‘The Morning Show’ Review: Season 4 Is Both Utterly Nonsensical and Numbingly Monotonous

After sending Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) into orbit and Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) into the arms of alt-reality Elon Musk, "The Morning Show" scales things back (relatively speaking) to focus on basic relationship drama... and makes even less sense.

What should an award-winning journalist do after hanging up her press badge for good? Teach, of course! Wait, hold on, let me add one minor piece of context: What should an award-winning journalist do after hanging up their badge for good because they were caught censoring footage of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol to hide their brother’s identity from the FBI? Same answer? You’re sticking with “teaching”? OK, great, then you and the producers of “The Morning Show” are on the same page.

Whatever hand-scrawled page in the Zodiac killer’s book of cyphers that may be has been the central curiosity of Apple’s inaugural original series over its first three tumultuous seasons. Starring Reese Witherspoon (as the aforementioned pillar of the Fourth Estate, Bradley Jackson) and Jennifer Aniston (as her one-time co-host and full-time gaslighter, Alex Levy), the ripped-from-the-headlines drama is ostensibly about modern journalism’s ongoing mission to rid the newsroom of toxic patriarchal influences while rebuilding broadcast news into an inclusive, open-minded, and steadfastly truthful profession. Make journalism great again. Or something.

What it’s actually about varies season to season, episode to episode, sometimes even scene to scene, as the increasingly bonkers narrative choices (started by Seasons 1-2 showrunner Kerry Ehrin and inherited by current showrunner Charlotte Stoudt) led the series to repeatedly and irreparably betray its ethical beginnings. Alex, who survived a 2020 bout with COVID by going on live TV to rail against cancel culture, isn’t the #MeToo heroine she set out to be, nor is she any less of a noxious onscreen cliché after sleeping with the fictionalized version of Elon Musk (played with pointedly distracting handsomeness by Jon Hamm) while he was trying to take over (and destroy) her news network. Bradley not only doctored footage of an attempted governmental coups, but she leveraged that video to land a higher-profile gig on the evening news.

That’s how Season 3 started — she also, you may have heard, went to space — ending her journey of peaks and valleys by turning herself over to federal authorities.

Such wild swings in previous seasons don’t leave “The Morning Show” with much room to top itself in Season 4. On a good day, I could applaud them for abstaining (especially since their timeline is still pre-Trump 2.0), but the back-to-basics approach — prioritizing complicated relationships and sudden, unsubstantiated melodrama over bizarro recreations of years-old news stories — only underlines how little character-building the series has accomplished across 30 hours of storytelling. It’s hard to care about so many ill-advised office affairs in a show that started off arguing against their existence, and it’s even harder when these purportedly passionate trysts lack substantial conflicts, palpable chemistry, or anything else that might warrant a mid-series switcheroo from decrying sexual predators to relying largely on sexual tension to sell the series.

Season 4 picks up two years later, and much has changed. Alex’s last-second pitch to merge UBA (her network) with NBN (a rival network) is complete, and the two companies are acclimating to their new normal (now known as UBN). That means surviving mass layoffs (a very real fear across the media landscape that barely merits a mention before “The Morning Show” moves on) and — unrelated! — embracing generative AI. New CEO Stella Bak (Greta Lee) has spent thousands of ex-employees’ salaries acquiring a top-tier artificial intelligence engine ahead of the 2024 Olympics, all so a digital version of Alex can speak to audiences the world over in their native language.

It’s a brilliant move that definitely doesn’t violate the Olympic Charter, and Stella’s new boss, Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard) is so excited about it she “literally swallowed shit” to close the deal. (The Seine’s poopy water is Season 4’s favorite topical reference, by far.) The plan is so fool-proof Alex even promised no (additional) UBN jobs would be lost to AI, and Alex’s word is… well, why don’t you ask her ex-bestie, Chip (Mark Duplass)? After getting fired by Alex for daring to question her relationship with tech billionaire Paul Marks (Hamm) — aka doing his job as a news producer — Chip dashed off to Cannes to accept an award for his new documentary. All’s well that ends well, I guess… except Chip gets lured back to his old stomping grounds, so the caliber of his ending is still very much up in the air.

Paul also can’t resist the gravitational pull of Alex Levy, spending their social run-ins giving her his best hot Don Draper stare from across the room, even as a new toxic white guy is living in her head, rent-free. Manosphere talk show host Bro Hartman (Boyd Holbrook) came over in the merger, using his red-state radio program, “The Talk Back,” to hock conspiracy theories and sperm-boosting supplements in equal measures. And while “The Brofessional’s” overt sexual harassment — “Look at that… talent,” he says while staring at Alex’s ass — may be a turn off for most women, Alex, God help her, just keeps coming back for more.

To its (very slight) credit, “The Morning Show” Season 4 goes out of its way to try to justify Alex’s horrific taste in men. (Remember when she had an affair with her married co-host and serial rapist Mitch Kessler?) Her father, Martin (Jeremy Irons), is a conservative legal professor who looks down on his daughter’s unserious work like Logan Roy used to look down on his kids, but he still comes knocking at her door when he needs a favor. Their barely rekindled relationship exists solely to set off extravagant fireworks later on, as Aniston goes toe-to-toe with Irons in this year’s annual scene designed exclusively for awards voters. But hey, maybe she’ll connect her problematic family patriarch with the patriarchy writ large and start making better life choices.

Bradley, meanwhile, is lured back from West Virginia (where she’s been sculpting young minds to report the news just like she did) by an anonymous text message teasing a scandal at UBN. Even though her FBI handlers — a condition of her post-insurrection release — are none too happy about it, wild horses couldn’t keep Bradley from a good story because she’s a real reporter. Similarly, only creepier, Cory (Billy Crudup) comes crawling back to his off-again, on-again crush, Bradley, even though he’s started over as a Hollywood movie producer. Sure, he’s trying to wrangle an Oscar-worthy cast for a half-filmed studio flick meant to repair his damaged reputation after being falsely accused of inappropriate conduct in the workplace, but what does any of that matter when he could once again walk the halls of UBA UBA+ UBN?

In case it’s not already evident, “The Morning Show” Season 4 strains to find ways to keep its core cast together, defying logic and legalities as needed, and it still makes time to add new characters like Celine’s artsy husband Miles and UBN’s Head of Sports Ben, played by excellent actors (Aaron Pierre and William Jackson Harper, respectively) whose talents are almost totally wasted in half-formed roles. Episodic focus shifts drastically between the main cast, with Mia (Karen Pittman), Christine (Nicole Baharie), and Stella carrying the bulk of the midseason drama before getting sidelined for the two white women who, it must be said, make their lives harder every day.

It all makes for a darker, moodier Season 4, which also makes it harder to enjoy. “Enjoy” may be the wrong word for an experience that makes you stand up and pace in circles, talking to yourself and screaming at the television in alternating bouts of hysteria, but when it’s recognized as the catastrophe it is, “The Morning Show” can be effective escapism in the way that only pitch-perfect trainwreck TV can. My poor editors, over the years, have had to endure multiple mid-screening office visits where I vent legitimate frustrations with the nonsensical series and then, sometimes simultaneously, savor the awesome lunacy of what I’ve just seen.

Season 4 offers far less of the latter. There’s simply no topping Bradley getting launched into orbit and a midseason reveal that she committed treason (and got away with it), even if it’s never been clearer by season’s end that neither Bradley nor Alex belong anywhere near a news building. “The Morning Show’s” various nods to reality — the Olympics, the Boeing plane door fiasco, the rise of AI — aren’t silly or substantive enough to spur hate-watching parties or hate-sharing texts. As the season goes on, you can feel the show’s interest waning in each of the topics that it chose to elevate, until the final episodes focus on something else entirely. (Nine of the 10 episodes were screened for this review.)

Viewer interest should wane as well, unless you’re a particular breed of actor or particular fan of acting: one who craves big, showy performances and doesn’t tend to care how repetitive they get or if they’re rooted in anything bigger than the seconds in which they’re spoken. In that case, it won’t matter that the contentious back-and-forths have no real weight to them. It won’t matter that there’s no build-up to each splashy confession, each emotional meltdown, each lost love. It may not even matter that there’s only the vaguest perception these are supposed to be actual human beings who connect with one another; that they read closer to melodramatic approximations of real people, saying and doing whatever sounds good, than someone you might actually relate to out in the world.

That’s just what happens, I guess, when you bungle your message so badly that you have no choice but to double down on the messy characters who were never meant to be the show’s primary subjects. Like Bradley running a classroom or Alex reporting the news, they just don’t make sense.

Grade: D

“The Morning Show” Season 4 premieres Wednesday, September 17 on Apple TV+. New episodes will be released weekly through the finale on November 12.