The Jennifer Aniston/Reese Witherspoon Screentime Clock Continues

A few random notes on this week’s episode of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show:

— For those keeping track at home, it was another episode in which Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon do not share a scene. If you’re counting, that’s about 90 seconds of genuine shared screen time in the first four nearly-hour-long episodes of the season. I don’t know if casting Julianna Margulies — who famously feuded with Archie Panjabi — as Witherspoon’s love interest is meant to distract us or call attention to the fact that the two leads on the show barely share the screen without a body double. What are we supposed to make of this? How can we not assume that Aniston and Witherspoon do not like each other? Or is that the intent? To create that buzz in an effort to boost ratings? Or is this all irresponsible speculation!?

— The Morning Show is typically propelled by soap-opera relationship complications or heavy-handed issue-based drama like Me Too, abortion, or cancel culture, but this week, the series briefly went full Succession. In an effort to convince a couple of white, bro-y executives to buy advertising on UBN, Stella (played by the fantastic Greta Lee) has to have drinks with them. In order to gain their business, she also has to eat a lot of shit, which at one point includes paying the waitress $22,000 to humiliate herself and lick a spilled drink off their table. Stella helplessly looks on. The network needs the money, and I suppose that Stella convinces herself that the waitress’s humiliation is worth $22,000. It is effectively stomach-churning.

— Reese Witherspoon’s character, Bradley Jackson, has so far this season been reduced to one-half of an estranged lesbian couple with Marguilles’ Laura Peterson, although Cory did remind us that Bradley owes him, potentially because Cory helped Bradley … get rid of a body?

— While Reese is in one show with Julianna Marguiles, Jennifer Aniston is in another with Jon Hamm’s Paul Marks, and Billy Crudup’s Cory is the go-between. This week, Cory has to navigate upfronts and needs to raise $300 million in advertising in order to secure a loan to save the network. Thanks to Stella, Cory raised the necessary money, but Fred Micklen (Tom Irwin) — whom Cory pushed out as President of UBN — inserts himself into the loan process. Cory would get the loan, but he’d have to spend the rest of his career eating shit from Tom, so he decided to decline the loan.

Related: I always forget that Irwin played Angela Chase’s dad in My So-Called Life.

— Fortunately for Cory, Alex (Aniston) was working Paul Marks. She flirts. She takes him on a date to Coney Island, where Alex also has to eat shit (sensing a theme?) when a Coney Island vendor calls her a bunch of sexist names because of her role, or lack therefor, in Mitch Kessler’s exit from UBN. Marks is so impressed with Alex’s ability to eat shit without losing her cool that he agrees to re-engage in negotiations to purchase the network. The network — and Cory’s job — is spared for one more week.

— We mustn’t forget that Mia makes a morally questionable decision to publish photos taken in Ukraine by her boyfriend before her boyfriend can leave the area. That’s going to bite her in the ass when The Morning Show gets out over its skis and has a character killed by Russian forces. It’s another instance where the series forgets that it’s about a morning chat show and not a 60 Minutes segment hosted by Christiane Amanpour.

— Retta, during her upfront stand-up segment: “Television executives are always saying that Blacks don’t sell well overseas. And I’m like, really? Because it seems to me we sold well for centuries … yeah, I said it. But y’all did it.” Yikes!