The Morning Show recap: Jennifer Aniston and Jon Hamm have some serious chemistry

Cory Ellison remains one of the biggest walking contradictions on television. For three seasons on The Morning Show, the charming but calculating network exec has worked his way to the top of UBA with a combination of smooth-talking, talent handling, and corporate backstabbing. This is an inscrutable man who seems to relish the chase for money, power and influence to compensate for his loveless personal life and who seems to get off on finding creative ways to dig himself out of impossibly high-pressure situations that most well-adjusted people would actively avoid. (Need I remind you, once again, of his most iconic catchphrase?)

So, it should come as no surprise that Cory, in the wake of having his $40 billion not-so-secret deal with Paul Marks slip through his fingers, would arrive at upfronts—one of the most stressful periods of the network-TV season—with a smarmy spring in his step. Simply put, our guy has been forced to go back to the drawing board. And if you couldn’t already tell from the use of “Stayin’ Alive” to open the episode, the ad dollars his team lock up at the sales event could make or break the media conglomerate that he has tried so hard to save from financial ruin (even if he has tried a time or two to run it into the ground on his way to the top).

Alex tracks down Cory in his office after the morning of presentations and asks why her latest docuseries wasn’t featured on the network sizzle reel, at which point Cory decides to inform her that not only has he yet to make a decision on her show, but UBA is also “flirting with financial disaster” after his plan with Marks went up in flames. (In Cory’s words, Alex “cucked” Paul by bailing on the rocket launch.) Despite insisting a couple of episodes ago that she didn’t care about UBA’s fate, Alex agrees to attend the UBA party at Cory’s house in the Hamptons and “woo [more ad execs] until the cows come home.”

What Alex doesn’t mention to Cory, however, is that she plans to spend the afternoon tailing Marks in Soho before convincing him to take a ride in her Porsche. Alex takes a reluctant but intrigued Paul to Astroland, the amusement park on Coney Island, where she reveals that she worked there the summer before college and turned down an internship at The New Yorker to salt margarita glasses. (Oh, Alex…if only we were all so privileged.) It’s an obvious ploy to get Marks to open up about his own adolescence and to not-so-subtly put the UBA sale back on the table—and it works.

Marks, thankfully, raises the question we’re all wondering: Why is Alex, who has spent so much of the last two seasons railing against most of her coworkers after the departure of Mitch, fighting so hard for UBA when she could plausibly work anywhere else? “I’d like to finish what I started, and we said we were going to make a lot of changes, and we’re not there yet,” Alex tells him earnestly. But by that logic, Alex will never leave this company—she knows it, Cory knows it, we all know it—unless either she dies or it shutters. She’s been around long enough to know that any kind of systemic change will take a long time, so how much change will be “enough” for her to realistically move on from this hellhole? At this point, I don’t even know if the show has the answer to that abstract question yet.

Later that evening, Alex and Paul encounter a disgruntled man running a funnel cake stand who calls Alex “a cock tease” and complains about still having to see her on the air after Mitch’s death. Despite Paul’s desire to step in and defend her, Alex explains to him that while those nasty comments may get to her, she’s resigned herself to the fact that the backlash simply comes with the territory of keeping her job in spite of her connection to Mitch. It’s at that moment that Paul begins to see Alex’s humanity and gives the first indication of any feelings that he may be harboring for her. Jennifer Aniston and Jon Hamm have some of the best chemistry of any pairing on this ridiculous show, and since TMS seems to pride itself on the messy mix between business and pleasure, it only seems like a matter of time until Alex and Marks find themselves in bed together both personally and professionally.

Bradley and Laura, unfortunately, don’t share the same kind of romantic chemistry, which makes this game of “will-they-or-won’t-they” that they keep playing this season feel more like a chore. After reuniting with Bradley under happier circumstances at Cory’s party, Laura mentions how Bradley’s video was never leaked to the public when the rest of UBA’s internal communications were exposed, but Bradley reveals that Cory paid the hackers to bury it. Laura’s insecurity over the nature of Bradley and Cory’s personal relationship rears its ugly head again, but we also haven’t been given any context as to what happened between the three of them between seasons. Until we get those flashbacks, any discussion of Bradley and Laura mulling over giving their relationship another shot will continue to fall flat.

Meanwhile, after Cory is able to secure an $8 billion loan to keep UBA afloat, Stella spends the entire afternoon attempting to win over two white male ad execs who seem more interested in playing a drinking game than talking numbers with her. At one point, Stella slips the waitress, also an Asian woman, a tip and asks her to give her water instead of gin in her drinks. But once the guys catch on to Stella’s plan, they give her an ultimatum: They will pay $200,000 per primetime spot if the waitress licks up a spilled drink (clearly a non-alcoholic one) on the table. The waitress does it, but Stella obviously feels awful. The fact that TMS only has one prominent Asian character becomes glaringly obvious in this storyline, which seems to end with Stella arriving at Cory’s party in a daze. Don’t get me wrong: The show does not have an obligation to touch on the stereotypical subservience of Asian women, or at least the challenges that Asian women face in positions of power, here. But the notion that Stella chooses to bury her discomfort about the choice she has to make between her job and her personal values—in part because she does not seem to have any Asian colleagues or any kind of support network with whom she can process those difficult feelings—makes me think that the show’s depiction of the experiences of Asian women will never be as meaningfully explored as those of Black women, who have consistently been able to lean on each other in the series. They shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive, but when push comes to shove, there is no denying that the exploration of Stella’s identity as an Asian American woman remains largely (and disappointingly) superficial.

Cory’s delight at securing the immediate future of UBA is short-lived, however. Fred Micklen, the disgraced former president of UBA who was fired and awarded an absurdly huge payout last season, crashes Cory’s upfront party and reveals that he has been asked to consult on the loan that Cory just secured. Simply put, if UBA takes out the loan, the news outlets will find out that Fred is still involved with the company, and Cory would have to work for Fred again, creating both a PR and personal nightmare. (That bastard!) But in a twist that absolutely nobody (read: everybody) saw coming, Alex arrives on the massive lawn of Cory’s Hamptons estate in a helicopter with none other than Paul Marks, having successfully charmed the billionaire to come back to the table with UBA. It looks like Cory might have found a way to dig himself out of another hole yet again.

Stray observations

• The only other storyline in this episode involved Mia and her rugged war photographer (ex-boyfriend?) André Ford. After hearing about a hospital bombing in Mariupol, Ukraine, Mia used one of Bradley’s connections to get André into the war zone, under the condition that André has to assume all liability as a freelancer. André later calls Mia from a military hospital in Odesk and asks her to wait until he has gotten to safety to run his photos. But when she’s unable to reach André again, Mia decides to publish them anyway in order to be the first outlet to publish the photos, even if doing so could endanger his life. These two already have so much chemistry through a phone screen; let’s see them together in person already!
• Also, are we just going to ignore the fact that Mia can speak Russian?!
• Before her meeting took a turn for the worst, Stella argues that people, for better or for worse, love the messiness of UBA, and scandals ultimately translate to a bigger subscriber base. I’m going to be honest: If UBA+ was a real streaming service, I, too, would probably be a subscriber. There’s something undeniably compelling about TMS—even if it feels like you’re watching a trainwreck in slow motion most of the time.
• After Cybil was ousted in a vote of no confidence for comparing Chris to “Aunt Jemima” in an email about Chris’ hiring, Stephen Fry’s character, Leonard, is now the head of the UBA board and insists that a new day has come at the network. But when Chris forces the issue of how much of the ad money will be used to address pay disparities for employees of color, Leonard ends up making many of the same empty promises that Cybil once made. I’m personally glad that the writers are showing how racial and gender inequity is a systemic issue rather than an individual one, but I’m wondering how much deeper they will be able to go with this storyline about pay inequality for women of color.
• Yanko informs Chris that UBA is broke and tells her to think twice about using her social media following to force the company to advance issues of equality, but how much do you want to bet that Chris will do it anyway?
• Chris jokingly calling herself the “Rosa Parks of legacy media” makes me love her even more. Nicole Beharie is killing this role!

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