Nothing is older than yesterday’s show, which is why you’re in the Morning show even thinks of tomorrow. In this case it is the year 2019, at the end of the year the news ticker came up with: a discrimination story about Pakistani transsexuals, the outbreak of a mysterious respiratory disease in China and a report about tuberculosis in the Bahamas. “Pakistan and Bahamas”, the responsible producer decides.
In The Morning Show it’s not just about news, but also about its correct classification – including wrong decisions. Ten new episodes of the glossy series, with which Apple TV + was launched in 2019, are now being released every week. The special thing about this epic narrative about the fighting behind the scenes of a show on US breakfast television are the references to current world events, which is also quite obvious given the news topic.
If it was the tremors of the “Me Too” movement that drove the plot forwards in season one, it is now the effects of the pandemic. In both cases, the series makers reacted quickly: When an NBC breakfast television presenter was accused of sexual harassment of a colleague in November 2017, Apple had just given its flagship series about the beautiful, colorful news world the green light. So the scripts were rewritten, the star presenter Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) was turned into a toxic white man with a “grab-them-by-the-pussy” mentality, who leaves a lot of scorched earth after being kicked out of the fictional channel UBA.
He is attacked by a young American woman who hopes to gain feminist fame on Instagram
At the beginning of the second season, Kessler lives secluded in an Italian castle, on the street he is attacked by a young American woman who hopes to gain feminist fame on Instagram. His new place of residence on a northern Italian lake was not chosen by chance, as this region initially felt the most severe effects of the coronavirus. This time, too, the authors have rewritten: When work on the second season started in February 2020 (and discontinued shortly afterwards), most Americans thought of the term Corona as a Mexican beer. In the world of breakfast television, too, one is busy with other things, such as Trump impeachment, the Megxit or the return of the presenter Alex Levy, played by Jennifer Aniston.
Meanwhile, her colleague Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) laughs when a correspondent reports on the events in Wuhan: “Social distancing, what is that supposed to be?” The world is changing, people are worried, old certainties no longer apply: the series captures all of this brilliantly, it combines elements of soap opera with topics such as discrimination, racism, homophobia, sovereignty of opinion and cancel culture. But the breakfast TVs do not question their own role, their medium seems to be above everything. Because at the end of all their fights, the main issue for them is who can read the announcements from the teleprompter.
On Apple TV +, ten episodes