But she is clearly about to send someone a text that says 'OMG my boss is chaos.'Īnd then! There is a scene in which Chip decides to grow a backbone all of a sudden, and he gets Alex's answering machine and unloads - just unloads - a bunch of truth bombs unto Alex, beginning with 'What the are you doing, you dumb ?' If I had not just quoted Cory's entire rant, I would quote Chip's, because it is also great and very well written, and it uses the excellent Mark Duplass much better than all the mopey business he's been mired in lately. If she took him seriously, I don't think it would work. What makes this scene successful is that Crudup is completely committed, and Greta Lee looks at him the entire time like he is completely deranged, like he's explaining to her that the moon is made of marshmallow fluff. F***ing exactly, yes! YES! Oh, come by my office with Gerald and Linda after my call, we need to strategize about how to make these TMS bombshells work for us. And what is good for you is good for the company, because it owns you, and it owns me, and we own it, and we are all one. Caring about other people, it limits your ability to make self-serving decisions. Here? Feelings, they drain your lifeblood, they turn your eyes gray - how I'm doing cannot be your problem. Go ahead - care about the world, die, fall in love, whatever - on your own time. Absorbing other people's feelings? That's a two-ton anchor around your neck. Here's Cory's full elevator speech, because it deserves to be enjoyed in its flamboyant weirdness: People sleeping on the couch because of their crazy hours? Cory psyching himself up in his luxe digs to a cover of 'Sixteen Tons'? It works.Īnd the scene where Cory starts telling Stella in the elevator about how it's really been bothering him that she asked how he was doing? That's bizarre and great! This is why people fell in love with this Billy Crudup performance in the first season and why he won the show its one Emmy. Certainly the strongest of the season maybe the strongest of the series? Particularly in the opening few minutes, you see what this show should be: the weird, pointy, highly-stylized dark workplace comedy-drama that we could have had this whole time. In the meantime, it took its eyes off anything with any complexity on the show at all.Īnd then it came back this week, with one of its strongest episodes ever. Last week's episode was very messy, narratively and philosophically: It focused on fundamentally uninteresting characters doing uninteresting things. Consider this The Morning Show's best plot twist yet: This is a very good episode of TV.

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