I didn’t think it was possible for The Morning Show to be more chaotic than its first season, but they proved me wrong. Now, just because it was more chaotic doesn’t mean it was any less entertaining. Less satisfying? Maybe. But let’s dig into that below.
Season one literally cut to static right after Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson blew the whistle on all of the misconduct going on at The Morning Show and UBA in general. This second season picks up not too long after that all went down, but also just before any of this pandemic nonsense started being taken seriously. In the aftermath of blowing the whistle, Alex leaves the show, and Bradley, Cory, and Chip all get canned. Somehow Bradley gets both her and Cory’s jobs back, and now Cory is taking head honcho responsibilities more seriously than antics displayed last season. Bradley’s got a new co-anchor who manages to snag a late night news coverage positions from her and then Cory drops the bomb that Alex is coming back.
It took a lot of convincing and a lot of promises and money, but Alex agreed to it and is then immediately overwhelmed. But the biggest threat looming over her head is reporter Maggie Brenner’s upcoming book which is implied to deal heavily with scandalous stories about Alex. She’s got Chip back as her producer and he tries his best to help her stay positive, but Alex is a mean ticking time bomb. There’s only so much he can do as her producer and friend before it’s not worth it anymore. Meanwhile, Bradley is dealing with some seemingly newfound bisexuality, which is fine and all if I didn’t think (and the show implies) that she had something going with Cory. Now, Cory gets his payback (I think) in an awful way, by outing Bradley to a huge news outlet, but it sort of helps center herself and realize that it doesn’t matter what people think of her. Least of all her family. However, her brother is a wreck, and at her core, she’ll always be the big sister trying to protect her brother even at the cost of her budding relationship with fellow UBA employee, Laura Peterson.
As if all of that isn’t enough, Mitch has been hiding out in some Italian mansion. While his transgressions have followed him overseas, he still manages to form a meaningful relationship with a fresh documentarian, Paola. She gets him to open up and reveal that he never wanted to be a bad person, but he was blind to how awful he was. Certainly he feels remorse for what happened to Hannah last season, but too little too late. In fact, it’s definitely too little too late from the network, which means UBA is getting sued by Hannah’s parents for 119 million dollars, which is the same amount paid to scumbag former head of UBA, Fred Micklen for him to go away. It seems that the whole season UBA is only doing the bare minimum to cover their asses.
And that’s also a reflection of the writing this season. They try and cover too much, but just end up breezing past most of it. They try and cover Asian hate, racism in general, Me Too, and COVID in only ten episodes. While that seems like plenty of time, it’s hard to give those very serious topics the attention they deserve while also digging into the nitty gritty details of everyone’s personal lives and relationships. I think they could have benefited from either not jumping so far forward in time, or moving past COVID in general. I know this show is about a news network and is trying to be as current as it can be, but it was even too late to the Me Too movement in its first season in my opinion. Make the show more fictional and cover issues in your own time. And less of them.
With all of that being said, I did really enjoy the season. Not to the degree of the first, but that was because I went in with such a low bar that it surprised the heck out of me! I enjoyed some of the newer characters they introduced this season, such as Stella and Laura, but I didn’t like the changes they implemented in Bradley. Also, Alex was absolutely insufferable this season! Chip was right to freak out on her as many times as he did, whether it was to her face or over voicemail. I loved the scene of Chip and Alex fighting in the car – pure comedy. Also, I think it was wise with what ended up happening to Steve Carell’s character this season. Honestly, even though he was trying to redeem himself, with him still around, Alex will always be just a little bit awful. If they do get picked up for another season, it’ll be interesting to see what direction it all takes. Lord knows there’s still an unbelievable amount of stuff that happened globally in 2020 that they could cover, but 2021 has been sort of a shit show, too. The world’s The Morning Show‘s oyster of chaos.