The Morning Show's Bradley Jackson highlights the show's latest issue
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The Morning Show spoilers follow.
Another week, another episode of The Morning Show to puzzle over. Or marvel at. Depends on the mood you're in.
If you're up for a show with an astronomical budget in direct proportion to its lack of core logic, you're in for a right rollicking treat. After a mid-season January 6 shaped nosedive, the third outing of the Apple TV+ show is starting to find some sort of footing, largely due to Jennifer Aniston, Jon Hamm and Billy Crudup, the forever MVP of UBA.
Yet that trifecta of soapy fun leaves the question of where its fourth star, Reese Witherspoon, slots into all this. It's a problem the show itself doesn't seem to know the answer to.
The latest attempt to give Witherspoon and her gonzo journalist Bradley Jackson something to do forces her to reenact some All the President's Men cosplay during the eighth episode, as she lurks inside the UBA car park to meet with whistleblower Kate (Natalie Morales), who has promised murky secrets about the real Paul Marks (Hamm).
This nonsense, just one week after she was scripted to walk in on Crudup's Cory, replete with newfound Mummy Issues, singing 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' around a piano with his freshly-introduced mother Martha. No, really, that was something that actually happened for a whole four minutes or so last episode.
There are more heightened musical choices in the latest episode, in which a montage of various things with no real relevance to one another happen in concert. As the criminally underused Kris (Nicole Beharie) tries to recapture her Olympic glory around a track, Bradley passes whole scenes wandering around an empty theatre waiting for her very own Deep Throat, who's a no-show. A fitting metaphor.
There's more in the works for Bradley, because another thing happening during that montage is her on-off girlfriend Laura (Julianna Margulies) using the leaked UBA emails and texts to piece together Bradley's iMovie editing job on the insurrection footage to magic away her Proud-Boy-with-a-heart-of-gold brother Hal (Joe Tippett).
It's rather miraculous she managed that from publicly available information when the FBI gave up the pursuit after one lazy subpoena.
Of the core A-list cast, it is Witherspoon's character Bradley who has fallen prey to the wily ways of The Morning Show, where storylines are breadcrumbed with seemingly intricate care, only to evaporate an episode later.
Bradley's prudently built-up COVID break-up with Laura? Let's Uno reverse card that over a lone glass of wine. That thorny relationship with her MAGA-toting sib? All but vanquished with a baby-shaped redemption arc. That declaration of love from Cory? Pray tell, what declaration?!
In a show where huge stars like Jon Hamm can be woefully miscast as some Elon Musk and Don Draper composite, megastars like Witherspoon can legitimately become an afterthought.
It's like they've gone to a restaurant and ordered way, way too much because alluring things on the menu just kept catching their eye. We might have to take Bradley home in a doggy bag at this point.
What's unfortunate in this storyline churn is that the genuinely intriguing part of Bradley's character, her frenemy relationship with Aniston's Alex Levy, has been all but abandoned. Despite the promotional materials of the two of them standing together, you might be forgiven for forgetting these two are on the same show, since they share precious little screen time.
Some may say, we already know The Morning Show is prestige-adjacent nonsense, so why does it matter that Witherspoon's storylines have a piecemeal quality and her character is stranded in no man's land? Maybe it doesn't really, except for the fact that she has come to represent everything the show still can't get right.
It's a shift that might have come since Bradley broke free of the frothy, fluffy manacles of the titular daytime programme to become the supposedly serious evening news anchor. In doing so, she crossed the show's juncture between its Coronation Street and Newsnight warring halves.
It's only the latter which really works to make a fun, watchable programme. Particularly with her involvement in the January 6 debacle, Bradley now embodies the part of the show we are desperately trying to escape from, when it attacks hot-button real-life news events.
What woe could be next? Jail time for that deleted footage? More po-faced sombre pieces to camera about the dire state of the Supreme Court? Whatever it is, things could always still be worse – at least they let Witherspoon shed that godforsaken brown wig.
The Morning Show is available to stream on Apple TV+.
You Might Also Like
