The Morning Show recap: Bradley was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 (because of course she was)

“Everybody stops to watch a house on fire.” Cory Ellison may have said that about the outsize reaction to Alex Levy’s home-office chronicles of her battle with COVID, but the statement could have easily applied to The Morning Show as a whole. This week’s installment of television’s favorite soap opera disguised as a prestige newsroom drama takes us back to the end of the second season, filling in many of the gaps in our knowledge about what happened to some of the UBA execs and on-air talent during the first year of the pandemic. And dear reader, we have missed a lot.

The episode begins on Wednesday, March 25, 2020—the day the Olympics were officially postponed. Stella wants Alex and Chip to continue their broadcasts from Alex’s home, while Bradley has been tasked with doing her own hair and makeup and getting dressed in the green room before anchoring TMS. After living the last two weeks in a hotel (presumably to quarantine after she and Cory tracked down Hal in a hospital), Bradley tells Cory that she is planning to decamp for Montana, where she and Laura will be able to anchor the show remotely from the latter’s ranch. Cory can’t exactly stop her from leaving, but it’s clear that he is disappointed that Bradley never reciprocated the feelings that he had developed—and rashly declared—for her. The best he can manage to say about Bradley’s trip to Montana? “Hope you see a moose!” (What?!)

At the start of the season, we learned that Bradley and Laura were no longer together. But apart from a couple of allusions to what happened between them and a scandalous home video that was almost exposed during the UBA hack, the writers decided against giving viewers additional context about the couple’s breakup, choosing instead to save all of those details for this episode. Bradley and Laura rode out the first six months of the pandemic on the ranch, waking up in bed together and eventually feeling comfortable enough to go public with their romance on the air. There has been some social-media chatter about Bradley and Laura’s relationship in the last two seasons, and although Reese Witherspoon and Julianna Margulies are outstanding actors in their own right, they can’t seem to muster up enough crackling chemistry this season to make this relationship feel lived-in and worth rooting for, even when dealing with matters of life and death that come up later in the hour.

With the lockdown restrictions, Bradley tells Hal that it wouldn’t make sense for her to visit him and their mother, Sandy, for Mother’s Day but promises to visit as soon as she is able. But while hosting a couple of Laura’s friends during the summer, Bradley learns that her church-going mother has contracted the coronavirus, and before long, she gets the dreaded phone call that no one wants to receive. By the fall, a noticeable chasm has grown between Bradley and Laura.

Picking a fight, Bradley declares one evening that she wants to go out and eat at a restaurant—something she knows Laura would never agree to because of her heart condition. When Laura suggests that she should see a therapist to process the loss of her mother, Bradley lashes out, insisting that Laura never liked Sandy and was the reason she stopped speaking with her in the first place. “I think you like to dress me up and parade me around for your fancy fucking New York friends. I’m like your little white trash pet,” Bradley says, taking cheap shot after cheap shot in an unbearably melodramatic speech. “I think you don’t even really like me. I think that it makes you feel better about yourself because you’re actually an elitist snob who hides out at the edge of the world so that she doesn’t have to deal with real people.”

Not to be outdone, Laura thinks there’s a part of Bradley that may actually be “relieved” that her mother is gone. “You just don’t have the guts to admit it, Bradley. And you need to grow the fuck up. You need to grow up and stop blaming me for all your shit,” she says. Needless to say, the former lovers are no longer on the same page. Bradley leaves for Washington D.C. the next morning and says she will be staying there until the certification of the 2020 election… and we all know how that turned out, don’t we?

And very quickly, the puzzle pieces—all of the flashbacks and little hints that we got in the first four episodes—begin to fall into place: Bradley Jackson was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021! (Because of course she was.) After being separated from her crew inside the building, the journalist decided to start recording the mayhem unfolding inside the building on her phone—only to realize that one of the insurrectionists, whom she caught on tape assaulting a police officer, is her own brother. Given that TMS is such a timely show, it isn’t surprising that the show’s creative team would attempt to recreate an event like the Capitol attack (albeit on a much smaller scale), but it doesn’t make it any less jarring to watch two and a half years later.

Back in her hotel room, a furious Bradley hears Hal’s pathetic sob story about how he ended up in D.C., how difficult it has been to be alone in their mom’s house, and how he is now expecting his first child. In an effort to protect her brother, Bradley gives him enough money for a bus ticket, takes his phone, and later deletes the footage. To make matters worse, Bradley leverages her harrowing coverage of the riot to become the new evening news anchor—and we discover that Cory not only found out about Bradley’s actions but has also been covering for her ever since they received a subpoena for all of her raw footage from that day. Are both Bradley and Cory about to go down for Hal of all people?! Let’s be serious, for once, TMS.

Cory, meanwhile, has one of the more puzzling personal storylines in this episode. After being effectively rejected by Bradley, he began seeing his real-estate agent Salma, who introduced him to the Hamptons house that we saw in last week’s episode. At one point, she was practically living (or at least staying) with him, even though that no longer seems to be the case in the present, and she was the one who singled out Paul Marks at the beach and told Cory that the tech billionaire had purchased another property nearby. What was the point of having an inconsequential love interest come into Cory’s life for what appears to only be one episode, unless it was really designed to set up that awkward meet-cute with a billionaire? Are we ever going to unpack how this man thinks about love of any kind? Is he even capable of love? He’s the kind of person who could probably survive on spite alone.

In other news, we finally get to see Mia and André interacting without a phone screen! At the start of the pandemic, Mia came home from work every day to the ruggedly handsome photographer laying in her bed. Between their steamy hookups and late-night dance parties, they were clearly beginning to fall for each other, and André even offered Mia a shoulder to cry on during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But when UBA decided to air the controversial Mitch Kessler documentary, in which the disgraced (and now deceased) news anchor attempted to meditate upon and atone for his sins, Mia decided to come clean to André about the extent of her connection to Mitch, which, ultimately, did more harm than good in her dalliance with André.

Stray observations

• Early on in the episode, Cory tells Stella that Aaron Sorkin is refusing to release his Henry Kissinger biopic to UBA+. “Why did you green-light that?” she asks. “Self-hate,” he responds matter-of-factly. It may seem like a small detail, but the idea of Cory begrudgingly approving a Kissinger biopic did make me laugh. It won’t happen since the show is more interested in salacious secrets, but I wish we could hear more about the ups and downs of Cory attempting to launch a streaming service at the height of COVID, simply because Billy Crudup continues to bring new depth to this operatic character.
• Before their big fight, Bradley tells Laura, “I know you don’t like where I’m from, but I have a lot of that world in me, and I need you to understand or attempt to understand if you’re gonna love me.” An exploration of two women in similar professional positions who love each other and come from different walks of life could have been really compelling, but the way TMS has set up this relationship makes it feel more like a chore. It feels like those characters are in a rut.
• After Bradley’s mom dies, Cory asks Kyle to send her something “on behalf of the UBA family.” Are we ever going to have an adult conversation between these two where they’re able to articulate what kind of relationship they have (or want to have)?
• We finally learn how Nicole Beharie’s Chris Hunter joined the show: Mia was the one who suggested that they hire a woman of color under 40 for TMS, and we thank her for it!
• In early 2021, Stella catches up with Kate Danton (played by Natalie Morales), one of her undergrad classmates at Stanford who now works at Hyperion One. Kate says she doesn’t blame Stella for leaving Marks’ company and wonders what her life would be like if she did the same thing, and I wonder how she will factor into Stella’s secret existing relationship with Marks.