The Morning Show Review: Ghosts (Season 2 Episode 5)

The Morning Show Season 2 Episode 5, “Ghosts,” marks the halfway point of the new season, and in many ways, it still feels like the show is spinning its wheels. Everything is moving so slowly that I’m not entirely sure what its larger arc is meant to be, or what stories it’s particularly interested in telling.

Is this a season about redemption? Retribution? Consequences? Or cover ups? Is it about moving forward or sadly staying stuck in the past? It’s still really hard to tell, and it feels like that shouldn’t be the case this far into the new season. 

Alex’s growing paranoia about the imminent release of Maggie Brenner’s book is…well, it’s good dramatic fodder for Jennifer Aniston in general as a performer, but it’s still not clear what this means for this character.

Is she afraid that her carefully curated public ideal of herself will be destroyed? That she’ll be forced to face up to the things she did and said that she now selectively doesn’t seem to remember? That she’ll have to publicly acknowledge her fling with Mitch?

The answer appears to be some mix of all of the above — with a hefty dose of fear. Perhaps the point of all of this is that Alex has never truly reckoned with the way her rise in the world of media has caused her to become a less-than-great person.

In all honestly, there’s so much to enjoy about The Morning Show’s second season, but there’s also so much that feels like a slog, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why. Yes, the show is still wrestling with necessary important topics: Sexual harassment, racism, misogyny, and the thorny question of cancel culture.

Yet, somehow it feels dated — as though its story is just stuck in early 2020 while the world has moved on and is talking about very different things. Given that this was just a little over a year and a half ago, this feels like it shouldn’t be possible, but the world post-arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic simply looks and feels so much different than this shiny memory of the before-times world.

This means that the ominous build-up to the virus’ arrival — complete with multiple wink wink nods to signposts we’ll all remember that tell us just how bad it’s going to get — as well as the focus on the Democratic Presidential Primary debate, complete with Bernie Sanders jokes, well… it just all feels so staid. 

Elsewhere, in an attempt to bury the salacious stories about dead former UBA employee Hannah, it looks as though Cory is about to out Bradley and her relationship with Laura Peters. This is, in and of itself, horrible, as no one deserves to have their sexual identity used against them in this way, but I think we also have to wonder what this says about Cory’s feelings about Bradley.

He seems so shocked at the idea that Bradley might be sleeping with Laura — and not necessarily because of the sexuality of the other party involved, but rather because there was another party in the first place.

The Cory and Bradley flashback certainly added fuel to my personal theory that the two slept together during the brief window where they were no longer coworkers, but their relationship — to me, at least — has always felt like it’s been teetering on the verge of becoming something more. (Cory’s interest in Bradley has never been strictly professional, IMO.) Is this his bizarre way of trying to get rid of the competition?

Even though he’s just a TV character, it’s still probably extremely wrong to wish that Mitch Kessler would catch COVID and die in Italy and yet. I just cannot figure out what this character — and his bizarre Italian documentarian thing — has to do with this show still. 

On some level, I guess it’s good to see a horrible man take some form of responsibility for his terrible behavior and admit that the way he treated Hannah at the end of her life was wrong. But is there a The Morning Show viewer out there who is invested in some sort of redemption arc for Mitch? Who’s really curious about how he’ll react to his fling with Alex becoming public?

This show would be so much better — and there’d be room for other, more compelling storylines to breathe — if we could all just admit that we don’t need Mitch anymore.

Stray Thoughts and Observations:

• Watching Stella getting harassed on the street for being Asian was rough. I mean, I’m fully aware that stuff probably happened more often than I could ever imagine — especially during the early days of the pandemic — but I know I’m guilty of viewing New York City as a liberal enclave where that sort of open racism just never occurs.
• Is Alex’s back pain psychosomatic? I had a brief moment where I was convinced she’d somehow caught COVID, but it makes more narrative sense to be something she’s somehow causing herself.
• I truly can’t figure out what the point of this Yanko subplot is — did the show feel like it desperately needed to include a more traditionally conservative point of view and just pick Yanko’s name out of a hat to suddenly give it to? 

What did you think of this episode of The Morning Show? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of The Morning Show stream Fridays on AppleTV+.

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