Many older journalists I know were influenced in their career choice by seeing All the President’s Men, a film about the investigation that brought down Richard Nixon, at a formative age. As a child of television, not movies, I was always more a Statler and Waldorf hack than a Woodward and Bernstein one. I learned all I know about journalism from Muppets literal and figurative. (I can see some of them from my desk.)
While my approach to cultural criticism was shaped by Statler and Waldorf, my reporting skills were honed by observing Kermit the Frog on Sesame Street. His hard-hitting report on Humpty Dumpty’s gruesome death is basically my Watergate.
I watch it frequently. Clad in his reporter’s trilby and trench coat (quite a contrast with his customary nudism on The Muppet Show) his head flapping open and shut with his authoritative high-pitched voice and his green complexion, Kermit is a reminder of a time when mainstream media institutions were trusted bellwethers for our culture.
Kermit was never afraid of becoming part of the story, either, in this instance accidentally murdering Humpty Dumpty to the consternation of some talking Muppet horses. “Become the story” is, as you know, the first thing you learn in Journalism 101 – and, as you can tell from this piece so far, it’s how I like to operate.
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It’s also how the news anchor Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) likes to operate on The Morning Show (Apple TV+). In the second episode of the fourth season, Levy is annoyed by the traffic caused by an Extinction Rebellion-style protest and leaps in exasperation from her car.
Before long she’s flapping her luxuriantly haired head, Kermit style, on a livestream, at which point she is doused in oil by protesters, tear-gassed by police and given documents about the malfeasance of certain oil companies by a passing protester. As I sit here covered in gunk and weeping, let me confirm that randomers handing me documents for no good reason is how I get all of my stories.
Afterwards Levy muses to her colleagues that, in the face of global environmental decay, being delayed in traffic perhaps isn’t that terrible.
It’s a testament to Aniston’s powers that she makes an inconsistent character who makes no sense whatsoever work on the screen. Since her glory days on Friends, Aniston is a supremely watchable and charismatic screen presence. They could have just put her in the sky, like the baby-faced sun in Teletubbies, and it would still work.
Alex’s colleague is called Bradley Jackson. (In the American news business, if you want to get viewers to watch women explain stuff, you have to give them men’s names.) She is played by Reese Witherspoon.
If Alex is the sun, then Bradley is the moon. For, while Alex is a liberal, Bradley is a conservative, or at least the kind of conservative that liberal TV producers can bear to give a heroic role (a liberal with a southern accent, lots of money and a gun). “We’re not so different, you and I,” they say to each other each season. “Conservative or liberal, are we not all, in our own ways, incredibly rich?”
In the first season there was a genuinely compelling story about a #MeToo-adjacent sexual-misconduct scandal to grapple with. (That plot disappeared when Steve Carell left in the second season.) Nowadays The Morning Show tells a messier, soapier type of story while retaining the notion that it has something important to say about the news media.
Bradley and Alex are constantly becoming the story: sleeping with the subjects of their stories or their bosses, illegally helping family members escape felony charges or, this season, helping Iranian interviewees defect to the United States without even doing the research to realise that one of them is a nuclear scientist.
Look, most journalists can relate to all that. Who among us hasn’t accidentally created an international incident, slept with a tech billionaire or committed a serious crime? The difference is that this shower can do all this and then give a speech about the importance of ethical and trusted news. That’s because rich Americans are very confused and have no shame.
The idealistic parts of The Morning Show trace a lineage back to Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, which as far as I remember was just Aaron Sorkin dressing up as all the characters and lecturing us for 20 hours about how everything is our own stupid fault. Its working title was Hush, Children, Aaron Sorkin Is Speaking.
That said, I watched all of The Newsroom much as I watch every episode of The Morning Show. I do so to keep up with what’s happening in my profession. There are some new characters this season. For example, Marion Cotillard plays the new president of the network’s board, and she has a hunk husband who another of the characters takes to sleeping with. (Newsrooms, I don’t need to tell you, are hotbeds of lust.)
There’s also a nominatively determined broish, manosphere presenter whose name is Bro Hartman. They should really have just called him Phallus Penisman. Phallus Penisman, I am confident, will turn out to be a hunk with a heart of gold.
Elsewhere our heroes heedlessly adopt AI technology while proselytising on the dangers of deepfakes, investigate the suppression of serious news stories in their own organisation thanks to convenient tip-offs and genuinely experience the consequence-free lifestyles of rich Americans. The Morning Show is an enjoyable but chaotic mess that by accident or design makes a compelling argument for tearing the Fourth Estate to the ground. But please wait until I get out of the building.
For a counterargument, check out The Hack, on UTV (Wednesday), which is the newest show from Jack Thorne, the Adolescence writer. In recent years television drama has taken up some of the work of long-form factual storytelling with shows like the aforementioned Adolescence – which explored the influence of online toxicity on teenagers – and Gwyneth Hughes’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which dramatised the UK’s post-office scandal and actually led to real political consequences.
It’s a journalistic approach to drama that has been mined well by US showrunners such as David Simon in shows like The Wire and Show Me a Hero. The Hack is specifically about the Guardian reporter Nick Davies (David Tennant) and his editor Alan Rusbridger (the Mr Bates vs the Post Office star Toby Jones) investigating real-life misbehaviour at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World.
[ Adolescence: A dark, often unbearable insight into the extremes of teenage livesOpens in new window ]
It presents the grottier realities of shoe-leather reporting that The Morning Show avoids, but it does so in a fun, heightened fashion, with Tennant breaking the fourth wall from time to time to narrate and comment on the legal difficulties of representing it all onscreen.
The Hack does a good job of showing how difficult, embattled, expensive and important real reporting actually is. It gives journalism a strange, bedraggled nobility absent from The Morning Show’s ridonkulous pomp. There are times, in fact, that the world-weary Tennant reminds me of a young Kermit the Frog.
