Jon Hamm is joining the third season of the Apple TV+ soap – The Hollywood Reporter

Environmental activism was at the forefront of Apple’s product announcement event on September 12, as the company boasted various levels of carbon neutrality as well as various components made from recycled materials, including the band for the latest version of the Apple Watch is apparently made from 82 percent recycled yarn.

The third season of the Emmy-winning series on Apple TV+ The Morning Show is probably closer to 90 percent recycled yarn, as the star-studded, media-centric soap moves away from its established position as a second-rate soap The newsroom – all the smug 20/20 hindsight, none of that annoying Sorkin dialogue – to a new approach that’s only half network (recognized) and half billion (unconfirmed). (That shouldn’t be my topic before the Apple presentation. Thank you, Tim Cook!)

In this case, narrative recycling works quite well The Morning Show. If my benchmark is the number of times I visibly winced or rolled my eyes while watching my screeners, this might be the best, or at least the least overtly painful. morning show season still. Of course it’s all relative. I had to stop watching the second season of The Morning Show after eight episodes — don’t worry, I eventually caught up — because Mitch Kessler’s COVID-induced Italian rehabilitation and subsequent martyrdom were too misguided for words. I watched all 10 episodes of season 3 and never felt like it needed a long break. Aside from one episode — the flashback-laden fifth hour — and one major plot thread that emerged from it, my anger directed at the show was limited.

My general opinion on The Morning Show is still identical to what it was in the first two seasons to a few degrees: it’s a supposedly intelligent series that’s unable or unwilling to stop doing stupid things, but perhaps there’s less this season these stupid things? However, does this mean the series’ many loyal fans will find it any less compulsively entertaining? Perhaps!

Season three begins in March 2022, and I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I saw that, in hindsight, we weren’t going to get the smug 20/20 version of the series from January 6, 2021. Revolt. Ha. Make a fool of me.

I won’t even give away the basics of where the characters are, other than to say that Alex (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) are on stable professional footing and, at least on the surface, everything seems fine at UBA.

Spoiler: Not everything is fine at UBA.

CEO Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) is worried that the company is in too much debt, or losing capital, or some other jargon that you’re never really convinced the show understands (I wouldn’t understand it either). The crisis has something to do with the launch of the UBA+ streaming platform, which was briefly saved by Alex’s live streaming battle against COVID and cancel culture that ended last season, but only for a short time.

Cory’s solution is to conduct a major sale of the company to Paul Marks (Jon Hamm), a space-loving, NDA-obsessed billionaire whose character is mixed bag – more recycling! – from the biographies of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others. Will it be a sale? A merger? A hostile takeover? Stay tuned! A big part of this new partnership is sealed by Alex accompanying Paul on a launch into suborbital space, but Alex gets cold feet because she feels generally underappreciated at UBA – albeit given what we’ve seen of Alex’s crazy apartment Have lavish lifestyle, it is challenging to get into it.

Many of the main themes of the new season concern women at UBA, who tend to be underestimated. Greta Lee’s Stella is tired of being condescended to by Cory. Karen Pittman’s Mia is tired of being so invested in her job that she literally sleeps in the office. Newcomer Christine (Nicole Beharie), a former Olympic athlete, is now wedged uncomfortably next to Yanko (Nestor Carbonell as the kindest, worst person you know). morning show Desk, becomes a sounding board for current racist and political issues.

Beharie, both effectively fiery and all too often forgotten; She supports MVP Pittman and experiences a ridiculous love story alongside Clive Standen. and especially Lee, who often adds comic references that the series desperately needs, are all exceptional and benefit from this extra focus. That several scenes in the third season take place in locations that appear in Lee’s indie summer hit Past lives is not a comparison that brings advantages The Morning Showbut at least someone on the creative team recognized that Lee was an absolute star and gave her material.

But if the show doesn’t carry the banner of women – particularly women of color – being underutilized and mistreated in the workplace, then many of its women, particularly women of color, are being underutilized. Sure, Witherspoon and Aniston are the series’ leads and both have heightened drama to offer, but they also get stuck in the familiar The Morning Show Tropics. Bradley’s entirely reactive storyline is based on an inexplicably stupid decision inserted into a ripped-from-the-headlines event, and Alex continues a series trend in which no one has slept with someone who suits them personally or professionally in three seasons.

Still, the actual trajectory of the season is entirely driven by Cory and Paul, two white male antiheroes doing familiar white male antihero things, without any of the crackling dialogue or actual, tangible business savvy that entails billion would lead to a similar clash of the titans.

Luckily, Crudup remains the part of the series that I consistently find the most compelling, even if the writers are wildly inconsistent when it comes to whether he should be a hero or a villain. As Cory is treated as an eccentric sociopath, Crudup borders on brilliant as a man whose over-confidence is tested, perhaps for the first time; Like the borderline business terminator he is, he starts making mishaps. Crudup’s scenes with the great Lindsay Duncan, in a one-part cameo as Cory’s mother, are my favorite scenes of the season, a theater-savvy duo fighting in magical ways.

And if Crudup plays Cory as a robot programmed to be a media mogul, Hamm counters him well as a robot programmed to be a billionaire. He’s so cold and precise that you don’t understand why anyone would trust Paul Marks, but Hamm draws you into his gravity – pun intended. When Hamm and Aniston circle each other, there’s old Hollywood glamor and chemistry between them. They look like stars who should be in a perfectly lit two-shot, with nothing in them The Morning Show is anything but perfectly lit. Hair. Fashion. Property. At 3:30 a.m. the alarm clocks flash. This is a show full of awfulness that makes the awful look terribly sexy.

Which keeps me watching The Morning ShowAside from the intrigue over which overqualified co-stars she’ll lose next (Tig Notaro gets the S3 crown), the point of the show is that it’s nothing but ready to have big conversations – or at least conversations about the big ones We had conversations with real people a year ago. From cancel culture to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade to various issues in modern media and the aforementioned horrific storyline surrounding January 6th, watching a morning show The result is like spending an hour on a Reddit forum, only with prettier people.

If you think that’s a good thing, I can only judge so much.