Movie and TV fans we are now living in a world where every network or company is making a streaming service (remember when Netflix was the only streaming service) well now Apple of all people have thrown there hat into the ring. So I thought i'd take a look at the first episode of one of their debuting shows and I picked a good one and so here are my review of the pilot episode for The Morning Show.
The plot of the episode is after being work colleagues for fifteen years Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) finds out that Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) has been fired Alex now has to deal with the reason as to why he was fired all the while she starts a rivalry with Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) who's looking to take Mitch's place. I'll admit I was looking forward to this show when I first saw the trailer and the first episode didn't disappoint me the story was understandably a little lacking since it's the first episode but it did a good job of making want to watch more.
Starring in this episode and the rest of the show is Jennifer Aniston as Alex Levy , Reese Witherspoon as Bradley Jackson , Billy Crudup as Cory Ellison , Mark Duplass as Charlie "Chip" Black , Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Hannah Shoenfeld , Néstor Carbonell as Yanko Flores , Karen Pittman as Mia Jordan , Bel Powley as Claire Canway , Desean K. Terry as Daniel Henderson , Jack Davenport as Jason Craig and Steve Carell as Mitch Kessler.
In terms of what I thought about the acting for a pilot it was honestly really good and that's not something that I get to say that often. With acting being this good in the very first episode it does make me wonder if the acting will only continue to get better or get worse as the show continues since at least if the acting is bad in the first episode then you know it's going to get better as the show goes on but here I have no clue and that makes it more interesting at least in my opinion but that's something that only time will indeed tell.
The show is inspired by the book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV by Brian Stelter and I say that because it's not an adaptation which I believe was planned by Lifetime a few years ago. Due to the fact that this show is inspired by the book I cannot say for sure if anything that happened in this episode actually happened in the book but I will say based on the brief read of the synopsis it does sound like an interesting read.
I'll admit when I first saw the trailer for this show I actually thought it was a comedy altho a very bad one because there was no jokes. Which now makes sense because I found out it's a drama so shame on me for thinking it was a comedy but in my defensive when you see Jennifer Aniston in a new project you straight away think that it's a comedy even more so when you see that it also stars Steve Carell.
Now this show is listed as a satire and I have to say I have no idea what they are meant to be satirising since everything that they mention in this episode could also be true for any TV show or film. So it would have been better if they only satirised things that happen on morning TV shows instead of having things that could effect any show but this is just my personal opinion there might be others out there who get what the satire is.
I have to say that based of this first episode alone I really like the character of that Reese Witherspoon plays. I think that she's a spunky character who doesn't take c**p from anyone and will openly call people out when there not being honest that is something that I very rarely see on any kind of show and it honestly made me excited for her scenes because I was in love with her character and I wanted to see what she'd do next.
As you'd expect from a drama there is alot of dramatic scenes but I honestly didn't feel that they became the focus of the episode. Which for me is always a good thing because i've seen things where there's drama every few minuets and it gets overbearing here the focus is more on the characters with a small hint of drama every now and then which is great because it's more like real life in that regard but it is something that I could see people being put of by as well as TV is a form of escapism for many people.
This is one of the first shows made for Apple's new streaming service the aptly named Apple TV+ and I think they are copying the Netflix route of releasing all the episodes at one time. I personally don't think that this will work for them especially since they haven't really announced any shows that will get people excited unlike Disney+ which announced a tone of shows and films that people are excited for so I think it would be better if they released the episodes weekly for now just to build up a fanbase.
Overall I do think that this was a solid debut episode for the show and I do think that Apple was right to have this show be one of the first shows launching for their service. Since I don't give out ratings for pilot episodes i'm going to do the same here and I will be checking out the rest of the series over time i'm just not quite sure when since there's a lot of stuff coming out that I want to see from other studios.