'The Morning Show' review: More soapy than ever, but still fun to watch

WHAT IT'S ABOUT At the end of the second season (the finale dropped way back on Nov. 19, 2021), "TMS'' co-host Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) had finally located her lost, drug-addicted brother Hal (Joe Tippett) while her co-host Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) went on the air of flailing streaming service UBA+ to talk about her COVID symptoms.

 By the start of the third, COVID's in everyone's rearview mirror. There are many other pressing matters now, notably a power move by UBA's most famous employee — Alex, who else? — to have greater say in the network's running. There's also a shake-up of the "TMS" team, with a new member, Christine Hunter (Nicole Beharie), and new purpose in the wake of the "Me Too" scandal that rocked the show last season. 

Then, there's this: Alex gets an offer from her boss, UBA chief Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup), that she can't refuse — a trip to space. Why? because Cory is secretly talking to spaceship mogul Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) who wants to buy UBA.

Then, catastrophe hits UBA: Someone hacks the network's email servers, and much, much else. Who did this dastardly deed? (This review is based on the first three of 10 episodes.)

MY SAY At some point during the second season, "The Morning Show" slipped the bonds of real-world TV journalism to become the show it was destined to become all along — a soap opera about real-world TV journalism. When precisely this happened is hard to pin down but the seventh episode, "La Amara Vita" ("The Bitter Life"), did begin the transition in earnest. This was where disgraced anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) drove off an Italian cliff into oblivion. Disgraced, deeply flawed characters are supposed to die in soap operas, and in more dramatic circumstances the better, even if Mitch's real-world analog (Matt Lauer) is doing quite fine and living la dolce vita in the Hamptons.

With this third season, the transition is complete, for an obvious reason. Soap operas are fun. Real-world TV journalism is not. It's hard, unsexy and remorseless. Most people who work at it are dedicated professionals who care deeply about the news and TV journalism's role in society, albeit as deeply and tragically diminished as that role may now be. The people who work at it on "The Morning Show" care mostly if not exclusively about themselves. That's why this has turned into a good soap opera which, like any solid one, demands a singular dedication to narcissism and self-interest. There's lots of that to go around in "The Morning Show."

Soaps also need stars, the bigger the better, and "Morning Show" has a pair of huge ones. Witherspoon and Aniston have always had a way of making the camera forcibly bend toward them, as if by gravitational force. What the camera sees, the camera likes. They're particularly camera-worthy here, so all that money (What? A total of $4 million per episode for both?) has apparently paid off. They never once come across as real anchors, of course, but they do come across as Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston — much better. 

Hamm never comes across as Elon Musk either, but does offer an entertaining facsimile, with that day-old stubble and enough smoldering malevolence to propel one of his rocket ships to Mars. Musk could only dream of looking as good as Hamm playing him. 

BOTTOM LINE Fake news, real soap — and still watchable.