Five shows to watch after you've finished Apple TV+'s The Morning Show
There's lots of behind the scenes television drama (and comedy) to be found, if you know where to look
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There is a growing audience out there that find themselves fans of news anchors Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson. And why not? Since 2019, those two women — and the team that works tirelessly behind them at the UBA Network — have taken on everything from the #MeToo movement to COVID, to… fake space billionaires or something…? Look, I can’t keep it up; I’m very much a fan of Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, but even I’m not entirely sure what the last season was about, beyond “Isn’t Jon Hamm charming as an immoral villain?” (On that note, Fargo season 5 will blow your mind.)
Here’s the thing, though: The Morning Show is a joy to behold: glossy, slick, self-righteous with its heart in the right place and its nose in the air simultaneously, it’s a guilty pleasure that’s almost too good to be described as “guilty.” I’m not alone in loving the show so much; it’s one of Apple TV+’s top shows, with a following that gets bigger all the time. But there are only three seasons of the show so far, meaning that anyone binging the drama will run out of episodes worryingly quickly. So what should they watch next? We have some ideas below.
The Newsroom
If The Morning Show has a clear ancestor in U.S. drama, it’s HBO’s The Newsroom — Aaron Sorkin’s much-maligned (arguably justifiably, as much as I love it) comedy/drama that combines real-world events with the romantic and political entanglements at a fictional media company. If that sounds pretty much like The Morning Show, that’s because it is pretty much like The Morning Show, down to the occasional holier-than-thou morality and eagerness to make speeches at entirely inopportune times. Really, for anyone who loves The Morning Show, it’s almost impossible that you wouldn’t love The Newsroom, as well; just think of it as what’s on the other channel.
Succession
Another HBO media drama, Succession is perhaps the Mirror Universe version of The Morning Show, where people are not only not trying to do the right thing and be the better versions of themselves — a recurring theme on The Morning Show — but are, instead, celebrated and successful (after a fashion) for being almost the worst versions of themselves. Arguably at once more serious and funnier than The Morning Show, Succession doesn’t lean into real world events at all, but very likely has far more to say about how the media business works in the real world, nonetheless.
W1A
What if the behind-the-scenes business of making television was far less filled with Machiavellian plots and schemes, or grand, sweeping plots by corporate giants that impact the work of crusading journalists, and was instead just… all kind of happening by accident, while inept (if well-meaning) managers and executives tried their best to understand what was going on, even as their egos lead them astray? Welcome to W1A, a rockumentary about what goes on in the background of the (very real) BBC. It’s less a comedy of errors, as much as a cascade of errors that becomes a comedy because the alternative is to be horrified at how things probably do work in the world.
Great News
Not enough people watched this short-lived NBC show that is, for all intents and purposes, “30 Rock but for news programming.” Impossibly, irrepressibly silly, Great News is fast-paced fun that is more likely to come up with 20 good fake headlines about a minor celebrity as it is to address the collective damage sexual harassment has in the workplace when gone unchecked for decades, but that’s what makes it almost the ideal antidote to the self-seriousness of The Morning Show. As an extra bonus, the cast includes Andrea Martin, John Michael Higgins, and a surprisingly great Nicole Richie.
The Story of Late Night
And now for something completely different. Maybe it’s not the drama and the soap opera of The Morning Show that has you hooked, but the glimpse into what the world behind the scenes of a major television network looks like — if that’s the case, this six-part CNN documentary on the history of American late-night television might be exactly what you need to check out. Sure, it’s devoid of the juicier details of what actually happened at the time, but if you’re really into what it takes to make the television machine work, this is a pretty great way to spend your time.
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