The Morning Show Season 3 Episodes 1 and 2 Review: The Karman Line/Ghost in the Machine

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.

After a truly dreadful second season, The Morning Show bounces back with a third season premiere that unapologetically leans into the series’ soapiest, most ridiculous elements and finally discovers a sense of fun in the process.

Whether it’s finally jettisoning Steve Carrell’s Mitch Kessler or realizing that literally nothing could be possibly worse than its hamfisted decision to build the bulk of its Season 2 plot around the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems that The Morning Show has finally decided to stop taking itself so seriously. (At least in its first two episodes.) And it’s all the better for it.

Thankfully, the show appears to have adopted the attitude that the less we say about Season 2 the better.

Sure, Alex’s COVID livestream experience gets a mention, but it’s couched in the larger conversation of how she’s earned a seat at the table when it comes to determining UBA’s future. And Bradley’s romance with Laura — and some very private footage from said relationship — certainly plays a key role in the hacking subplot that drives Season 3’s second episode. But, beyond that…you could have essentially skipped Season 2 entirely here and still found plenty to enjoy in this premiere. 

And there’s a lot. Two years have passed in between seasons, and much of “The Karman Line” is about catching us up with where everyone is now.

Alex now has her own show, a primetime magazine-style streaming series called Alex Unfiltered that’s apparently keeping UBA’s streaming network afloat, and though she still anchors The Morning Show, it’s only a couple of days a week. (It looks like Yanko is one of the regular hosts now alongside a new character named Christine played by Sleepy Hollow fan favorite Nicole Beharie.)

Bradley’s finally snagged the chair as UBA’s main evening news anchor, largely thanks to her intrepid reporting from the U.S. Capitol during the events of January 6. She and Alex seem to have largely mended fences, though it doesn’t appear that they’re spending a ton of time together. (We know this because Bradley has a new apartment but Alex has yet to visit it until the very end of the second episode.)

And something definitely happened between Bradley and Cory following his confession of love at the end of last season, but the show’s being coy about what that actually was. (Whatever it is, though, it’s enough that both of them are nervous about it getting out.)

In other Cory news, he’s busy trying to negotiate a deal for tech billionaire and apparent space nerd Paul Marks to buy UBA because legacy media is dying and the network’s crappy streaming app is never going to survive the purge when the market inevitably consolidates. 

That he has decided what will sway ultimately him is getting Alex to go into space with him on one of his rockets live during an episode of The Morning Show — meant as an attempt to convince suburban moms space tourism is safe?? — is obviously incredibly nonsensical, but it’s the sort of fun crazy this series has decided to embrace in its second season. And I’m not mad about it. 

It’s not clear whether Hamm is meant to serve as The Morning Show’s fictional stand-in for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, but since this show is incredibly ill-equipped to comment on the real-world impact of men like that on the state of either space exploration or traditional news models, here’s hoping the series is content to just let Marks be really rich and good looking. 

Plus, Hamm and Aniston have fun chemistry together, and the series could not be telegraphing a future romantic subplot for them any harder. Alex dating a billionaire is going to be objectively terrible because she will inevitably be horrible about it, but also will probably make for great TV.

The first two episodes of Season 2 juggle a lot of table setting, speeding through plot points that are undoubtedly going to turn out to be important to the rest of the season but whose shapes haven’t fully formed yet.

The cyberattack on UBA means that all manner of secret personal information — from Stella’s apparent history with Paul Marks and Bradley’s relationship with Laura to whatever she and Cory got up to during the hiatus that the pair is willing to pay $50k to hide. Plus, given that Alex makes a point of mentioning multiple times that her home computer is regularly connected to the UBA servers, there’s almost certainly some information of hers that’s been leaked and/or compromised as well. 

Then there’s Bradley’s obsession with a woman who helps provide medical abortions in Texas. Determined to tell the story of Luna Garcia, who crosses the border every month to obtain abortion pills for women who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access them, Bradley plans to visit Texas herself for an extensive interview and on-the-ground reporting. She’s furious when Stella (and by extension the UBA board) forbids her to go and forces her to drop the story, insisting that it’s more important she maintain her image as a journalist who is trusted by both Red and Blue America. 

Bradley eventually acquiesces, but it’s clear she feels awful about letting her source down. That Alex ends up going in her place when Luna is arrested, partly as an act of defiance when she discovers Cory’s plans for Paul Marks and partly because she thinks it’s a story worth telling, it seems evident that we haven’t seen the last of this issue.

Season 3 of The Morning Show very deliberately opens in March of 2022, two years after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in America and three months before the Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe v. Wade will be issued. (There’s no way the fallout from Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health isn’t going to be a major plot point of later episodes, is my guess, but what that means — for Bradley, who had an abortion herself, or for stridently liberal Alex, is unclear.)

Apple TV+ so clearly wanted The Morning Show to be its flagship drama, the sort of prestige piece that people immediately associated with the network that birthed it. But despite its shiny pedigree and overly serious tone it was never truly equipped to be that show, and the series struggled most obviously when it kept trying to live up to a brief it never asked for.

Truly, who knows where Season 3 is going to go from here. The first two episodes are wildly ridiculous in places, the show still has too many characters, and stars Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon don’t share the screen enough for my taste. But suddenly watching The Morning Show no longer feels like homework. The prospect of next week’s episode is actually kind of thrilling. And when’s the last time we were able to say any of that?

Stray Thoughts and Observations: 

• I was so hoping his turn on Good Omens would help Hollywood see what a fantastic comedic actor Jon Hamm is, but…sadly, his Paul doesn’t feel terribly different from dramatic roles he’s done before, save for the fault that this guy’s a billionaire with an adrenaline fetish. At least he objectively looks amazing. Just completely rested and refreshed, we love to see it.
• Holland Taylor remains this show’s stealth MVP. The woman truly does not waste a single line.
• Honestly do not know what Tig Notaro is doing in this season but I love it for us.
• At one point I was really hoping Cory and Bradley might be a thing but now it all feels kind of gross?

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 on Wednesdays on Apple TV+.

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