Welcome to my second Monday newsletter! Today, I will be looking at the third season of The Morning Show, Hulu's new The Other Black Girl, some thoughts on recent trailers and more!
IT'S "MORNING" AGAIN ON APPLE TV+
The Morning Show returned for its third season last week and it's off to a wild start. My history with the show is a bit all over the place. Despite the mixed reviews from critics, I absolutely loved the first season, enough to award it my 2020 Outstanding Drama Series for my Benjamonster Awards. I thought it was expertly acted and didn't dive too far into the melodrama. So when critics were trashing the second season before it premiered, I dismissed it because I knew I liked the show. Well, that wasn't the case for Season 2. I thought the entire season was a mess for many reasons but perhaps most specifically because of its handling of Covid. There were plenty of shows that tried to incorporate COVID and the results ranged from expert (Superstore) to terrible (This is Us). But The Morning Show may have even been a step below terrible. Arriving in Fall 2021, it forced us to relive the nightmarish early months of 2020 in too many dumb ways.
So now we arrive at the third season and it feels a little bit like they are doing what they originally wanted to do in Season Two with an added dose of Jon Hamm and trying to stay current with the ever-changing streaming landscape. Set in Spring 2022, the show seems to be leaning into its crazy side a little bit more with the first two episodes dealing with a trip to space (?) and a cyber hack. So far, this season is landing somewhere between the focused Season 1 and the disastrous Season 2. The things that have always worked still work. The best moments are scenes involving Jennifer Aniston and Billy Crudup and the times the show is dealing with regular drama about working on a morning show without going too far down the rabbit hole of the personal lives of the characters or trying to say something about every major media and political issue. It's like The Morning Show has a very narrow lane where it can click and everything else is either ridiculously silly or sappy melodrama.
It's a frustrating show because a truly compelling scene like the fight between Aniston's Alex Levy and Crudup's Cory Ellison can be followed a few minutes later with a scene in space that felt as goofy as when The Other Two did it earlier this year in a clear satire (this, of course, was not satire). The production qualities are still top notch and the show is capable of some decent levity when it wants to include that. I feel like the show is starting to lean in a little bit to the qualities that have made it a hate watch show over the first two years which is unfortunate because I have no interest in those elements.
I am interested to see what the show does with Jon Hamm over the season and, just as in Season Two, I have absolutely no interest in Julianna Margulies' character or storyline. It took a bit of a backseat in the first two episodes but I fear it's going to come roaring back given some plot developments in episode two. I haven't mentioned Reese Witherspoon yet but she's always been very much a second banana to Aniston in this show for me and that continues here. I will ask, how many times do we need to see a scene of Witherspoon's Bradley going off script to fight the good fight for something? The answer appears to be infinitely more than I want.
I do plan to continue to share thoughts on The Morning Show given its one of the higher profile returning shows this fall so we'll see where it goes from here.
THE TONAL MISHMASH OF "THE OTHER BLACK GIRL"
I checked out the first four episodes of Hulu's The Other Black Girl (all ten episodes dropped last week). There's a lot to like from the latest Onyx Collective entry but it really is hard to grasp the type of show it is. Like The Changeling, it seems to be competing with itself about what type of show it wants to be. On one hand, it's a pretty sharp satire about the travails of black women in a mostly white workplace. On the other hand, it's a mystery that involves a timeline from the 1980s and has some unnerving elements. I'm usually all for murder mysteries and thrillers but that's the part that doesn't work for me as well on this show.
What does work is the satirical story about the workforce and I feel like the show could just be that story and I'd be happy. Thanks to strong lead performances from Sinclair Daniel and Ashleigh Murray and scene-stealing supporting performances from Bellamy Young, Eric McCormack and especially Brian Baumgartner, the show really works as a corporate commentary. I'm just not sure, even after four episodes, how the two disparate vibes of the show will intersect and it's very clear they are going to. There's enough elements that I like to continue watching so maybe I'll have more to say in a future newsletter.
CHECK-IN WITH SOME TRAILERS
Since my Top 10 Most Anticipated Shows post in this Newsletter a week ago, there were some trailers that dropped for fall series that I wanted to briefly comment on. I thought the trailer for Lessons in Chemistry (my #3 show) looked great. It looked like a pristine period piece, something we know Apple TV+ can do well. As for my #7 show, Frasier, I was much less enthused. It looked less snappy than Frasier once was and more like a generic network sitcom. David Hyde Pierce will be missed a lot. As for The Fall of the House of Usher (my #5 show), it seemed sufficiently creepy but it's always hard to tell in a horror show trailer if it'll be worth it or not because I care much more about the story than the jump scares.
SCRIPTED SHOWS PREMIERING THIS WEEK
A week before what would be the traditional rollout of the fall season usually has a few early starters. But in this incredibly unusual year, it's a very quiet week for scripted premieres. On Wednesday, FX has the premiere of American Horror Story: Delicate. The newest edition of the long-running anthology is a takeoff on Rosemary's Baby and notably features Kim Kardashian. Thursday has the premiere of the fourth and final season of Sex Education on Netflix, a show that has had its share of supporters but never broke into the awards conversation. Also premiering Thursday is Issa Rae's new animated series Young Love on Max. Friday brings The Continental: From the World of John Wick. The awkwardly titled prequel series only has three episodes and features Mel Gibson in the cast. Like Kardashian in Horror Story, that might be enough to turn some viewers off
RANDOM THOUGHT TO END TODAY
The Emmys were originally scheduled for tonight but have been pushed back to January 15 for obvious reasons. Let's hope the January date is not too optimistic and there will be deals made well before then. I do have a concern that the Emmys will pivot to a calendar year instead of TV season year with this change plus the potential lack of new programming before the next Emmys deadline. I've always liked that the Emmys has the part of the calendar year to itself. Having it mixed in with all the other January and February awards would be unfortunate. We'll see what happens.
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