‘The Morning Show’ on Apple TV is the best and most pertinent political drama I’ve watched since Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The West Wing’. Both deal with power in the hands of people presented as ordinary human beings. Sorkin’s drama was of a different time and climate. It expressed the lingering idealism of the baby boomer generation. In a later show, ‘The Newsroom’, Sorkin explored the confluence of politics and media. As in ‘The West Wing there’s the sense of an omniscient moral order, watched over by benign patriarchal authorities, represented by Jeff Daniels and Sam Waterston, that invariably delivers on the side of truth and Justice (Law and Order).
‘The Morning Show’ is a product of another century, when that very authority is under question and uncertainty reigns in the shadows of every institution. Its political and interpersonal machinations are at least as complex as those in another show of the era, ‘Succession’. Both deal with issues of power and authority, but ‘Succession’ takes a more comedic approach, while ‘The Morning Show’ more aggressively and tragically addresses the real world.
In ‘Succession’ the patriarch and his entourage are portrayed as fools, inhabiting an environment of almost cartoonishly excessive wealth and power. This is not a place where people have jobs, it’s where they have ‘positions’ somewhere within the arcane mazes of control. It’s a world drenched in male ego, where both men and women thrive and survive only by ruthlessly manipulating each other to gain the approval of the king. It’s ultimately a game of abject surrender, in which a gaggle of fools gambol just at the boundaries where comedy and tragedy meet. In the end nothing in that world has substantially changed, and we go home satisfied that everyone pretty much got served what they deserve.
Inspired by the real life sexual abuse scandals that emerged during the MeToo scandals that lead to the fall of power brokers at Fox News, ‘The Morning Show’ doesn’t hold back in aggressively challenging the power of the king and the patriarchy. It takes the path of tragedy, in which the hubris and foolishness of each player is met with individual consequences.
‘The Morning Show’ is about struggle and a heroic journey toward redemption. Every character is brought to the edge of a precipitous fall, and is severely tested with the choice between pure survival and risking everything for the pursuit of clarity. As in classic tragedy a sacrifice of innocence is required in order to bring down the king. No one emerges unscathed.
At the end of the first season we’ve witnessed the inevitable fall, and are left with a little grief mixed with a sense of possibilities. The show leaves us with a hopeful motto, ‘sic semper tyrannies’, which translates, ‘thus always to tyrants’.
photo by Gabriel Melcher
Arclist 