The Morning Show recap: Cory loses it

There’s a train wreck, and then there’s whatever the hell happens to Cory Ellison on this week’s episode of The Morning Show. In a season that has already seen Bradley Jackson go to space (remember the premiere?!) and conceal evidence of her brother storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, the penultimate episode of the third season is an unhinged masterclass in feverish, morning-show melodrama—elevated, in no small part, by the committed performance of Billy Crudup, easily the best actor on this messy show.

It’s taken a couple of years, but Cory’s house of cards has finally fallen. Four days before closing the landmark $40-billion deal that he had initiated with aerospace billionaire Paul Marks, Cory learns from Earl that UBA’s trading activity has gone up suspiciously, with one LLC buying up a lot of the company’s stock. While he believes that Marks or one of his buddies has been trying to cash in on the sale, Cory discovers that Cybil, the former head of the board that was ousted for making racially insensitive comments, is behind the unnamed LLC. Cybil struts into Cory’s office and says she won’t sit back while “thugs” destroy her family’s company. When Cory tells her to embrace the inevitable and take the sale as a win, an incredulous Cybil realizes that the smarmy CEO doesn’t know what has been happening under his own nose: Marks is preparing to strip UBA for parts, and Fred has been helping him price the network’s assets—the studio, sports division, content library, and even Cory’s beloved UBA+—in exchange for a hefty sum. By the end of this conversation, Cory looks like he is about to crawl out of his own skin—and it is so gloriously satisfying.

Crudup seems to relish every minute of Cory’s descent into the five stages of grief, playing a man who slowly realizes that, by making a deal with the devil, he has largely orchestrated his own downfall. After punching the wall while waiting for the elevator, Cory makes a beeline for Alex’s office and asks if she was in on the plan to gut UBA when she was claiming to protect the fourth estate a week or two ago. Despite expressing some reservations about Marks’ plan (she likened “killing a company that has existed for 80 years” to burning a house down), Alex eventually agreed to team up with her new boyfriend to launch a new venture together. “Oh, fuck me. Couldn’t you have just slashed my tires? Any goddamn thing except killing the entire fucking company,” Cory says, vibrating with rage. “Here I thought the neverending fucking pandemic was our biggest threat, but no, it’s you and your boyfriend. How is it everything that held us together is just…gone?”

Alex lets Cory gripe and whine about losing UBA before saying that she is “so sick of [his] self-righteous monologues.” Despite not being any better than Cory, Alex does raise a number of valid points: She has never had enough power at the network to kill anything; she was denied a seat on the board; and Cory was the one who told her to “get on board” with someone who has “more money than god.” She makes it clear that not only has she seen the books—“there’s nothing left to save”—but she will also be taking the tens of thousands of soon-to-be-unemployed UBA employees to her new company and paying them what they deserve. At this point, Cory looks like he is ready to burn the place to the ground. But attempting to salvage the firm (and maybe his own dignity), he starts yelling at Leonard on the phone, telling him to call an emergency board meeting about the sale. But Cory’s day is about to go from bad to worse, thanks to his old pal Bradley.

While Cory’s professional life has gone up in flames, Bradley has been trying to uncover the truth about Marks and his business practices. After all, the mass exodus of engineers suggests that there are some potential safety or managerial issues behind closed doors. Bradley has called all the people on Stella’s list, but she hasn’t been able to find anyone who has been willing to go on the record because Marks’ team has silenced those former employees with NDAs. Stella is unable to get back in touch with Kate, and she also refuses to give her old boss (Marks) any intel about her soon-to-be ex-boss (Cory).

While visiting UBA for a story for The Times, Marcia Gay Harden’s Maggie Brener returns to bury the hatchet with Alex, who became the subject of Maggie’s explosive book about UBA last season. Maggie commends Alex for all she had to overcome in the last few years—like Alex, I didn’t see that compliment coming—and Maggie says she is less interested in Alex’s relationship with Marks than she is in what UBA’s impending sale will mean for the future of broadcast television. When Alex asks for her take on UBA’s long-term chances of survival, Maggie is pretty frank: The cash inflow may keep UBA’s doors open for another three to five years, but then the big three (fictional) networks—UBA, NBN, and CBA—will eventually cannibalize each other and die off. But it’s what Maggie says about Bradley that really leaves an impression on Alex: “In all my years, I have never seen an anchor have a colleague’s back the way she had yours.”

In one of the few one-on-one scenes that we’ve gotten between Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon this season, Alex asks Bradley to consider leaving with her, insisting that they will always be undercut by someone else if they stay at UBA. Bradley, however, isn’t convinced. In fact, Bradley goes as far as to say “the wrong guy” is buying the network, and she insists that something fishy is going on at Hyperion. Alex unsurprisingly questions if Bradley has any concrete evidence to substantiate her claims about Marks—she doesn’t, at least not yet—but Bradley thinks it’s hard for Alex to be objective about her new billionaire boy toy. Suffice to say, Alex does not like being questioned about her love life and storms out. Again, why does Alex think her relationship isn’t a clear conflict of interest?!

Later, in a meeting with Cory and Stella, Bradley reveals that Chip spoke with a foreman who hasn’t been compensated for working through the night, which suggests that Marks is both behind schedule and strapped for cash. Despite Cory’s willingness to turn a blind eye, Stella reveals that the transmission failure during the rocket launch was Hyperion’s fault, not UBA’s, but Marks still blamed the issue on UBA instead of reporting it. Bradley tells Cory that she will continue to chase the story, while Stella expresses regret for not taking a firmer stand against Marks from the very beginning. “I know we have to find a way to keep the doors open, but he’s infected you,” Stella tells Cory. “He’s like a virus, and I have already survived the plague, so…I’m gonna be fine, because after the deal goes through, I won’t be here. I just want you to know that.”

Midway through the meeting, Bradley gets a text message from Laura, who wants her to come over as soon as possible. But what Bradley fails to realize is that Laura knows everything. You see, while Bradley has been chasing her lead, Laura has been doing a little digging of her own. After discovering that Hal was a Trump supporter and finding evidence of Bradley and Cory colluding to lie to the FBI, Laura decides to call Hal and suggests meeting up in Washington, D.C. for the Fourth of July weekend. Hal claims he hasn’t been there since high school, and that is clearly the confirmation Laura needs to confront Bradley about what she has done. While Laura has been dreaming of spending mornings in bed with Bradley in Montana, Bradley and Cory have been harboring this terrible secret. “Fuck fair. You fucking broke every rule. How do you sit in that chair every night? It is obscene,” Laura yells about how Bradley leveraged her Jan. 6 coverage to anchor the evening news. “Everything about you is a lie.” Compared to the fight Bradley and Laura had in the fifth episode, this one is easily more piercing. There is nothing Bradley can do to rectify the situation, and Julianna Margulies delivers one of the most devastating lines of the season about Bradley and Laura’s ill-fated relationship: “I thought we would get old together. I really did.” Following a heated pre-show conversation with Marks, who threatened to call the FBI and implicate Laura if she didn’t drop her investigation into Hyperion, Bradley decides to resign from UBA for “personal reasons”—a move that shocks everyone.

To add insult to injury, Stella informs Cory that The Vault has just published a story accusing Cory of being a sexual predator à la Mitch Kessler—clearly a false accusation that will have repercussions in the finale and beyond. The tabloid reports that Cory has spent the last few years “grooming” Bradley and managing her rise at UBA, and claims that when she rejected his advances, he retaliated by outing her. At this point, we’ve all but confirmed that Marks is behind this leak because he and Amanda spent the entire episode looking for dirt on Cory. He wants that man out of there. And by the end of the episode, Marks seems to get his wish: Cory’s assistant, Kyle, warns that security is on their way up and has been told to escort Cory out of the UBA building. Does that effectively clear the way for the sale to the deceptively charming billionaire? Bring on the finale!

Stray observations

• The banker low-balled UBA’s assets. Instead of paying $20 billion for the sports division and $30 billion for the studio and library, Marks is only paying $40 billion and plans to use the difference to help get Hyperion back on track. But part of me thinks it won’t be quite that simple…
• Early in the episode, Chip says, “As a recently fired employee of—how do I put this?—a challenging boss, I speak from experience…painful fucking bitter experience.” How much do you want to bet that he will be back by Alex’s side by the time we see them in a scene together?
• Chris doesn’t fit in as neatly with the rest of the storylines this season, but she is the most criminally underused character of this ensemble. Her sports agent husband, Marcus, arrives in her dressing room with flowers and informs her that her “favorite sports network” has shown a substantial interest in signing her. Although Chris is understandably reluctant about jumping ship to join a network that may not be as progressive as it claims to be, Marcus says they can negotiate for her to cover more hard news, such as the Brittney Griner case. I’m sorry, but Chris is going to have to find a way to do both because we can’t lose her next season. I refuse to let that happen.
• Cory has so many great lines in this episode, but this is one of my favorites: “Wow, Cybil, what a surprise. Let me guess: You forgot your white hood. I’ll have Kyle check the lost and found.”
• Aniston’s innate comedic timing comes back to the forefront when she says sarcastic things like, “I just had a low-stress, respectful, life-affirming conversation with Cory Ellison.” I know this show is supposed to be a “prestige drama,” but these moments of levity have been sorely missed this season. This show is always more fun when it leans into its soapier tendencies and injects humor into these impossibly high-pressure situations.