The Morning Show's #MeToo storyline is a mess, and that's the point

Los Angeles Times

The Apple TV+ series has been far from perfect, but it is breaking new ground with its portrayal of sexual misconduct, says Meredith Blake. "Two years after reports about Harvey Weinstein triggered a massive cultural reckoning, television shows as wide-wide-ranging as Succession, BoJack Horseman and GLOW have incorporated #MeToo story lines into the narrative," says Blake. "The Showtime miniseries The Loudest Voice traced the rise and fall of Fox News chief Roger Ailes, portraying in detail the alleged predation that led to his ouster from the network he founded. But The Morning Show is the first to focus solely on the messy here-and-now of #MeToo, diving headlong into the thorny ambiguity and not shying from the sometimes unsavory conversations going on across the culture — often, if not always, between men. In its attempt to take a nuanced look at a sweeping social movement, The Morning Show can be anything but. There are clumsy lines of dialogue about sexual agency, neo-McCarthyism and 'woke Twitter' that feel like they were lifted from contrarian op-eds and forced into the mouths of fictional characters for the sake of balance and honoring 'both sides.' And the show spends probably too much time on what it’s like being an accused man and not what it’s like being a woman ... But what The Morning Show does effectively is show how it is possible to abuse your power and privilege and act in a sexually entitled way even without making explicit threats — and how a workplace like a morning news show, where an air of faux intimacy and long, irregular hours are the norm, are particularly conducive to bad behavior. It’s an obvious lesson, maybe, but it’s one that bears repeating. You don’t have to look very hard to find men who think that simply not being Harvey Weinstein means they ought to be exempt from criticism." ALSO: The Morning Show is attempting to untangle the thorny, systemic gender and power issues in the morning-news industry.