‘The Morning Show’, or the survival of autoimmune journalism

Each new season of The Morning Show (AppleTV), the series that brought together Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon —who were sisters in Friends, don’t forget, while now they are sometimes friends, sometimes enemies— appears before the viewer like a shaky building waiting to be built. And this is because the risk it runs, each time, is enormous. It is not easy to deal with journalism from the inside, and to do it, furthermore, with a documentary value that began in an improvised way: at the beginning it was just a matter of placing a bomb on a live morning show, the discovery that its host, Mitch Kessler ( a not always convincing Steve Carell) had been a sexual predator from the beginning and ended up becoming the driving force, in the background, of each new installment. Or isn’t it still the series that has most truthfully dealt with the pandemic without exactly focusing on it?

From a powerfully ambitious modesty — the series is aware that it is treating the world from the apparent frivolity of a morning show full of ridiculous advice and papier-mâché celebrities — The Morning Show impeccably portrayed the sexual offender in his work environment, the harasser who is protected and consented to by his colleagues, surrounded by sentimental corpses — women destroyed by the abuse of power, and their conversion into mere toys with no more value than the use he wants to make of them, like Hannah Shoenfeld, the young producer who is at the center of the first season although from a well-calculated second plane: the real victim is still so afraid that she even hides in the plot. A dizzying tug of war between the old world and the new world is settled, in the final episode, by the main characters.

The stars are, of course, Aniston and Witherspoon. The first plays a narcissistic television legend, Alex Levy, who was never completely comfortable in the old world, but who didn’t care because, as she herself says, “she was successful” and that was the only thing that mattered to her. Witherspoon plays an intrepid southern reporter with identity problems - she finds it difficult to recognize her sexuality - and a hyper-dysfunctional family (an alcoholic father, an addicted brother, a cruel and ruthless mother) who, above all, seeks the truth, that is, to be fair to the moment and to the people around her. After starring in a spectacular attack on the company itself at the end of the first season, in the second, one has left television to write her memoirs in an idyllic cabin in Maine, while the other is about to become news herself for her affair with another famous anchor.

It seemed difficult to create the building of that second season, with Kessler himself (Carell) out of action in Italy, but thanks to the aforementioned documentary value of the format, which included a shocking opening sequence with New York looking completely empty during the coronavirus pandemic —a drone flight that brings back something that, today, seems to have happened in a parallel reality— and addressing the pandemic from the onset with a special correspondent to Wuhan whom no one takes seriously at first. The end-of-the-world feeling that flutters throughout the season —knowing as we know how the pandemic ended, and how during the first months it was not given the importance it was going to have — perfectly captures the moment, doing what journalism does with reality through fiction: capture it.

Vulnerabilities and punishments

In the middle, Levy, still fearful of what her past could cost her in the present—an opportunistic journalist is about to publish a book in which she plans to uncover the intermittent relationship that existed between her and the predator Mitch Kessler—begins to shed her unbearable narcissism, allows herself to let her guard down, become someone else and ask for forgiveness, while Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) discovers how vulnerable a woman can be in a place of power like the one she occupies, taking the opposite path as her partenaire—in the interpretive duel, Aniston stands almost as a force of nature—and trying to protect herself without success. There is an implicit punishment in success, warns Julianna Margulies, playing Laura Peterson, another famous morning host, with whom Jackson has just begun a relationship.

The relationship meant a public outing for Jackson before she could do it for herself, and in this third season it becomes one of the threads to pull on to put the building back on its feet. The casting of Jon Hamm in the role of Paul Marks, a kind of desirable Elon Musk determined to buy the company — and with it, Aniston and Witherspoon, and their entire history —introduces the beginning of the end of the importance of television, and of news in the old format. The lack of control over a present in which privacy does not exist — and what little remains of it can end up hijacked in a cyberattack capable of erasing you and your credibility from the map — precipitates the possibility of a future in which journalism barely survives its own autoimmune disease.

Billy Crudup (a superb Cory Ellison, the charming two-faced tycoon who may try to bring you down or rescue you with the sole purpose of staying afloat) said it at one point in the first season: “What we are fighting is a battle for the soul of the universe.” Under the mechanism of fiction, The Morning Show is showing how human beings are trying to redirect the ship and how the system they have created is acting as a storm that prevents them from doing so. “They are not earthquakes, they are people,” says at another point one of the network’s directors, Cybil Reynolds (Holland Taylor), demanding that the destruction they cause be avoided in time, but forgetting that the environment in which it moves — that of information—is agonizing over its own medicine, which it still believes can save it: the disease of clickbait.

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