Morning show. Author: Jay Carson. Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crudup. (TV series, AppleTv+, third season from September 13).
Released in late 2019 and emerging in the wake of numerous #metoo scandals, this series has proven to be an excellent star car for Jennifer Aniston. She dominates the stage as the famous TV presenter Alex Levy, a fifty-year-old woman at the peak of her career and popularity, who grew up, professionally speaking, in a different era, now tested by change. in language and sensitivity.
Aniston’s talent and ease are somewhat overshadowed by her co-star and co-executive producer Reese Witherspoon. Both actresses are almost the same age, but it is obvious that the role of Bradley, an aspiring journalist who moved from the provinces to New York, was originally written for a maximum thirty-year-old guy.
The first season ended brutally (I won’t say how, maybe someone wanted to restore everything from the beginning), the second too, and now the third is underway.
One of the benefits (and also the greatest challenges for those who write this) morning show the fact is that, being set inside a television network, it follows current events in a pattern in which external facts act as a horizontal story, as also happens in ContinuityAnd in Devils.
Indeed, the second season, which launched in 2021, was dominated by Covid from start to finish. In the third, we start in 2022, two years after the start of the pandemic.
Once again we find the main characters struggling with new problems and at an accelerated pace, resulting in constant anxiety in the directing and editing. The world has woken up from its pandemic slumber and things are very bad.
In particular, the traditional television industrial model is in crisis. UBA, the fictional network, is a kind of NBC, or ABC, or CBS, or “legacy media,” according to a lexicon that already buries them in one word. A partner with fresh capital could save the network’s finances (yes, very similar to what is happening in Continuity, but without the Roy family). The new potential partner here is Paul Marks, a billionaire space travel maker (yes, like Elon Musk). He is played by Jon Hamm, a new character in the series, placed there to shuffle the cards.
Even with some rhetorical and unrealistic reservations (love stories, high journalistic ideals) morning show it still manages to scratch the glossy surface of traditional television. It feels like the database contains more than just a book(Morning Wars) well-documented, but at the same time real-life research on the environment, according to various points of view: it is no coincidence that author Jay Carson was Hillary Clinton’s press officer.
PS: Who knows, maybe in Italy, after the recent movements of daytime TV presenters, someone will decide to write Afternoon Show.