STAR POWER
A career-best performance from Jennifer Aniston is the main reason to stick with ‘The Morning Show’, says Adam White. While Jodie Comer delivers in hard-hitting drama ‘Help’
From its earliest days in development, The Morning Show (Apple TV+) has made more headlines for its behind-the-scenes
drama than anything it’s done on-screen.
One of the most expensive shows ever made – stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon alone reportedly earn $2m an episode – it explores the inner workings of a daytime news programme anchored by a troubled veteran (Aniston) and an erratic newbie (Witherspoon). The patchy first season was extensively retooled mid-production, swapping showrunners and reworking scripts in the wake of #MeToo. By riffing on the demise of disgraced US TV personality Matt Lauer, who was accused by multiple women of misconduct including sexual harassment and rape, The Morning Show was automatically in reactive mode. It was uncertain about what it was actually saying about power, sexual abuse and the entertainment industry, but – pfft – was going to dramatise it all anyway. Two years later, and somewhat unbelievably, the exact same thing has happened again.
Four weeks into production, The Morning Show’s second season was shut down by Covid-19, leading the show’s writers to overhaul much of their material and write the pandemic into the series. The result is a 10-episode season set entirely between December 2019 and March 2020, awash in unsubtle asides (“Jesus, 2019 sucked!” a character remarks in episode one, because har har har) and difficult to enjoy. Over the course of the season – which is dropping weekly on Apple TV+ – it never entirely justifies its decision to open with dystopian shots of an empty New York and then leap back a few months in time. There’s also something decidedly un-fun about reliving the beginnings of a pandemic we’re very much still in. It never feels cathartic, useful or especially interesting, yet The Morning Show dives headfirst into it all the same.
Season two picks up a few months after Alex (Aniston) and Bradley (Witherspoon) exposed their network, UBA, for fostering and deliberately ignoring a culture of toxicity, harassment and bullying. Alex has vanished in the aftermath, quitting UBA and taking up residence in a snow-covered shack to write her memoirs. Bradley, meanwhile, is still at the titular daytime news show but eager to move to primetime.
Unbeknownst to her, however, the executives are determined to woo Alex back as her co-anchor, despite the pair’s slightly chequered history.
Its first episodes display the show’s worst impulses, with characters speaking in overwritten monologues
Much like season one, The Morning Show’s second year takes a while to get going. Its first episode basks in some of the show’s worst impulses, characters speaking in overwritten monologues and Witherspoon struggling to play a character who swears and shouts a lot but still doesn’t feel real. Later episodes, though, feel smoother, as if the show has made an attempt to improve on its earlier mistakes.
Its exhaustingly large cast has been trimmed down (bye, Bel Powley and Jack Davenport!), there are more episodes focusing on just one or two characters at a time, and even Witherspoon’s distracting first-season wig has been dispensed of. The show is using Aniston to her fullest, too. After a few early stumbles last season, she is now doing career-best work, playing Alex as a brittle, directionless woman both trapped by her past and wildly insecure about her future. In a show that so often seems unsure of what it’s doing – or why it’s doing it – Aniston is its only area of consistency.
Two seasons in, though, The Morning Show is still something of a luxurious mess. It’s stronger when its characters guide the narrative – even Bradley becoming more textured as the season goes on – but feels trapped by its own fixation on real-world
relevance, or plundering recent headlines for story ideas. The writing isn’t good enough for much of that to work, either. At its worst, it’s less like a show with anything interesting to say about the media and how we consume it, and more a lazy bulletin board of hot-button topics come to life. Ultimately, you leave every episode wishing The Morning Show was just a little bit better than it is.
Comer and Graham’s emotional reunion Help
★★★★☆
Actors love Alzheimer’s. It lets them rummage around in the bottom of the thespian toolbox and flit between compassion, rage, terror, kindness, warmth, melancholy, and any other emotion they care to throw in. Reach a certain level of stature and eventually you will be offered a crack at a degenerative brain condition. It’s a tradition as old as Lear. Christie got Away from Her, Dench got Iris, Streep got The Iron Lady. Earlier this year Stanley Tucci gave us Supernova, while Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for The Father.
Now Stephen Graham gets his shot, in Help (Channel 4), a much-trailed one-off drama about social care during the pandemic. In late 2019, a new nurse, Sarah (Jodie Comer), starts work at a fictional care home in Liverpool. She’s the only
It’s interesting to see Comer remind us of her range, as she frees herself from the increasingly shonky shackles of ‘Killing Eve’
candidate for the job, but the owner Steve (Ian Hart, as ever more than holding his own in a role where he could easily have been overshadowed by his co-stars) gives her a hostile interview all the same. “This is about treating people with dignity…” he says. “I’m not just employing any old Nobby Nobstopper to wipe an arse.” We’re allowed to take a few seconds, I think, to appreciate the incongruity of Comer, one of Britain’s most glamorous and magnetic young actors, being described as a Nobby Nobstopper. She does get the job. It’s interesting to see Comer remind us of her range, as she frees herself from the increasingly shonky shackles of Killing Eve.
Graham plays Tony, a 47-year-old with young-onset Alzheimer’s and one of the home’s most difficult patients, still strong enough to be a physical threat. Comer and Graham are friends offscreen. They met on the set of the miniseries Good Cop nine years ago, and Graham introduced her to his agent. Comer thanked him in her Bafta acceptance speech two years ago. Help is their first project since Good Cop, both are executive producers, and it’s obvious they enjoy working together as Sarah and Tony strike up a bond. Sarah’s not scared of him, being well versed in difficult men from life at home. She has barely begun when coronavirus strikes. Residents start dying. The government hoovers up all the available PPE for hospitals, leaving care homes critically short.
After Time and The North Water, this is Graham’s third grand TV project of the year. Insofar as a line can be drawn through the bazillion roles he has now played, he is a master of inbetween men: bright, fundamentally decent blokes, not born quite into the right time or place or class, pulled apart by institutions and circumstance. In Time, it was the prison system; in The North Water, it was whaling and imperial capitalism. Here, it is the disease and the strapped social care system. None of them will have you tumbling down the aisles, but the Graham stamp remains a reliable indicator of quality.
Help has been written by Jack Thorne, the most Stakhanovite scribe in England. If you think Graham has range, so, too, does he: hopping from Skins to This is England to Enola Holmes to His Dark Materials to this. His last outing with Graham was 2019’s brilliant The Virtues , about a man reckoning with his childhood abuse. Help can be similarly intense. It falls firmly into the category of programmes that will be described as “important” and “timely”, and other words critics reach for when admiration outstrips enjoyment. At times, it is hard to watch, as already terrified men and women die lonely deaths from a mysterious plague, and staff do what they can in impossible circumstances for terrible money.
But the pathos and tension are broken by a few superfluous flourishes. At the pre-pandemic Christmas party, an English teacher recites a surprisingly long section of 16th-century poetry. During the pandemic-arrival montage, a disinfectant spray lingers in shot while ominous Hollywood zombie-filmstyle music plays. The final act, in which Tony and Sarah go to the beach, might be designed as an antidote to all the gloom, but it sits awkwardly with the rest of the piece. The distractions are unnecessary. Whatever else it has been, the past 18 months has not been short on drama. Forget the grand gestures; Help’s at its best when it trusts its cast with the little unremembered acts of kindness and love that endured despite it all. With this subject matter, Graham and Comer are all the assistance you need. Cumming
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