When screenwriter, playwright, television scenarist, and denouncer of leftist pieties and prejudices Paddy Chayefsky wrote the movie Network in 1976, he made television seem awfully small. Here was a film, released by that most forward-looking of studios, United Artists, with A-list movie stars (Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall) and several bona fide screen legends (William Holden, Peter Finch) appearing as assorted on-air and behind-the-scenes personnel from a fictitious broadcast network. Because of the trenchant tone of the film and the magnitude of its cast, Network had the effect of diminishing its subject, cutting it down to size. The movie made TV seem tawdry, cheap, and as disposable as a pack of gum.
The Apple TV+ series The Morning Show has a near-identical setting and similar star power: Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and a dizzying supporting cast that, at various points, has included Billy Crudup, Julianna Margulies, and Marion Cotillard. But it is not Network, neither in greatness nor impact. This series comes not to bury broadcast television but to make legacy media — even when seen through the lens of a made-up morning show on a made-up network with lots of over-the-top characters — seem important and worth caring about. Of course, the show’s writers acknowledge that they are depicting what one character calls “the last fledgling embers of a formerly great media empire,” but all the effort and energy expended to portray that empire suggests a desperate attempt to extend the relevance of legacy media.
Why do so many recent movies and shows devote themselves to romanticizing once-prominent media institutions now on life support — a local newspaper in Peacock’s The Paper, or a certain moldy sketch comedy show in last fall’s feature film Saturday Night? Perhaps a comedy-drama depicting the machinations of morning television might have had some bite six years ago, but, amid the vanquishing of legacy media by podcasts, Substacks, and other options for edification, it seems beyond passé. In the present environment, to produce a series about broadcast news has all the logic of making a show about the last days of the VCR or the decline of the car phone.
True, The Morning Show strives to incorporate the ever-changing landscape into its storylines — talk of mergers and acquisitions has taken up untold hours on the show, and the ongoing fourth season has much to do with deepfakes and the manosphere. But for most viewers, that new landscape is old, old news. It would be news if anyone who watches The Morning Show still tunes in to the real network programming that inspires it.
There was, however, some inspiration in the original conception of the show, which was created by Jay Carson and drew upon Brian Stelter’s 2013 nonfiction book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV. Premiering in the fall of 2019, the series had the advantage of emerging amid the fever pitch of the #MeToo movement, which it piggybacked on but captured with a rare note of complexity when considering the personal conduct of public figures. Aniston starred as Alex Levy, the spiky, driven cohost of the titular sunrise news show on a network called UBA, but she was by no means the only central figure early on. Her comrade in daytime programming arms was Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), whose popular, extravagantly remunerated tenure had concluded before the first episode of the first season had barely gotten underway: Kessler is given the heave-ho, from UBA and from polite society generally, on the heels of allegations of sexual misdeeds in the workplace. The acting was credible, especially that of Carell, who traded the supercilious superficiality of his goofy antecedents to the part (his role on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and his turn in Anchorman) for the tragically flawed humanity of Kessler.
Back then, the show had a raison d’être, but as a measure of its increasing irrelevance, consider how long it feels since real-life morning show anchors Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose were yanked from the airwaves following accusations of their own bad behavior — the cultural context in which The Morning Show was hatched.
Undaunted, the series’s producers persisted in the belief that a network morning show remained a compelling setting from which to view the various traumas of recent years — a kind of window on the world, in Today Show parlance, though without the heat-seeking focus of the first season. In successive seasons, Alex powered her way through COVID-19, the UBA team was wounded by a hack, and on-the-rise UBA anchor Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) committed all manner of ethical breaches in tidying up after her wastrel brother Hal (Joe Tippett), a participant in the Jan. 6 riot. Increasingly, the show traded fascination for cringe.
These plotlines were chosen for their perceived topicality, but they always pointed back to the show’s real interest: network television, which is portrayed with gargantuan self-importance. Movies about journalism have always preferred this overwrought tone; on the basis of All the President’s Men (1976), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), and Spotlight (2015), what Robert Redford, George Clooney, and Michael Keaton really wanted to do when they grew up was become reporters. But in an era when the decline of legacy media is no longer an ominous prediction but a present fact, it is difficult to get too worked up about the meant-to-be-scary prospect of UBA being gobbled up by an evil Silicon Valley billionaire, Paul Marks (Jon Hamm). To get involved with the show requires buying into the notion that network television is a cultural institution that deserves Mount Rushmore-like permanence. “You silenced a journalist!” Alex bleats at one point — a really bad thing, but shows such as this tend to make it sound like the worst possible thing.
The fourth season unfolds at what is now UBN, an entity formed when Alex puts together a merger of UBA and another network, NBN (Presumably this was written before MSNBC decided to call itself MS NOW). As ever, the network is convulsed with all manner of timely problems, including the cultivation of artificial intelligence in furtherance of the network’s Olympics coverage as well as layoffs and general belt-tightening.
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Bradley, having been exiled to West Virginia for her crimes, is beckoned back to the network — a sign that the series, aware it is likely on the clock, is embracing the logic of uncancel culture. Meanwhile, amid UBN’s coverage of the Olympics, Alex facilitates the defection of a young Iranian Olympian and her father, Bradley is barraged with anonymous tips relating to an environmental issue, and the entire enterprise titters nervously at the rising popularity of a bro-style podcaster dubbed, with notable lack of originality, Bro (Boyd Holbrook). Yet one is always aware that these characters care far more about their network than we ever possibly can, which of course accounts for their increasingly soap opera-ish conduct: Only true believers — in the fourth estate, in their own virtue, in their hunger for power, whatever — could engage in so many deals, side-deals, and double-crossings.
There is nothing especially bad about this show. Aniston believably vacillates between professionalism, corruption, woe, and indignation, and Witherspoon effortlessly projects her character’s down-home appeal. The direction is high-speed, like an Aaron Sorkin show. Carell is missed, but Crudup, Cotillard, and Greta Lee are excellent. Yet its references to podcasters, tech billionaires, and deepfakes already feel like yesterday’s news. Years after its release, Network stayed relevant because its target (the three networks) remained prominent on the American scene. But if The Morning Show keeps going for two or three more seasons, there is the very real possibility that it will outlive its subject. In the world of late-night, Stephen Colbert became captive to Trump Derangement Syndrome, and then they came for Jimmy Kimmel — are you telling me that morning TV is safe?
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
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