Bradley is concerned about how Alex is holding up, but she’s also got problems of her own: Her brother, an addict, has been missing for two days after Bradley cut ties with him.
Don’t let your shame of what other people think run your life.” In the final minutes of the episode, we see Bradley reuniting with her brother, choosing the mess and chaos of owning the difficult parts of her life versus cutting them off.
After a three-episode arc painstakingly laid the groundwork for Alex to return to TMS, only to have her ghost a presidential debate and disappear off to Italy, my first reaction was, What the hell is happening? My second was, Maybe this is the show we deserve right now.
Bradley, who enters into a relationship with the UBA anchor Laura Peterson because she is drawn to her ironclad no-drama mantra, realizes that as much as she respects Laura’s perspective, she’s not ready to exile her brother or disown her past.
She explains to Bradley that as an adult, it’s up to you to decide how to handle the traumatic things that have happened to you—do you seek support to work through them, or do you let them pull you down? This question comes into particular focus when Bradley’s brother Hal, who is bipolar and struggles with drug addiction, crashes the TMS offices, belting out Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” while breaking crockery.
She spends the whole season in damage control mode: surprised that some of her coworkers aren’t jazzed to see her; desperately trying to get a muckraking author to remove the allegations about her and Mitch from her book; flying to Italy to get Mitch to sign a statement that they never slept together.
For Alex, who must instantly, publicly denounce Mitch, there is no room for the kind of process that Laura talks about—reckoning with painful truths, doing the personal work that allows you to move on.
Aniston does amazing work in this role, not only because it plays to her comic strengths but because of how deftly she can switch between the Alex in front of the camera and the one behind it, the way her girl-next-door glow freezes over the moment filming stops.
As much as I admire Laura and her chaos-avoidant worldview—and kind of wish she would come and tell me what to do with my life—we cannot all escape to our ranch in Montana.