The Morning Show Season 4 Episode 1 Review: My Roman Empire

Apple TV+’s The Morning Show has always taken itself much more seriously than any of its stories have ever warranted. On some level, this makes sense — the show has a star-studded cast, a serious prestige feel, and was the flagship drama that helped launch the streamer back in 2019.

But as anyone who has ever actually watched the show can tell you, The Morning Show is about the furthest thing from a serious drama on any network right now. Which is something that Season 4 premiere “My Roman Empire” seems to have forgotten.

This is a show that has featured storylines involving everything from the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection to a version of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space flights. This series is ridiculous, and we’d all be better off if the folks who worked on it would just face the facts and embrace what’s really going on here. 

The Morning Show remains one of the most enjoyable trainwrecks on TV, in a love to love to hate it kind of way. But is it too much to ask for just a smidge of self-awareness? The answer: Apparently! (Or, at least, for right now.)

Season 4’s first episode, unsurprisingly, is predominantly an hour about setting up larger arcs. Though it’s been two years since we last saw any of these people, the series picks up in mid-2024, just ahead of the Paris Olympics.

Stella’s now the CEO of the newly formed UBN, Alex is a vice president in charge of talent, in addition to being a main on-air presence, and Mia…still doesn’t appear to have gotten that promotion she’s deserved since the series’ pilot. 

The UBA-NBN merger has been a struggle. There have been layoffs and buy-outs, and the new network hasn’t exactly been all that was promised to its staff or investors. They’re counting on the Olympics — and their AI-boosted global streaming coverage — to finally make UBN a success. 

That it all almost immediately goes off the rails shouldn’t shock anyone who has ever seen a second of this show before. And of course it does so in the most deeply unrealistic way possible. 

In the midst of a fluff pre-Olympics interview with a female Iranian fencer who is set to compete — a conversation that has apparently taken weeks and no small amount of political gamesmanship to secure — the girl’s father passes Alex a note that says the pair of them wants to defect to America. 

Look Alex’s decision to help them is the right one, there’s no question about that. But this entire subplot — UBN’s biggest star potentially kicking off an international incident because she was unaware the fencer’s father was a scientist in Iran’s nuclear program — is such a perfect microcosm of everything that’s just…insane about this show. 

Defecting Iranian nationals? Using Alex Levy’s internet talk show as a cover to run for their lives? An act for which she is professionally reprimanded?  THIS is The Morning Show’s idea of what Prestige TV looks like? 

Elsewhere, despite obstructing justice and destroying evidence about her brother’s involvement in J6, Bradley Jackson is, somehow, not in prison.

She’s left the news business behind for a teaching position, which apparently she’s still allowed to hold since the FBI hasn’t seen the need to make her crimes public. (The idea that no one leaked this info? Delusional.)

Anyway, with Alex on the proverbial bench thanks to her newfound love of political brinksmanship, Mia and Stella want to lure Bradley back to the Morning Show desk to free Chris up to take over all the pre-Olympics coverage. (I hope at least she has gotten a raise.) 

The real-life reason for this is simple: Reese Witherspoon is a big star, and they have to get her back into the show’s main story somehow. The in-show reason is messier; the UBN powers that be think she’ll help them attract more male and conservative viewers in an election year, and if we’ve learned anything about the media industry in recent years, it’s that it’s incredibly craven. 

Bradley’s reluctant at first, but we all know she’s going to cave, long before she starts receiving anonymous text messages from some source claiming that someone at UBN is helping to cover up some kind of climate disaster that’s killing large flocks of birds and also possibly people. 

Crusading Bradley is the least interesting version of this character, so excuse me if I just get in a preemptive yawn about all this right now. 

Alex, for her part, isn’t super down with the Triumphant Media Homecoming for Bradley plan. And, to be fair, she makes some decent points. While The Morning Show itself seems perfectly willing to handwave Bradley’s behavior (and literal crimes), it’s harder to make the argument about why anyone in the world of the show should do the same. 

Though the two women hug upon Bradley’s return to the UBN building, they’re back at each other’s throats within minutes, likely leaving some viewers (i.e., me) wondering why so much of this series has felt the need to pit these two against one another.

Heck, it’s not like they even shared that many scenes last season before Alex walked Bradley to her date with the feds. I wish I still cared about this relationship in the way this show seems to want me to. I wish they’d give me a reason to. 

On what generally feels like a different show entirely, there is Cory Ellison. The Morning Show’s most over-the-top figure (and sort-of villain? sometimes?) has relocated to Los Angeles, where he is now in the movie-making business because this is a character who couldn’t look more like he stepped off the set of Hacks if he tried.

He’s having problems with his current film — the combination of the strikes and the smoke from northern fires have crippled production — and we spend a not insignificant amount of time watching him attempt to solve a stunt problem and find a new leading actress.

It’s all completely disconnected from anything else we see in this episode, which is more than a bit weird. But to Billy Crudup’s credit, he is also the only performer on this series who truly understands the assignment that is being part of The Morning Show. and behaves accordingly. 

From his Hollywood schmoozing to his over-the-top dialogue, Crudup flings himself into every scene like he’s playing Stefano DiMera on Days of Our Lives. At this point, it’s impossible to take Cory seriously as a character — somehow, he is also not in jail! — so we might as well all just have fun with him, right? 

It’s a lesson I wish the rest of The Morning Show would learn. 

That said, the promise of Cory’s return to New York (and to Alex and Bradley’s world) is reason enough to get excited for next week. If “My Roman Empire” was about putting the pieces of Season 4 into place, here’s hoping its second episode lets color outside the lines a little. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Does anyone have any ideas why this episode is called “My Roman Empire”? Truly, I have no clue. 
• Jeremy Irons as Alex’s father is a truly next-level casting coup, but I’m not sure that I could actually be less interested in whatever her deep-seated Daddy Issues are. 
• Instantly hate the misogynist UBN podcast bro!
• Deeply concerned about where my boyfriend Yanko is, tbh. Hope he is okay! 
• I seem to have a mental block about remembering Marion Cotillard’s character’s name, but her fashion sense is chef’s kiss.
• Plot twist: Was not expecting Stella to be sleeping with her boss’s husband.
• Genuinely forgot that Chris is a former Olympian until they showed her with her medals. 
• Cannot believe this show is still trying to make Mia and her incredibly boring war zone trotting boyfriend happen. Give it a rest.

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New episodes of The Morning Show premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV+

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