The Morning Show Season 2 was a mess of a season, despite being very watchable

Pajiba

"It has been a deeply weird season of The Morning Show, and not just because of the melodramatic soap storylines or the bizarre death of a main character," Dustin Rowles says of this week's Season 2 finale. "I’m sure it has to do with COVID protocols and not because the two leads don’t get along, but it’s remarkable how little screentime that Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon shared this season. Aniston’s Alex Levy spent almost the entire season away from The Morning Show studio and, instead, in hotel rooms, her apartment, in an Italian villa, most often with only one or two other characters, and away from the morning show that is the very subject of the series. The result has been an inconsistent season, at best, one where they spent all 10 episodes trying to pick up the pieces from last season only to end in a place where it feels like The Morning Show is as broken as it’s ever been."

ALSO:

• Why COVID was a big part of The Morning Show's Season 2 finale: “The conceit of the season was that everybody just ends up isolated. I really didn’t want to play it through the whole season; I wanted to do it at the end and put it right on the precipice of quarantine to show how isolated we all became from each other and community itself and also how much we needed,” says showrunner Kerry Ehrin.
• Season 2 finale wasn't intended to be a series finale: "You can’t write every year as a possible series finale and have them have any value after a certain point. I wrote it to be the end of the season," says Ehrin. "We wanted to write about the time, those three months, and the characters in that time and how they all wound up. So, no I don’t think it’s written as an end to the series at all."
• Jennifer Aniston on her character facing cancelation: “Obviously, that’s a new thing that’s happening. It’s the new sport,” she says. “It feels reckless, which is why I think we really wanted to explore it in the show. What happens when someone gets canceled? Where do they go? Is that it? Depending, of course, on the level of the crime: Some are obviously unthinkable, unforgivable acts that cannot be overlooked, and then some are just bad judgment, or there’s stuff being dug up from 20 years ago, when times were different and things that were normal are now, today, not normal. Everybody is navigating through, ‘What are we allowed to say?’ ‘What can you do now?’ ‘Oh, no no — you can’t say that.’ So there is a new playbook that everybody’s trying to catch up to.”