Jennifer Aniston is thrilling to watch on The Morning Show: Her character offers a meta commentary on being in the public eye for decades

BuzzFeed News

The Morning Show is "at once a manifestation of and reckoning with women’s middle-aged rage," says Anne Helen Petersen, adding: "It’s not that this rage is new. It’s always been there, in various, and variously sublimated, forms. There have just been so few opportunities for it to be listened to — at least within the mainstream — because there have been so few mainstream productions that even take older women, let alone their anger, seriously. But The Morning Show, for all of its unevenness, also serves as a meta-textual commentary on the fatigue of decades of being a woman in the public eye. This is a fine show about morning television, and a not-always-successful show about #MeToo. But it’s also a very interesting show about Jennifer Aniston." Peterson says that Aniston "is fascinating. But the vast number of roles offered to her — and that she’s taken, for whatever reason — work hard to suggest otherwise. The role of Rachel Green set her image in concrete, but even the slightest detours from that image (The Good Girl, Friends With Money, Cake, Dumplin’) have shown just how interesting an actor she is. But those performances have been largely ignored, either because they went straight to Netflix (Dumplin’) or because they didn’t offer the Aniston image, that experience of charisma and likability, that so many have come to expect with one of her performances. What The Morning Show does is offer both: the star and her exhaustion, the charisma and its livid dark side, the glamour and the sacrifice."

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• How can The Morning Show be so bad yet so watchable?: "You can tell something is wrong here by how often its characters say the word 'f*ck,'" says Rich Juzwiak. "I sense it’s for the sake of grit, but the word is shoehorned awkwardly into the mouths of characters whose language is otherwise not nearly so colorful...The inclusion of so many 'f*cks' seems to be a writers-room shortcut to “how real people talk,” and as such comes off unimaginative." He adds: "It’s the weirdest thing. The Morning Show is not camp—it’s too khaki, for one thing, and not quite outrageous enough, despite it brimming with outrage—and yet it contains so many of the sensibility’s elements, including a counterintuitive watchability. I binged those three episodes this weekend. They move at a fast clip and continually deliver narrative rewards, at least in the relative sense of the show’s flawed universe. The algorithm works. It’s not that I couldn’t wait to see what the characters would do next; it’s that I couldn’t wait to see what the ensemble would attempt and fail at."
• Stephen King expresses his support of The Morning Show: "Instantly involving, characters you care about, professionally made, acted with elan. What's not to like?"
• How director Mimi Leder made The Morning Show look real, on-screen and off