Look, fans of The Morning Show understand what we are getting into with this series by now. If you are considering purchasing the Season 3 DVD, you are either a completionist who likes to have physical media on your shelf, or you are fully addicted to this specific brand of expensive, glossy nonsense this show peddles. By now, the show has given up pretending to be a serious piece of modern journalistic thought and has transformed into a full-blown corporate soap opera. Season 3 is the one where it embraces its true nature.
Lets start with the packaging, because it was the reason for your twenty-plus dollar purchase in the first place. Not much to say, beyond it is a standard multi-disc affair. Nothing fancy, but if you wanted luxury, you would get the blu-ray. The video quality is perfectly fine for standard definition, despite how absurd watching an episode that cost tens of millions of dollars to make look incredibly cinematic on Apple TV+. The show holds its own with the standard DVD compression, but it becomes clear during the dark, moody boardroom scene that the color palette loses some of its depth. The audio tracks are clean, which is important, because most of this shows involves people screaming over each other in glass offices or whispering conspiratorially in the back of town cars.
Talking about the content, which comprises of ten episodes that altogether last just under nine hours, we have an accelerated, breathless sprint of a storyline. At the center of the season is a cyberattack on the fictional news network, UBA, where all these beautiful, angst-ridden characters work. The attack leaks the emails of all the employees, which creates a convenient source of drama, as well as a looming corporate takeover by the tech billionaire Paul Marks (played brilliantly by Jon Hamm).
Adding Jon Hamm to the mix was probably the smartest move The Morning Show could have made. He effortlessly embodies the tech bro billionaire archetype in the role of Paul, whose presence is the catalyst for nearly every relationship in the show. Paul and Jennifer Aniston’s character (who is named Alex Levy) are engaged in a drawn-out affair, and the show’s best moments come from watching this dysfunctional dynamic play out in real time.
Aniston is the anchor for the entire piece, and the show evolves from the first two seasons, where we were never sure whether Alex was a hero or a villain, to Alex being an incredibly powerful, yet flawed person who seeks to gain a permanent seat at the corporate table. She wants to move beyond just a morning news show and build a legacy she can be proud of, but she has the talent and the ambition to do so.
Reese Witherspoon is Bradley Jackson, and she is the most problematic part of the season. We see her storyline, which traces back to the January 6th Capitol riot, jump from one topic to another. As a result, we are left reeling from the absurdity of it all, but in a good way. Through a series of events that are too complicated to explain, Bradley finds herself covering the riot, her brother is accused of being involved in violence against the Capitol, and she decides to leak the footage in order to protect him. The ethics of the situation are, arguably, the most controversial part of the season, because there is no way around the massive scale of the action Bradley commits. The show asks us to sympathize with her, because of her family, but it is clear the woman has become a corrupt force of nature who should be held accountable for her actions. That said, this is not really a show about journalism, the ethics of it or its integrity. It is a show about billionaires doing stupid things and saving themselves with their wealth.
The best part of the show, hands-down, is Billy Crudup as Cory Ellison. Cory is the CEO of UBA, and Crudup imbues the character with a manic energy of a theater school dropout who somehow got a heart of gold. Everything he says is weirdly rhythmic and comes out in a strange pattern. He smiles through all the chaos as if he is witnessing the destruction of the town square and thinks it looks exciting. Cory undergoes the most development in the third season, where he tries to get the deal through with Jon Hamm’s character (while, simultaneously, getting the network out of the hands of their abusive corporate overlords). All of this while he deals with the fallout of the secrets being revealed, as well as the toxic obsession with Bradley that he thought he left behind. As Cory descends into madness in the final stretch of the season, Crudup is right there with the performance. He conveys the panic and the desperation in Cory’s soul perfectly, and the sweaty intensity of the scenes in which he is losing his grip on reality is something to behold.
The show has a tendency to take real-world events and turn them into a Hollywood melodrama. Besides the January 6th coverage, we get a war in Ukraine, abortion rights, and a range of other topics. However, with the exception of a few topics, like the gender wage gap, these are all used as an backdrop for interpersonal drama. The show wants to focus on bigger issues, but it always goes for the convenient confrontation. The show is all about corporate ethics, but it would rather have Alex Levy (played by Jennifer Aniston) go all-in on her rival for the morning show anchor seat, instead of having an actual, meaningful conversation with one of the many women of color who have been wronged by the system. This is why the transitions between the episodes can often feel like whiplash – because one moment, you are supposed to be discussing the corporate racism with Nicole Beharie’s character (Chris Hunter, who is a fantastic addition to the anchor desk), and the next – Aniston is blasting off into space on a billionaire’s rocket, because the show needed a dramatic opening scene.
The end result of the season is a fast-paced, corporate betrayal-fueled farce that is reminiscent of Succession in some ways. The show exposes the inner workings of its industry, but it does so in the most shallow way imaginable – the characters are all narcissists who love themselves too much to actually work together. The biggest secrets are revealed, the most crucial alliances are broken within the span of a few board meetings, the characters throw everything they have at one another’s necks just to feel better about themselves in the end. It is all terribly entertaining, if a bit of a diet version of a full-on prestige drama.
The people who buy the DVD know what they want – they want to see beautiful people in expensive coats yelling at each other in high-end New York apartments while the world burns around them. It is not high art, and it certainly is not a realistic depiction of how newsrooms work. However, as an indulgent piece of glossy nonsense that features actors who are willing to have fun chewing the scenery, it works perfectly. The DVD package delivers on exactly what the title promises – it is ten episodes of beautiful nonsense you can devour on the weekend, when you want to feel better about your own life choices.
The Morning Show Season 3 is available to own on DVD today!
Comments