<i>The Morning Show</i> Season 4, Episode 8 Recap: All in the Family

Spoilers below.

It’s hard to believe that on the last season of The Morning Show, we experienced both our characters going to space and being implicated in storming the Capitol on January 6. A political defection and AI scandal aside, this season has felt significantly subdued so far to me in comparison. It does at least give us an opportunity for deeper character development, especially in this week’s episode, as family trauma really rises to the surface.

We begin with Bradley interrupting Alex watching Joe Biden’s State of the Union address at her apartment (maybe this season would be more chaotic if it took place during Trump’s second term). Alex chews Bradley out—deservedly so: She gave up Claire, her source, to the FBI! And on UBN grounds, no less. Unfortunately, Bradley is not here to resign: We’re back to the Wolf River case instead. Am I the only one who wants that investigation to be over already? Stretching it over a season hasn’t been the most interesting arc, for the show or our characters.

Bradley and Chip have found a whistleblower who worked at Martel Chemicals, the company responsible for the environmental impact of Wolf River —presumably the woman in the photographs that Bradley texted a few episodes ago, but they don’t mention that directly. This is the smoking gun of the investigation, but she lives all the way in Belarus. Alex is concerned this will somehow impact her chances of a sit-down interview with Biden, and she’s probably right based on how this season has gone. They argue about it for a while—Bradley is hinging all of her self-worth as a journalist (and human) on breaking this story to make what happened to Claire worth it. Alex refuses to sign off on it.

Alex has some other messes to clean up, though: Her father Martin was arrested for public intoxication and urination. She bails him out and he sleeps over, but the next morning, they’re both in Page Six. Apparently, he peed on a statue of Paul Revere in Boston. The headline reads: “Alex Levy’s Plagiarist Poppa,” which gave me a giggle. Surprising Alex in her office at UBN later that morning, Martin downplays it all by saying it’s an insignificant incident. His career is at risk (obviously), but I’m not sure what Alex could really do about it without tarnishing her own name. Interestingly, he’s anxious because he says academia is in “free fall,” specifically referring to student protests for Gaza and tension between the government and university leaders. He asks to appear on UBN, to which Alex declines. She’s really using “no” as a full sentence this episode.

We also get some French-language scenes with Celine this week. She’s debriefing about her husband’s infidelity with her brother (Arnaud Valois). We haven’t seen her since StellaGPT’s flop two episodes ago, and she and Miles are taking some time apart, but it’s refreshing to get a bit more color for her character here, especially if she stays on for further seasons. The scene is actually quite the reveal: Celine moved to New York from France specifically to cover up the Martel Chemicals scandal, but ended up staying longer. We still don’t really know what her family does back in Europe, but this suggests they’re quite influential. She tries to convince her brother that by staying on as CEO and President, their family will have total control of UBN. He reminds her of how implicated they are in the Olympics, with various stakeholders at risk. She retorts by making fun of his pet project to clean poop out of the Seine ahead of the Olympics, which isn’t going too well (there was real poop-related drama ahead of the 2024 Olympics, btw). Celine later uses Bro’s podcast to promote the Seine’s clean water—by making Bro drink Fiji water masquerading as river water imported from Paris on-air—as a way to show her brother the power of being UBN’s boss. Celine plans to support Bro’s campaign for New Jersey Senator, so she has him under her thumb.

In a moment reminiscent of Chris’s steroid scandal earlier in the season, Mr. Levy stumbles onto Bro’s podcast (mid-segment about how not being able to make “anti-woke” jokes is ruining comedy). He convinces Bro to be an unscheduled guest to speak on the privileges of young people, that they should be thanking the older generation instead of cancelling them. Do live video podcasts that air on a streaming service like this exist, by the way? It seems like a format that’s more useful for the sake of these kinds of scenes over realism. Meanwhile, Alex meets with White House representatives whom she’s trying to woo for her Biden interview. She lands a 12-minute interview with a walk-and-talk (a Biden cameo on this show would be insane).

Noticing her father on the live feed of the podcast after her meeting, she storms into the studio to collect him, frustrated that Bro wouldn’t run this by her first. Bro takes this opportunity to confront her about ghosting him after their one-night stand (not in front of her father!). Adding insult to injury, the White House calls her after to let her know they won’t be proceeding with the Biden interview after all, due to her father’s actions. She puts the call on speaker phone in the car so that Mr. Levy can hear it too. Yikes, but I would also keep Biden far away from UBN if I were on his team, considering the mess at this network.

Martin follows Alex into her apartment and they have an explosive but revealing fight. He blames her for the plagiarism incident; she blames him not only for losing the Biden interview but for the feelings of insufficiency, failure, and shame she’s carried since childhood. I can’t imagine getting quizzed on obscure literature at 10 years old—any child would crumble under such unrealistic expectations and pressure. Alex felt she had to raise herself, especially without a mother. We then find out that her father never spoke about her mother because she had postpartum depression for a child he only agreed to have to make her happy, and after she left, it was too painful for him to talk about.

This revelation profoundly reframes things for Alex. She realizes his resentment toward her—and all the ways she tried to get his approval—wasn’t because she was lacking anything inherently, but because he held her responsible for the postpartum depression. Despite the expositional nature of the dialogue here (everything always has to be spelled out word-for-word on this show), it's a strong scene, both for Alex’s character development and for Aniston and Irons to sink their teeth into.

In a storyline not unrelated to Alex’s experience: Cory Productions is back in business! Cory is trying to decide which Meryl Streep-esque wig his unnamed actress should wear on the set of his film when he gets a call from his mother, who’s concerned about her deteriorating health and memory. She doesn’t want to end up in a state where she needs around-the-clock care, and has decided to end her life…today—a shocking bomb to drop to your son over the phone. He was already aware she had been researching it but, sheesh, what’s the hurry!? He gets a speeding ticket on the way to her house and they break down the suicide schedule for the day. Seated in the backyard, he makes a couple quips and tries to convince her out of it, but she’s made up her mind.

Understandably, Cory’s not taking it well. They didn’t even go on the Antarctica trip she promised after they saw March of the Penguins! She tells him he’s the greatest thing she’s ever done. She seems like she’s about to reveal something massive but hesitates and asks him to show her the wig instead. Is there something else going on here? While he’s fetching it, she takes the pill that ends her life. By the time he comes back, mid-explanation about his film character who’s a former fascist district attorney-turned-private investigator, she begins to fade, until she’s gone. Her last word being “beard” is a little odd, but it’s unimaginable for that to be your last moment with a parent. Like Alex, this is sure to be a turning point for Cory. He falls asleep by her side until an alarm goes off, reminding him the coroner is on the way.

He leaves before he can be associated with her death (she reminded him earlier this is not a legal practice). On his drive out, he leaves Celine a voicemail asking her to go skiing. Turns out he means cocaine, and he numbs away the pain with her at Miles’s sex den/art studio, dancing on tables and letting loose. He reminisces about the music of his youth and of Columbia House, a mail-in records subscription that began in the ‘70s. He recites a few lines from Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” before lying on the ground. Celine has no idea what’s going on with him, but lies down next to him anyways.

We end with Alex dropping by Bradley’s apartment to let her know, post-existential re-examining of her entire life and childhood, she will support her trip to Belarus. But instead she finds Chip, who reveals that Bradley already left, without permission (of course). According to him, she hasn’t checked in and he thinks she’s been detained—in a country that persecutes its journalists. Uh oh. The Morning Show already threw us a curveball with Greta Lee’s mid-season departure, and now Cory’s mother. This doesn’t bode well for anyone else in this cast, Witherspoon included. Anything’s possible in these last two episodes.