‘The Morning Show’: 8 Wildest Moments, From Jon Hamm to Jan. 6

The Morning Show’s first season essentially took place in a timeline nearly identical to our own, except theirs had a temporarily brunette Witherspoon and a Gilmore Girls Broadway musical. Sure, the events that inspired its main plot had taken place years earlier in real life, but since they were mapped onto fictional characters, it didn’t matter.

However, the show’s poor creatives were thrown for a loop once again thanks to the onset of Covid-19. The Morning Show prides itself on tackling hot-button issues with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, so ignoring the pandemic wasn’t an option. Given that Season One wrapped up in 2019, the writers were given the tough task of catching up with current events by the time Season Two finally came back in the fall of 2021.

For better or often worse, The Morning Show ultimately stuck with a media res approach, perpetually stranding its characters at least a year behind our present timeline. In Season Two, that meant spooling the season’s events over the first few months of 2020, sneaking in blunt references to Covid, and forcing us all to relive that awful March — but this time, through the lens of fictional newsroom drama!

Season Three improved somewhat on this front, even if the show’s attempts at tying recent traumatic events into melodramatic storylines are usually clumsy at best. Sure, you might remember where you were when you found out that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned. Now, you can relive that horror alongside your favorite Morning Show characters as they attend a Valentino event! Ah, the magic of television.

As someone raised on the Tumblr heyday of the early 2010s, I have witnessed many a queerbait. Back then, it was common for young queer women to joke about trudging through six seasons of a truly woeful CW series on the off chance that said show’s flirty leads would finally exchange a kiss.

But as queerness has entered the mainstream more and more, these calls for representation have sparked a newer media trend in which a film or show throws two conventionally hot stars together in queer storylines that seem specifically engineered to capitalize on online shipping culture, chemistry and nuance be damned. The Morning Show, god bless it, has offered up one of the worst examples of this trend through the pairing of Bradley and rival news anchor Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies).

On paper, sure! Why not? The Morning Show has become such a fever dream of a show that some gay, inter-network drama should feel right at home. Unfortunately, from the moment they lock lips seemingly out of the blue in Season Two, Witherspoon and Margulies have about as much chemistry with each other as I have with my dental hygienist. 

I’m inclined to blame the casting department. The Morning Show loves nothing more than adding a new A-list star to its roster, Infinity Stone-style, and seemingly figuring out what to do with them later. Once Margulies was on board, why bother with a chemistry test?! As the show has progressed, their unconvincing (to the point of verging on homophobia) romance has at least granted the writers opportunities to touch on more nuanced issues like navigating the workplace as a queer woman in a high-profile position, or how classism and wildly different socioeconomic backgrounds can divide a couple. But if we’re sticking with this for the long haul, do some trust-fall exercises ahead of Season Four, I beg!

Apart from star power, I couldn’t tell you why Carrell stuck around on The Morning Show after his character Mitch was ousted from morning news once his workplace sexual misconduct came to light. We inexplicably follow him on vacation to Italy in Season Two, where he jumps on an opportunity to “redeem” himself by helping local documentarian Paola work on her film about a wrongfully overturned rape conviction.

Thankfully, the show’s bizarre attempts to humanize Mitch didn’t even last an entire season. In Season Two’s seventh episode (titled “La Amara Vita”), he gets into a car accident that sends him flying into Lake Como as gentle piano music plays, which is honestly far more than he deserved.

What if instead of spending the early days of the Covid lockdown cringing away from a bunch of celebrities’ rendition of “Imagine,” you were subjected to a livestream of a morning show anchor hacking her way through a positive case? For some reason, this is invaluable journalism in the world of The Morning Show, because interviewing frontline nurses and patients is so overdone. After catching an early Covid case at the end of Season Two, a delirious Alex goes live and somehow wins over the whole of America in the process.

“She [suffered] through a biblical plague on live TV to become the one human that people can actually relate to in this shitshow of a so-called democracy,” Cory crows in the Season Three premiere. “Alex Levy is Lazarus.”

And I’m closing the New Testament!

The Morning Show Season Three opens with a treacly unaired in-memoriam segment dedicated to one Alex Levy. But don’t worry, she didn’t die of Covid. They’re just taking precautions in case she dies in space!

That’s right, the latest season kicks off with a ride aboard Elon Musk’s infamous penis-shaped rocket. However, its owner isn’t Elon per se, but a thinly veiled, infinitely more watchable stand-in character named Paul Marks, played by the one and only Jon Hamm. 

Amid weaselly CEO Cory’s best attempts to cozy up to Paul, UBA decides to send him and Alex to join Paul on his rocket’s inaugural launch, which will be livestreamed on the network. After Alex ditches her team following an argument with Cory, it’s Bradley who ultimately leaves the stratosphere alongside the two men. 

Things get dicey when the rocket’s live feed temporarily cuts out, a tech issue that Paul successfully pins on UBA for most of the season. Luckily, since the first two episodes of Season Three were released simultaneously, viewers only had to wait 30 seconds to learn that (shocker) Witherspoon, Crudup, and Hamm had not been killed off in the premiere after all. Honestly, I’m just impressed that the writers had the restraint to wait until the season finale to make a phallic rocket joke!

One thing I will say for The Morning Show? It gives Karen Pittman a hell of a lot more to do than the equally bonkers series And Just Like That… 

This year, the show uses the war in Ukraine to tell a wild tale about longtime producer Mia’s (Pittman) love life. Season Three, Episode Five (titled “Love Island”) drags us, poor viewers, back in time to the cursed year 2020 once again, revealing how each of our characters spent lockdown following Alex’s death-defying Covid livestream. At first, Mia found a bright spot in the chaos, entering a quarantine pod with her new flame, a hunky photographer named André (Clive Standen).

Their honeymoon phase comes to an abrupt end when André goes out drinking pre-vaccine, sending an understandably pissed Mia out the door. But before they can hash things out, the AP sends André on an assignment to Afghanistan, which lands him on the ground in the Russia-Ukraine war by the time Season Three’s main timeline picks up in the spring of 2022.

The two have kept in touch even as André faces increasingly dangerous assignments until he goes radio silent following a hospital bombing. So imagine Mia’s surprise when she discovers that her man is alive and well in America. He let her think he was dead, and in a betrayal that the show seems to take equally seriously, he started working for a rival news network in the meantime. The audacity!

If you thought the Amy Robach and TJ Holmes affair scandal seemed like something straight out of The Morning Show, you ain’t seen nothing yet! This year, the show bravely answered the question: “What if Katie Couric dated Elon Musk, but in a prestige-soap-opera way?”

Much like how Billy Crudup’s Morning Show performance often carries the essence of the only human in a Muppet movie, Hamm’s suave, shifty performance manages to ground the show in some semblance of reality, no matter how zany things become. Sure, his character Paul Marks is a billionaire with a penis rocket and some questionable secret business practices. But where the actual Musk is immediately smarmy and retaliatory, Paul’s skill at remaining just enigmatic and charismatic enough to mask his shadowy intentions makes him an infinitely more watchable fictional counterpart.

Yeah, he’s a baddie who absolutely shouldn’t be getting into bed (in more ways than one) with the on-air talent of the company he’s trying to acquire and secretly strip for parts. But when he aims that sizzling Don Draper charm at Alex for six episodes, it’s easy to shut off your brain and buy into their ill-advised affair.

All of The Morning Show’s clunky takes on real-world news were worth it in the end. Why? Because I had the pleasure of experiencing the Bradley Jackson Jan. 6 arc in all its ludicrous, absurdly hilarious glory. 

In the Season Three premiere, Bradley receives a journalism award for reporting from inside the Capitol during the 2021 insurrection. It’s all fine and dandy, except for some weird exchanges she keeps having with Cory, with whom she apparently shares a secret. Flash forward to “Love Island,” where we learn that while Bradley was at the Capitol recording footage, she came across a rioter assaulting a police officer, only to discover that said rioter is her brother, Hal (Joe Tippett).

To make matters worse, Bradley deletes the incriminating footage of her brother and gets Cory involved in the process. She agrees to turn herself in alongside Hal at the very end of the season, but how exactly we’re supposed to root for her and Alex as principled journalists in Season Four, I have no idea.

Still, this blend of baffling current events and ridiculous yet undeniably entertaining melodrama is where The Morning Show is at its most watchable. So, if this show picks up in 2025 with Alex moving into a moon colony and Bradley helping Marianne Williamson secure the Democratic presidential nomination, I’m all in.