The Morning Show 2: What went wrong this season

It may have been due to the pandemic that delayed filming for almost a year and, perhaps, also due to the desire to revolutionize the script to get the story of the virus at all costs, but it is a bit as if the second season of The Morning Show he had lost the focal point of the story by using an opaque, distorted, frosted lens. The first season, which we saw on Apple TV + in 2019, a few months before the world stopped, had a very clear profile: to launch the Cupertino platform, a strong story was needed that was courageously linked to the Weinstein scandal and the outbreak of the #MeToo. The idea of ​​telling the behind the scenes of a successful TV show starting from the end of the career of its host, accused of sexual harassment by several women, has proved successful in many respects. Not for the last, the hypocrisy of a system that knew and kept silent, including the many women who worked at his side and who preferred to turn away because it was more comfortable this way. The end of that cycle of episodes put us in front of a turning point: Alex and Bradley, respectively, played by Jennifer Aniston e Reese Witherspoon, manufacturers of The Morning Show, they had decided to break that tacit agreement and to unmask live the filth that the network had hidden in order for the public to know the truth.

The big screen scene in Times Square with the two presenters letting off steam and the signal that suddenly stops, letting us understand that the consequences for them would be terrible, is perhaps one of the most successful for the finale of a season, and it was logical to expect us. that The Morning Show 2 he would start from there, getting ready to shake us up for this lap as well. Unfortunately this was not the case. The series has decided, who knows why and who knows why, to take new paths, less courageous and closer to a soap opera plot than a series with a team of Emmy-nominated screenwriters. The pace, especially at the beginning, struggles to take off: too much time has passed since the first season, and reconnecting with Bradley and Alex’s stories, now separated, is not an easy task. Without too many words, the problem was to dwell on weaker narrative threads while ignoring the most interesting ideas. Bradley Jackson’s homosexuality, not even remotely hinted at during the first season, seems like something thrown in and developed too quickly, citing the character’s conservative background but without going far enough to make us understand what was hidden behind that painful repression. and so hard to admit. Same goes for the voluntary exile in a false and sadly stereotyped Italy (when ever?) Of Mitch (a great Steve Carell), who has seen fit to isolate himself to start over.

There have been several things we would have liked to know more about: by Alex’s fear of being “erased” for the statements reported in the tabloid book that tells how the heroine of Morning Show instead, she slept with the “ogre”, at the free hating to Asians at the outbreak of the pandemic; from the schizophrenic politics of a network that does not know whether to be governed by the trends of Twitter or by the common sense of those who manage it, to the desire to always be on the right side for fear of disappointing the public that always points the finger and asks a few questions. T.Unfortunately, we have seen little of this, and it is a pity. Even the new entries did not fully convince us: if the character of Laura Peterson, played by the great Julianna Margulies, served not only as a graft for Bradley’s homosexuality but also to tell the difficulty of a lesbian woman to make her way on a network abused to repression (it is exactly the same path that Ellen faced when she came out), we were especially disappointed by Paola Lambruschini from Valeria Golino, extraordinary in the first episode, when a young girl who attacks Mitch in Italy only to be filmed and shown to her Instagram followers that she is on the side of the good guys, and then a supporting actor, sometimes two-dimensional, of a conflict, that of Mitch and the his ghosts, which would have deserved more space.