The Morning Show Recap: Parenting Techniques for Dummies
In case you forgot, you can be in your 50s and your parents can still fuck you up real good. The youths don’t have a lock on that, okay? It’s a shame that Alex and Cory have such a distaste for each other at the moment, because both of their parents are psychotic in their own special ways, but psychotic nonetheless, and those two would have a lot to share after the events of “The Parent Trap.”
Cory’s mother takes a pill to kill herself in front of him, and honestly, I still think Alex has the shittier day. As if tensions between Alex and her father, Martin, weren’t high enough, she gets a call in the middle of the night that her father has been arrested by campus police for giving Paul Revere a different kind of midnight ride, which is to say he is hammered drunk and was caught pissing on a statue of the Revolutionary War hero. Alex drags him to her place to sober up, but by the time the sun is up, Martin is gone and the incident is all over the internet — with video! It certainly doesn’t help that her father is bringing this chaos to her world, the very same day she’s supposed to meet with the White House press team to negotiate a possible sit-down with President Biden. Alex is stressed enough without her father’s shitstorm.
Alas, there is no end in sight to the tornado of hoity-toity chaos that is Martin Levy. He arrives at her office to demand that she interview him on her show so he can tell his side of the story — both the plagiarism and the Revere urination sides. He feels his reputation is being torn apart because critical thinking is dead, and also because his daughter is famous. Or something. He definitely blames Alex for all his problems, so she must help him fix them. Alex flat-out refuses. It’s the right instinct, but it has some unforeseen consequences. Alex heads to her meeting with the White House people, which seems to be go just fine, although when they tell her they’ll confirm but it will most likely be in the first two weeks of July, I did have a chuckle because what a time that was and then a single tear fell down my cheek because why are we reliving the events of 2024 again? Please, someone, help. Regardless (and definitely not “irregardless”), any cause for celebration Alex feels while standing at the precipice of a major career victory dissipates the moment she looks at a TV monitor and sees that her father is currently a guest on Bro Hartman’s podcast.
Martin simply waltzed over to Bro’s studio, began ranting about how the youths should stop canceling old men and be thanking them instead, and Bro agreed to put him on the air. Okay, fine, Bro gives him a seat on his show when he realizes he is Alex’s dad. He’s still hurt that Alex ghosted him and clearly looks like she wants to hurl any time she is reminded that they’ve had sex, but he perhaps underestimated how potent his revenge move would be. Alex yanks Martin out of the studio — although he still manages to get a comment about how terrible Alex is with men before he leaves — but it’s too late, the damage has been done. Minutes later, Alex gets a call from the White House, and they are not moving forward with the interview because of … well, because of everything with her father. His rant on Bro’s podcast “doesn’t help the ageist narrative [they’re] fighting against with [their] guy.” I thought for a second Alex might put her fist through the car window, but instead she gets out and, in a voice full of quiet rage (the scariest kind), tells him how he just blew up something she had been negotiating for weeks.
Martin can’t let it go. He follows her up to her apartment and the two finally have the angry, honest, tear-filled conversation they should’ve had decades ago. I mean, Martin sucks. In the same breath that he is accusing Alex of blaming other people for her failures, he is blaming her for his. She loses it about how she spent a lifetime trying to be good enough for him, but she never has been. He calls her kind of dumb. He does this in a snobby, articulate way, but still, it’s rough coming from your dad and only parent.
This is when the argument turns to Alex’s mother, and Martin is honest with his daughter for the first time in his life. He didn’t push Alex’s mother away. After she had Alex, she suffered from severe, undiagnosed postpartum depression, and while he tried to get her help, it only got worse, and eventually she just left one day. Martin didn’t even want to have kids. He loved his life with his wife. He blames Alex for losing what he had. He literally says that his wife left him “with this messy child I didn’t want in the first place,” which is, you know, an absolutely devastating thing for a person to hear from their father. Alex is reeling from finally understanding that all of the problems she’s had with Martin are because he resents her existence. There was never, nor will there ever be, anything that would change that. Alex Levy isn’t, like, the best human being, but she certainly doesn’t deserve what her father just piled on her. “Do you know how badly I wanted to be somebody that you could love?” she asks him in tears before reminding him that she is the legacy he worries so much about. He has nothing else to say and walks out. It feels like something you can never really come back from.
Hey, speaking of, Cory is on set, acting like choosing a wig for his lead actress is the most important decision he or anyone will ever make in all of history when his mother calls him to say that she isn’t going to Switzerland to die because she got a hold of some pills and is just going to do it at her house today. I still can’t decide which is crueler: To not tell Cory, and therefore not give him one last chance to see her, or to tell him so that he runs over there and watches her kill herself in front of him. The latter, which is what we see play out, is pretty awful.
When Cory gets to his mother’s house — wig sitting in his car — he tries to dissuade her from doing this. But Mama Ellison, who has growing signs of dementia, wants to make this choice while she still can. Cory, who immediately goes into child mode when around his mother, begs her to change her mind. She tells him that he is the “greatest thing [she’s] ever done,” and then looks like she’s about to tell him something earth-shattering … or at least, like she wants to unburden her soul of some piece of information, but stops short. Instead, she asks him to go get the wig so she can see it, and while he’s gone, she takes the pill. She dies sitting there as Cory, wig in hand, excitedly pitches her his movie about a former DA with something to prove and a sexy new client, which, honestly, isn’t the worst way to go. She has everything planned so Cory has little to worry about, including an alarm to remind him that the coroner is coming and he’ll want to be out of there before anyone arrives lest he find himself in some legal trouble.
Cory, who spent hours sitting by his dead mother’s body crying until it is time to leave, does what seems logical after the day he just had and goes on a cocaine-fueled bender with Celine Dumont. They dance and they sweat, and Cory talks a lot about the Columbia House CD club. It seems he is nostalgic for a time when his parents felt like constants, like his North Star. If everything we’ve seen up to this point has been Cory Ellison not unhinged with grief, I can only imagine where we are headed.
In Other News
• I’m sorry, Bradley Jackson went on a secret mission to track down the Wolf River whistleblower, and now she might be detained in a Belarusian prison? The Morning Show is just one giant game of Mad Libs, I’m convinced.
• Le frère de Celine arrives in the wake of her marriage scandal to tell her she’s terrible and also that their father wants her to ditch Miles and come home right away. She tries to get him to see the bigger picture — that if she controls UBN as both CEO and board president, they’ll have unprecedented power to control the narrative. She provides a visual aid by having Bro Hartman talk up the French efforts to clean the Seine before the Olympics, a failing project Celine’s brother is in charge of. If Bro tells his hundreds of millions of followers that the water is clean, then the water is clean. It’s a very convincing argument, even if the Dumonts still want Celine to cut off Miles for good.
• Bro wants to run for a Senate seat in New Jersey, and Celine promises to back him? I’ve got to see this.
• What do you think is Cory’s favorite line in his movie? We never got to hear it! Give me your best guess.