Nowhere is that more apparent than in this week’s big moment of bathos: a needle drop of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” during a fight between Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson and her alcoholic brother, Hal , deployed with such self-seriousness it can’t help but be funny.
This season, The Morning Show confronted that lack of definition by adding a plot point about how Bradley isn’t quite fitting in on the show, making her blonde, dropping her into a relationship with Julianna Margulies’s serious journalist and emotional-support lesbian Laura Peterson, and sticking with the vaguely conservative southern background.
He’s intoxicated and spouting phrases like “I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told.” When Bradley tries to get Hal to calm down, he blurts out that their father “killed a kid driving drunk while we were in the car.” This is meant to be an echo of Mitch’s death or something, but it goes by so quickly there’s barely time for it to register before Hal shouts more lyrics to “The Boxer,” smashes a coffee mug, and then, as Bradley tries to grab him to make him stop, launches into the whole “lie la lie” refrain as the song kicks in at full volume.
I have no idea why the writers decided “The Boxer” was the song that would hold together this bouillabaisse of dramatic vignettes.
This is perhaps a realistic depiction of how the American public and media confronted the pandemic, but it brings up more unnerving questions about what might happen as The Morning Show goes forward.