Watching The Morning Show, Apple TV+’s messy, star-studded morning news drama whose second season premiered this fall, is for me a very vocal experience – the road from concept to execution so bumpy and the choices so chaotic as to provoke several guffaws an episode.
The biggest “NO” comes in the beginning of the second season’s third episode: Daniel Henderson, co-anchor of the fictional Morning Show on the fictional UBA network, is quarantining in Beijing after exposure to a novel coronavirus in January 2020?
As Alison Herman put it in the Ringer: “There’s a thin line between bad and good-bad, but once a show crosses it, there’s nothing to do but go all in.” Midway through its second season, The Morning Show is not the prestige tentpole drama it aimed to be, but it may be the most compelling mess on TV.
It’s hard to remember now, but its premiere in the fall of 2019 was awash in hype: a high-wattage show about a TV show, a loosely inspired adaptation of a book about morning show drama to the #MeToo era, Apple TV+’s marquee offering with a full prestige budget.
It’s not that The Morning Show has gotten better, or even hit its stride, in season two – It’s just gotten bigger and soapier, with big-name additions (Holland Taylor as the UBA board chairman, Julianna Margulies as an ex-daytime anchor and Bradley’s love interest), as Ted Lasso has lifted the burden of anchoring Apple TV+’s success.
The first half of the second season takes place in early 2020.
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