The Morning Show Season 2 probably cemented its intention to be a messy show

Slate

"Halfway through The Morning Show’s second-season finale, Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), co-anchor of the fictional morning show TMS, calls her disgraced co-host Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), who has just tested positive for COVID," says Anna Nordberg. "Bradley is concerned about how Alex is holding up, but she’s also got problems of her own: Her brother, an addict, has been missing for two days after Bradley cut ties with him. She hasn’t even tweeted out his picture, she admits to Alex, because she’s too ashamed. What follows is the closest thing to a thesis the scattershot show has come to. 'If you want to cut somebody off, cut them off and be done with it,' says Alex, who has been wrestling with her own relationship with the show’s former anchor and her longtime friend, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carrell). 'If that is not an option, then you’ve gotta own them. Don’t let your shame of what other people think run your life.' In the final minutes of the episode, we see Bradley reuniting with her brother, choosing the mess and chaos of owning the difficult parts of her life versus cutting them off. The idea of owning your mess instead of trying to contain it or run from it is the one clear theme that emerges from The Morning Show’s deeply uneven second season. There were times when the season made so little sense—veering from one bonkers plotline to another while spending way too much time with post-cancellation Mitch moping around a villa on Lake Como—that I wondered if the incoherence might actually be the point. During COVID, it feels like we’ve collectively lost the plot, that none of us quite understand the story we’re in. So I admit I found it strangely satisfying to watch a show that seemed to have no idea what it was doing either. After a three-episode arc painstakingly laid the groundwork for Alex to return to TMS, only to have her ghost a presidential debate and disappear off to Italy, my first reaction was, What the hell is happening? My second was, Maybe this is the show we deserve right now."

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• The Morning Show's Season 2 finale was tone-deaf: "The sun has finally set on The Morning Show’s self-absorbed second season, in an hour of television so extraordinarily tactless that it will linger based on audacity alone," says Proma Khosla. "After ten weeks of trauma-baiting with the imminent introduction of coronavirus storylines, the show dove headfirst into the pandemic by giving Alex (Jennifer Aniston) COVID-19. Up until this point, The Morning Show’s COVID-adjacent plotting was cringeworthy but not quite painful. It was still too preoccupied with the ethics of cancel culture and a supposition that the world itself revolves around an American daytime talk show even with a global pandemic looming on the horizon. And even as the pandemic reaches the U.S. and Alex and her colleagues face down the shock we all lived through in 2020, they cannot look beyond their own insular worldview. The final hour sees her feverish, vomiting, and ostensibly on death’s door, still equating getting canceled with literally dying and turning her ire toward the American people before they suffer the worst months in recent memory."
• Jennifer Aniston jokes of the hits Alex kept taking: “It was relentless! Honestly, I did think at one point the writers were trying to kill me!”
• Emmy-winning Morning Show editor Sidney Wolinsky says much of Steve Carell and Jennifer Aniston’s argument was cut