One of Apple TV+’s earliest series, The Morning Show, was the initial reason that people even signed up for the streaming platform in the first place back in 2019, with its two big wigs, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, leading the pack as two anchors on a morning show similar to The Today Show. Sure, in a series about the cast and crew of a broadcast news program, there’s naturally going to be a ton of side characters. The only problem is that The Morning Show is a little too generous when it comes to giving all of those characters equal amounts of screen time. Season 3 is adding even more to the packed cast, making its screentime problem just a little bit more complicated. Jon Hamm is joining the crew as Paul Marks, a super-corporate executive, as well as Nicole Beharie, who’s coming on as Christine Hunter, a new anchor at The Morning Show. In addition, Tig Notaro will be portraying Amanda Robinson, Paul Marks’ chief of staff.
Alex Levy (Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Witherspoon) are co-anchors of the morning news program, which should mean that they get the most screen time out of the bunch. The Morning Show — equally throughout both seasons — has always been game for turning the focus away from its main stars at times. For certain television shows, it’s completely necessary to take deep dives into other characters, but this series is no Game of Thrones or Grey’s Anatomy: it’s not naturally about all the characters.
Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon Get Sidelined on ‘The Morning Show’
There are plenty of great characters on The Morning Show, but there’s a fine line between the ones who are truly capable of holding their own plot line and the ones who really can’t. For one, we spent just a little too much time with the random Italian documentarian, Paola Lambruschini (Valeria Golino), whom Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) met while hiding out in Italy after being fired from The Morning Show. The time we spent with her was completely superfluous, especially after Kessler ended up suddenly dying at the end of Season 2. We only have so much time within a season with these characters, and the time we spent with Lambruschini could’ve been put to much better use by being diverted to any of the other more important plot lines going on.
Along those same lines, we also clocked in quite a few hours with our beloved weather forecaster, Yanko Flores (Néstor Carbonell), in Season 2, who used the word “spirit animal” in one of his broadcasts and was met with a fair amount of backlash online as a result of it. On the verge of being canceled, he begrudgingly apologized, though the entire semi-scandal was given a bit too much air time in the series, and Flores ultimately wasn’t the strongest character to dedicate that much time to. Carbonell is great in his side character role, but it should stay that way: there simply isn’t enough in that character to warrant a larger storyline.
But what even makes a character more deserving of air time than another? On The Morning Show, being cast on the show seems to automatically put you in the running for getting some serious screen time, but in other series with a bit more direction when it comes to time on camera, it appears to be both a mix of the actor and the trajectory of the character in question. Lambruschini and Flores simply weren’t strong enough to be written in for that much time. Though it’s nice in theory to give every character a similar amount of screen time, sometimes it just isn’t the right move for the series. In the case of The Morning Show, Season 3 needs to learn a lesson from Season 2, which proved the Apple TV+ drama couldn’t find its focus. It’s time to be a bit pickier when it comes to who’s worthy of the most time on screen.
Side characters need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis to decide if it’s really the right move to bring them up higher on the screen time lineup, and Julianna Margulies‘ Season 2 character, Laura Peterson, is quite possibly the only one truly deserving of the amount of screen time that she received. (To be completely honest, she should’ve been given even more time.) Peterson is a veteran of the news business in the same way that Margulies is a veteran of television acting, and the meshing of those two personalities is what makes Peterson both incredibly captivating to watch and deserving of time on the series.
The same goes for Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) and Charlie Black (Mark Duplass), who were both originally side characters but slowly worked their way up to becoming absolutely irreplaceable members of the cast. There would be no show without these three power-hitters, along with Aniston and Witherspoon, of course. Putting the spotlight on these five characters is a far more logical way to go instead of jamming in a billion different storylines with characters who aren’t able to live up to the weight that comes along with taking on a larger role.
An almost mystical force needs to form between an actor and character in order for both to be able to powerfully hold their worthiness of screen time. When a side character doesn’t have that force and is given too much screen time, it becomes painfully obvious to the audience that something is a bit off balance. If The Morning Show keeps making this mistake, it will ultimately start affecting the series at large, making cracks into craters as the balance falters over time. The series remains one of Apple TV+’s biggest hits, even scoring an early Season 4 renewal ahead of the Season 3 premiere. Season 3 is a chance for the series to right its wrongs and finally figure out who the real power players are. Without that, it risks becoming a bit of an off-balance snooze fest where the audience prefers fast-forwarding through certain parts of the series instead of actually being engaged.
The Big Picture
- The Morning Show has been criticized for giving too much screen time to side characters, taking focus away from the main stars, played by Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
- Certain side characters, like Laura Peterson and Cory Ellison, have proven worthy of their screen time due to their captivating performances and importance to the plot.
- The series needs to be more selective in determining which characters deserve more screen time to maintain balance and engagement with the audience.
