Pittman’s Mia Jordan, tells him Black people always have to deal with disappointments in the workplace.
That’s also how Lester Holt made history as the first African American to be sole lead news anchor at a broadcast network, taking over the NBC Nightly News after the fall of Brian Williams.In the television business, possession of the anchor seat is a powerful thing.
As is often the case with other shows, the oversights and missed opportunities here regarding characters of color are just symptoms of a larger storytelling problem.
One of The Morning Show’s obvious problems, was that it didn’t seem to figure out exactly what it wanted to say about Carell’s character Mitch Kessler.
In particular, when she must write a script reporting that Kessler has died, Mia has an emotional moment where she veers from horror at his death to anger and more.But quality scenes like those are fleeting on The Morning Show, which hands great gobs of story to Aniston, Witherspoon, Margulies and Marcia Gay Harden, playing a journalist who has written a tell-all book about Kessler, Levy and UBA’s scandals.
To feed the drama, these characters – particularly Carell and Aniston’s – whiplash between outrageously selfish acts that make them look like terrible human beings and other actions that redeem them.