A Rare Miss From Aniston and Witherspoon

At the end of its first two seasons, The Morning Show went out with a bang. Why, then, is the Season 3 finale so boring? The Season 1 and Season 2 finales—which, respectively, saw Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) and Alex (Jennifer Aniston) taking UBA prez Fred (Tom Irwin) down, then the dawn of the pandemic in New York City—left me slack-jawed, thanks to bonkers cliffhangers leading into the next season. After a lot of shake-ups in Season 3, one would think the same logic would apply here. Sadly, The Morning Show finales have gone The Godfather route—the third installment is by far the worst.

We open with some foreshadowing on Bradley’s storyline. As a child, Bradley turned her father in for hitting a pedestrian with his car. Why, then, is she so incapable of turning in her brother Hal (Joe Tippett) after he punched a police officer at the Jan. 6 insurrection? Flash forward to present day (which, in the TMS Universe, is the back half of 2022; we later get an RRR reference), where Bradley is facing a reckoning after evil billionaire Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) forced her to pick between quitting UBA’s evening news team or turning herself in to the FBI.

Bradley is AWOL after quitting UBA. Stella (Greta Lee) and Mia (Karen Pittman) can’t get a hold of her. Cory (Billy Crudup) tries her front door, but Bradley tells him to leave: “Paul knows,” is all she can say. “He fucking knows.” Alex has been sending dozens of texts to Bradley with no response. Paul, now Alex’s full-time lover, tries to convince Alex that Bradley had to go. She was a liability to the future of UBA. Alex is wary about this logic, but she’s still team Paul, at this point.

Stella won’t stop hunting for dirt on Paul. After she shot down Kate’s (Natalie Morales) attempt to blow the whistle, Stella is now backpedaling, looking for Kate anywhere. An online video game is her last hope. Maybe it’s unmonitored by the UBA hack. She sends Kate a message begging for forgiveness; if Stella wants to save UBA from being dismantled by Paul, Kate is her only hope.

Perhaps, though, there’s power in numbers. While Mia asks Stella who she’ll move to the evening news to replace Bradley, Stella confesses that there may be no point in making any shifts because Paul plans on one of those big media restructurings that’ll probably end with everyone being fired. Mia can’t keep this a secret; she tells her TMS team. An agitated Chris (Nicole Beharie) argues against this: Well, shouldn’t we do something to stop this? Everyone in the newsroom agrees. They need to interview someone who will leak all the info on TV, throwing a wrench into Paul’s shareholders vote. But who?

Cory, meanwhile, is doing everything he can to stop the deal from happening. He’s also dealing with the fallout of Paul’s staged, TMZ-esque article about Cory’s grooming of Bradley. “I’m going to become an asterisk right under Mitch Kessler’s asterisk?” Cory asks former ally Leonard (Stephen Fry). “Not a rapist, but just bad enough to never work again.” Leonard wants nothing to do with Cory. He believes the article. He’ll vote to sell UBA off to Paul.

Then, Cory rages through all of New York to solve the Paul issue; alas, Cory can’t be too mad, because the Paul sitch was something of his own making. He calls Cybil (Holland Taylor) for help. He goes back to the Sloan team—those ad guys who were working with Fred—to look for an investment. He needs anything, anything to keep Paul from destroying UBA.

The Morning Show then makes a turn toward the best part of its finale, which, naturally, happens between Alex and Bradley. This is why we watch TMS: to see two beautiful women manipulating their way through the media industry together. Alex shows up at Bradley’s door, and Bradley finally allows her into the apartment—as long as Alex agrees to leave everything, her bag, her keys, and especially her phone, in the hallway. Okay...consider my interest piqued.

Everything Paul said before Bradley quit UBA, she explains to Alex, was a reiteration of her earlier conversation with Laura (Julianna Magulies). Not only that—Paul threatened to ruin Laura’s career if Bradley didn’t quit. How did Paul know everything that was going on between Bradley and Laura? It was all in-person, never over the phone or through emails. Bradley believes Paul has been surveilling everyone at UBA for a long, long time. She tells Alex that she plans on leaving and going home to Hanover until this all blows over, which Alex supports. But Bradley won’t leave before begging Alex to keep pulling on threads until Paul is finally taken down for good.

Alex’s next stop? Paul’s apartment. Yeesh. This sequence feels like a horror movie—I’m screaming at my TV screen, begging Alex to escape, get out, leave as soon as she can. She doesn’t. Alex comes clean to Paul about going to see Bradley, who she says seemed to be “manic.” Paul agrees. Maybe, Paul suggests, Bradley should just go home to Hanover until this all blows over. Alex stops in her tracks. Wasn’t that exactly what Bradley just said?

Back to the tedious bits of the finale: Chip (Mark Duplass) is invited back to TMS to be interviewed about Paul. He blows up while explaining everything Paul plans on doing, cursing up a storm in a clip that “breaks the internet,” to quote a rival conservative news anchor (June Diane Raphael) that reports on Chip’s potty mouth.. The newsroom is sent into a tizzy when AOC tweets that Chip’s monologue is “baller” and Ted Cruz calls for an investigation into the deal. What’s the purpose of all this? By the end of the day, everyone is back on Team Paul. The point of this interview is moot.

A fearful Alex goes to Laura to talk about everything and nothing. The ladies have a vague chat about Bradley, the industry, the Paul deal—it’s not like they can get into the nitty gritty, though, considering Paul probably has an ear to the conversation. But later in the night, as Alex lays beside Paul and winces when he tries to spoon her, she receives a text from Laura: “She’s in.” Who’s in?

Dramatic music swells as we reach Paul’s big day. He stands high and mighty in UBA’s offices, ready to take a bulldozer to the bottom floor and watch the entire company fold. Leonard congratulates Paul on the deal—which, although it has technically not gone through, is as good as gold. But here comes Alex with a new idea: What if, instead of selling UBA to Paul and watching the company go down in flames, they merged with MBN?

“It’s a chance to start over,” Alex explains to a panel of wide-eyed board members. “To do things right, for once. A true partnership.”

Paul, infuriated, asks Alex to sidebar with him. What the hell is she doing? Alex leads Paul onto a soundstage where Stella and Kate are waiting. The truth is revealed: Paul hacked into UBA to make up for the fact that his navigation system malfunctioned in the middle of the space flight at the beginning of the season. Kate was fired when she told Paul that a longer flight would be lethal. If he doesn’t pull out of the deal with UBA, the trio will run the story. While this is a gripping twist, what would’ve made it more fun is if, like All the President's Men or Spotlight, we actually got to see the journalists piecing all the clues together. Too much is left in the dark.

Paul pulls out of the deal, and The Morning Show jumps two weeks into the future. Alex chats with Paul, who explains that his company is dust and his career is over. Really? Seriously? The Morning Show expects me to think that journalists have the power to take down entire tech billionaires? I’ll believe it when I see it. While Paul was an intriguing villain, and Hamm was a great addition, he never really clicked as a character. What were his motivations? Why was he so hellbent on taking UBA down? Unlike, say, Elon Musk, Paul never explicitly stated his issues with the press.

The Morning Show wraps everything else up in the span of five minutes. An investigation has been launched into Cory’s workplace behavior with Bradley. Bradley believes him innocent. When the pair run into each other, they reconcile, still friends. Cory confesses that he doesn’t know what he’ll do next, but UBA is still in the picture. Thank goodness—I can’t imagine TMS without Cory Ellison.

Of course, Season 3 has to end on our girls. Alex and Bradley walk arm-in-arm to…the FBI offices in New York. Hal is waiting. The brother-sister duo are ready to turn themselves in for treason. “No regrets,” Bradley tells Alex. Emotional music plays as Bradley triumphantly marches through the doors—are we supposed to feel emotional? What Bradley and Hal did was horrible, inexcusable, and an insult to this country. But, sure, I guess I’ll miss Bradley when she’s imprisoned next season.

Alex beams with pride outside the building. She appears to end up on top, as always, after sleeping with the enemy. But no: It’s actually Chris who gets the best deal of all. Chris is leaving MBN/UBA ahead of the layoffs that will likely follow this merger, heading to a sports broadcasting network (ESPN, basically) as one of their lead anchors. Chris’ story is the biggest cliffhanger of the season. What’s next for her? Heading into Season 4, The Morning Show’s brightest future isn’t even The Morning Show. It’s whatever this fake ESPN is.

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