82 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
ON TELEVISION
Two Bites
Apple TV+ débuts with “ The Morning Show” and “Dickinson.”
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM
ILLUSTRATION BY YONATAN POPPER
M
idway through the dead-hearted
new Apple TV+ series “The
Morning Show,” there’s a scene that flirts
with the unruly potential the series
wastes. In it, Alex Levy, a beloved morn-
ing-TV anchor played by Jennifer Anis-
ton, hosts a swank karaoke benefit for a
Broadway charity. Naturally, she and her
news-director nemesis—a smiling cobra
played by Billy Crudup—end up sing-
ing a duet of Stephen Sondheim’s “Not
While I’m Around.” Watching them, a
minor character marvels, “What the fuck
is going on?” His companion answers,
“I don’t know, but it’s weird and fasci-
nating and I’m super into it.”
That’s basically what I was hoping for
with “The Morning Show,” the star-
crossed series set at a fictionalized “Today”
show, in the midst of the #MeToo crisis:
something flawed but electric, full of odd,
oversized media-élite gestures; something
along the lines of, say, “Smash” or “Stu-
dio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” borderline
camp dramas that I couldn’t stop watch-
ing, however hard I tried. For all its bad
buzz, “The Morning Show” has a terrific
cast, with Aniston, Steve Carell, as the
deposed anchor Mitch Kessler, and Reese
Witherspoon, as the Southern spitfire/
muckraker Bradley Jackson. It has an in-
triguingly chaotic origin story, too, hav-
ing been adapted from the book “Top of
the Morning”—which was about the bat-
tle between Matt Lauer and his co-host,
Ann Curry—only to be reconceived,
under a new showrunner, after Lauer was
fired for sexual misconduct. Early epi-
sodes of the series, which opens with
Mitch’s firing, hint, despite their clum-
siness, at promising directions: a dark
comedy about sexual harassment; a go-
girl thriller about some Katie Courics
getting payback; a taboo-flouting drama
about the complexities of #MeToo. When,
at the end of the second episode, Alex
defies her bosses and brashly announces,
in an award-acceptance speech, that Jack-
son—a scrappy nobody from Real Amer-
ica whom she’s just met—will be her new
co-anchor, my skin tingled. I’m a sucker
for any show where a character tears up
a speech and just wings it.
As Julia Roberts once told some shop-
girls: big mistake. Sadly, by its finale, “The
Morning Show” is less addictive train
wreck than glum clunker, symptomatic
of peak TV: it’s yet another lacquered,
poorly structured ten-episode story, whose
sparks are dampened as it becomes more
earnest. The best bits just make you miss
livelier shows. It has the pedantry of “The
Newsroom,” minus its screwball zest, and
the sleekness of “The Good Wife,” minus
its canny wit. If it were nuttier, it could
be “Scandal”; meaner, “Veep”; more at
ease with its characters’ amorality, “Suc-
cession.” If it had more profound insights
into Hollywood misogyny, it could be
“BoJack Horseman.” Frustratingly, the
script won’t let assholes be assholes. In-
stead, it keeps burdening us with their
divorces, their environmentalism, their
grief over their dented brands.
The best bits of “The Morning Show”
are actually its most warped, particularly
its satirical portrait of the way people,
no matter how complicit, mouth mealy
platitudes about how much they care
about the “brave victims,” even as many
of those women stand among them, si-
lent or silenced. “I feel so empowered,”
one employee says, smirking. “Do I look
empowered?” Carell certainly gives it his
all as Mitch, a self-pitying rooster con-
vinced that his comeback is imminent,
and, if it isn’t, then he’ll take the net-
work down with him. There’s an effec-
tive, creepy scene in which his charac-
ter, pitching a fellow cancelled bigwig
to direct a “nuanced” #MeToo documen-
tary, realizes that his buddy is a preda-
tor, and not, as Mitch sees himself, a vic-
tim of cultural overkill. Crudup, too, is
icily terrific, adding wit where the script
