Time flies, eh? It’s been six years since Apple TV+ launched, and in that time it’s gone from an also-ran to being arguably the best streaming service on the market at present. Its biggest asset is the average quality of its output – while there are plenty of platforms with far more shows and movies to pick from, few of them come close to Apple TV+ in terms of the likelihood of starting something decent, even if you pick at random.
Right back when it first launched, the streaming platform’s flagship show was The Morning Show, which put Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell at the centre of an enticing story of power and abuse at a major network TV station. It was the first show I watched on the streamer when I got my membership, and now it’s finally back for a fourth season, as presaged by a long-awaited full trailer.
Carell is obviously no longer in the picture on the show, which is my way of avoiding spoilers for previous seasons, but things are moving on at a fair old clip. The show’s fourth season will start after another time skip, moving forward to 2024 to see how things are faring at the newly merged stations that we’d been looking at.
Witherspoon and Aniston’s characters find themselves on two sides of a bit of a professional divide, after last season’s events, and there are now more personal subplots than ever, as the new unified network tries to define its identity moving forward. That means an opportunity for established players like Stella (Greta Lee) to make their mark, but there are also new characters to contend with, including an exec played by Aaron Pierre, and a gung-ho TV host (Boyd Holbrook).
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Of course, any fan of the show will know that it’s the relationships between characters that will make the season sing – and it’s pretty clear that there might be some new romances on the cards. The trailer’s editing makes it deliberately slightly hard to tell who’s entangled with whom, so that’ll be fun to find out when it starts streaming.
I haven’t always found The Morning Show stellar, but its overall quality is hard to deny, with some huge stars putting in great work, and I’m pretty fascinated to see how it keeps that going through a fourth season that has taken a while to arrive. I’ll be tuning in when it kicks off on 17 September, in short.
