Season 1 grappled with what it takes to really clear the rot out of a corrupt institution, and how much easier it is for those in charge to merely look as if they’re doing so. "But even with a delectable premise, a prime opportunity to engage with one of the most seismic yet controversial cultural shifts in recent memory, and the combined star power of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, The Morning Show lost the spotlight to the far more modest Ted Lasso, which has received 20 Emmy nominations (and so far three wins) for its freshman season compared with the drama’s eight (with one win for supporting actor Billy Crudup, the master of the joyless laugh).But the 10-episode second season just doubles down on the failures of its precursor without the compensatory empathy for or interest in victims. The Morning Show is even more disappointing in Season 2, doubling down on the failures of Season 1: The Morning Show was supposed to be Apple TV+'s flashy, irresistible headliner, says Inkoo Kang.Liberated from its previous desire to parse events in a meaningful way, it’s become stranger and more fun." Its writing was consistently laughable, if not surreal.But what is 'good TV' anyway? Who’s to say that a show in which a character trips over a high heel and wakes up in the hospital with COVID-19 is any more or less worthy than one of HBO’s many shows about murdered women? If we interpret camp to be something so unironically bad that it’s actually good-a tribute to excess and artifice in which, as Susan Sontag wrote, everything is always in quotation marks (using the terminology of the show, not feminism but 'feminism,' not gelato but 'gelato')-then in Season 2, The Morning Show is a camp masterpiece. Reimagined post-#MeToo to incorporate story lines about sexual harassment and abuses of power in network television, the show couldn’t quite balance its commitment to serious plot points with its extravagant impulses toward musical numbers and Machiavellian speechifying. The first, which arrived after several years of extended hype and snarky commentary about its reported (and disputed) $15-million-an-episode price tag, was largely a critical disappointment, even if viewers loved it. If you can meet The Morning Show on those terms, its second season is quite a ride.
What’s less common is the show Apple has inadvertently gifted us: a feast of high camp and late capitalism. Ink-dark dramas in which Oscar winners suck wearily on vape pens or try to survive nuclear fallout in order to Say Something about modernity are a dime a dozen, the glut of the peak-TV harvest.
"About four episodes into the new season of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, I stopped expecting it to have the qualities of a prestige television series-narrative complexity, emotional resonance, logic-and began simply appreciating it for what it is: one of the most batshit-expensive soap operas ever made," says Sophie Gilbert.