With the most glamorous cast in a current streaming series, this thoroughly entertaining show is full of drama.
There’s a fair bit of scene chewing in Morning Wars, so it only stands to reason that Jennifer Aniston’s starry streaming series is so dramatically delicious, you’re going to eat it up.
With a cast that includes Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Bill Crudup, Mark Duplass and newcomers to season two Julianna Margulies and Valeria Golino, Morning Wars is a very appealing proposition.
The first season made a splash as Apple TV+’s most high profile – and probably most expensive – original series on the just-launched subscription streaming platform. But that first season started a little shaky before coming home strong in the back half.
Now, with a covid-imposed two-year break, Morning Wars, also known as The Morning Show outside of Australia, returns in the aftermath of its explosive season finale.
There’s a lot of drama to unspool – and make no mistake, Morning Wars is a primetime soap that revels in the melodrama of breakfast TV’s high stakes and big egos.
So, the characters are a little shouty (or a lot shouty) and it’s almost exhausting trying to figure out what everyone’s hidden agenda is in every scene, but that makes for extremely entertaining storytelling.
Especially when that story is being told through actors with as much charisma and screen presence – and of course, they’re very pretty – as the ones billed here.
Aniston’s considered and committed portrayal of the vulnerable and insecure veteran breakfast TV anchor Alex Levy won her a Screen Actor’s Guild for the first season, and she remains the star of a series with no shortage of blinding wattage.
Crudup’s Emmy-winning performance as TV network executive Cory Ellison is chaos personified, in a good way. His character is inscrutable, and you can’t ever predict which way he’ll lean. While the character has given audiences many reasons to believe he’s a good person, there’s enough mystery that you feel like you’re being gaslighted.
Even Witherspoon, who seemed miscast in the first season, is more comfortable in her feisty character’s boots – or perhaps the writers have finally shown us that Bradley Jackson is a firecracker, instead of constantly telling us she is.
And you’ll never resent the addition of Margulies to any cast. She’s a class act and she elevates every scene she’s in as a respected TV journalist and rival to Alex.
That’s just four characters out of an ensemble of roughly a dozen. Which is the great challenge for Morning Wars – it’s trying to do so much.
Morning Wars wants to play in sandbox filled with thorny subjects including MeToo and sexism, racism and privilege, cancel culture and accountability, and the viciousness of a corporate media environment.
It might’ve done better to focus on one or two of those themes if it wanted to say something meaningful about them, rather than sabotaging itself by attempting more than it could handle. On top of that, it’s doing it all through the filter of early days covid and the 2020 US election.
Morning Wars’ writers reframed their scripts when its season two production was suspended due to covid and it’s understandable why they’d want this series set in a newsroom to react to those momentous events.
But revisiting all that across a season – as opposed to The Good Fight’s condensing that same period in one flashback episode – sucks the urgency out of the series.
Eighteen months into the pandemic, and having moved into a different phase of it, there’s real fatigue around watching characters wonder whether this coronavirus in China is going to be a thing. There’s no tension there.
So, Morning Wars ends up relying on the watchability of its talent doing very dramatic things, which in itself is definitely enough to be thoroughly entertaining, but it doesn’t hit its ambitions to be more than that.
Morning Wars season two is streaming now on Apple TV+ with new episodes weekly
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2021-09-17 07:12:39Z
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