The Morning Show ’s Best Character Isn’t a Hero. He’s Far More Interesting Than That.

It has always been hard to tell what kind of show Apple TV+’s The Morning Show wants to be—a straight-up workplace drama? A camp masterpiece? An issue-driven polemic? Maybe just a delightfully watchable hot mess? The series, which kicked off with a surprisingly nuanced #MeToo storyline in its first season before pivoting to the pandemic in its second, is back with a third season that has ricocheted from suborbital space to a massive cyberattack to high-handed discussions of the First Amendment and systemic racism. Such lofty ambitions, interspersed with soap-opera antics and a sky-high budget, are a recipe for chaos. But one thing that’s clear, three seasons in, is that this chaos is a feature, not a bug, and no character embodies this more than Cory Ellison, the CEO of the UBA network.

Cory is the character who seems to thrive on a tidal wave of dysfunction. Played with a dark, layered charm by Billy Crudup, whose I-dare-you-to-call-my-bluff line readings could be the subject of an entire seminar at Juilliard, Cory was a breakout character in Season 1, an underdog whose Midas touch in programming catapulted him into the top job at UBA’s news division. Cory kept his cards close to his vest, a contrast to the gushing dysfunction that flowed from Alex (Jennifer Aniston), Bradley (Reese Witherspoon), and the rest of the TMS cast and crew. An early scene where he and Alex circle each other, singing the Stephen Sondheim duet “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd, pointed to the kind of smart, thrillingly off-balance show this could be. “I don’t know what’s [going on],” says Yanko, TMS’s weatherman, speaking for all of us, “but it’s weird and fascinating and I’m super into it.”

So it was utterly baffling when the showrunners made the decision, in Season 2, to have Cory, this elegant, brilliant weirdo, fall back on the most clichéd, cringey move of all: declaring his love for Bradley in the streets of New York as the city teeters on the brink of COVID catastrophe. Not only did it feel misguided (to put it nicely) for the show to go into full, hetero, rom-com mode after investing significant narrative capital in developing a relationship between Bradley and Laura Peterson (the ever-wonderful Julianna Margulies), but even Crudup couldn’t sell it.

The Morning Show tends to confuse character development with pressing replay—Bradley just wants to report the news! Alex just wants her seat at the table!—so one of the biggest questions hanging over Season 3 was how it would handle Cory. Thankfully, aside from one or two awkward references to the confession, the show seems to have adopted creative amnesia when it comes to the Bradley/Cory love-that-wasn’t, focusing instead on Cory’s internality, which up until now has remained a cipher.

In a storyline that drafts off Succession, Cory woos Paul Marks, a billionaire whose tsunami of tech money is positioned as UBA’s savior (Cory and Paul even namecheck Jesus and Lazarus during their merger discussions). In the opening episode, Marks, played by Jon Hamm with the kind of inscrutable cool that must make Elon Musk squirm, brings the TMS team on the maiden launch of his Hyperion spacecraft, purely a business decision meant to burnish UBA’s brand while making space look “as safe as Cinnabons.” And yet, for a moment, Cory floats above the dealmaking. Looking down at Earth, he quotes the Buddhist idea of enlightenment—“the all-knowing mind, empty and radiant.”

It’s a supple joke, because the idea of Cory—driven by an ambition that burns hotter than the surface of the sun—relating to the Buddha, who gave up all material and earthly desires to achieve enlightenment, is pretty funny. But it also speaks to a central tension, revolving around the idea that peace can only come when you let everything else go. Cory is not a person who can let go. But what makes him tick doesn’t seem to be just standard-issue, corner-office ambition, either. Maybe a man who knows a Buddhist text well enough to quote it while in zero-gravity space has spent some time thinking on this, but Cory seems to understand that power alone isn’t enough, even as he seeks more and more of it.

This comes to a head in this season’s fourth episode, which primarily unfolds during an upfronts party for advertisers at Cory’s Hamptons pad. His mansion, as vast and neutral as a Marriott, is supposed to represent Cory’s success, but it feels as chilly as the Grinch’s lair. There, Cory learns that his nemesis, UBA’s former CEO Fred Micklen, has been hired off the books to monitor UBA’s loan. As he stares off into the dark, channeling the ghost of Kendall Roy, a helicopter lands on the beach and Alex and Paul Marks disembark, their arrival reviving the deal that would allow Cory to throw off the Fred Micklens of the world forever. You get the sense that, for Cory, the electric possibility of an idea makes him feel more alive than anything reality can deliver.

It’s no coincidence that the episode is named “The Green Light,” a nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, wherein Jay Gatsby gazes across the water at the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, the idea of her from his past more real and moving than any reality. Even Cory’s waterfront “West End stunner” feels like a reference to Fitzgerald’s fictional West Egg, the less exclusive Long Island enclave where Gatsby lived, as opposed to Daisy and Tom’s old-money East Egg. The Great Gatsby is about longing, and the limits of reinvention and the American Dream, and there are shades of Gatsby to Cory, an outsider who slings into the CEO seat out of nowhere, his molten ambition equaled only by the emptiness we see on his face when no one is watching. Gatsby hungered for an idea so much he bent his whole life around it, even if his dream could never regain the charge of the past. With Cory’s frenetic desire to build an empire, we see a more ruthless side of him, and a suggestion that what makes him run may not just be ambition but something darker.

Even with his piles of money and his cold pleasure dome, Cory draws power from feeling like an underdog. When the suits underwriting UBA’s loan tell him, in a subtle power move, that they should meet up at the ultra-exclusive Maidstone Club in East Hampton, Cory returns an acid volley: “Of all the antisemitic clubs, that one’s my favorite.” It’s this unpredictability, this refusal to ever thumb under, that makes Cory fascinating.

What it doesn’t make him, though, is a hero. In a move that would have made Littlefinger proud, Cory uses a massive hack that lays UBA bare to his advantage, leaking a racist email from the UBA board chair, Cybil Reynolds (Holland Taylor), in order to sideline her and pave the way for the merger, indifferent to the fact that it causes TMS staffers deep pain. When Stella (the brilliant Greta Lee), Cory’s deputy and head of news, calls him out on weaponizing 400 years of systemic racism in order to make a backroom deal, he doesn’t even bother to deny it. Later, Cory tosses Stella into a stew of cheery misogyny when he tasks her with bringing in huge commitment from advertisers who feel beamed in straight from the pre-#MeToo era. Cory knows who these men are, but he assures her she can get it done, and she does, at a stomach-churning cost. The details of just what happened don’t particularly matter to Cory; he chalks it up, like every ruthless maneuver in his life, to a necessary evil.

Gatsby was a classic American archetype, the outsider who plays the role of the insider; as a character, he makes little sense until you realize this performance is core to who he is. The same goes for Cory: One of the most revealing scenes this season shows us Cory alone, in front of a mirror, practicing versions of his upfronts speech until the right cadence—confident, surprising, impenetrable—snaps into place. Perhaps the reason Cory feels so sphinxlike, so difficult to peg down, is that he, too, is always playing a role. Above all else, Cory is an incredible showman—and the show, after all, is what we’re here for.