The Morning Show - TV Review

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Billy Crudup, Mark Duplass, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nestor Carbonell, Karen Pittman, Bel Powley, Desean Terry and Jack Davenport.

An interesting timely approach. In the wake of Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, this examines what it's like for a Today-like morning program that has to deal with the fallout when their main male anchor (Steve Carell) is fired for sexual misconduct. Jennifer Aniston plays the head female anchor who was barely holding it together when the scandal broke, and Reese Witherspoon is a small-town reporter who has one of her stories go viral and gets an opportunity to join the show. Made me think of what it was like for Savannah Guthrie, Gayle King, Norah O'Donnell, etc. 

Fantastic cast, with Billy Crudup the Emmy-winning stand-out as the network executive who seems to like the chaos and may or may not want Aniston to fail so he can fire her and get a clean slate of leads on the show. 

The genius of casting Carell for this part is that he has this lovable persona and he's famously one of the nicest off-camera guys around. So to see him as this character be accused of these things, it makes the viewers secretly deep down hope some of these accusations are false.

The pace of the season is expert. When I take it as a whole, you can see the creators had a grand idea from beginning to end how this was going to go. Some actors in there seem like they don't have a lot to do and then the episode comes where we see just how important their role is in the grand scheme of things.

I'm very interested to see where Season 2 goes from here. With COVID, production was delayed and the season was rewritten to incorporate that into the show, but it should be out before the end of 2021. It's on AppleTV.

Tiger King - Netflix Review

Starring Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin, Doc Antle, Jeff Lowe, Howard Baskin, John Finlay, and Rick Kirkham.

Directed by Eric Goode & Rebecca Chaikin.

Netflix has put out this seven-episode series, and it is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. The most bizarre true-story crime docudrama ever made. This is DYING to be made into a Danny McBride movie. 

It's about Joe Exotic, owner of a big-cat zoo in Oklahoma. His biggest rival is Carole Baskin, owner of Big Cat Rescue, and she's dedicated her life to shut down zoos like Joe's. And she's rich, so she has unlimited resources to go against Joe. You see Joe get crazier and crazier in his rivalry with her, and things escalate.

Some questions raised.

Spoilers......

Did Carole Baskin murder her first husband? The editing would certainly seem that way. Millionaire who wants to leave his way suddenly disappears and is never seen again? Hmmm…

Did Joe Exotic really order a hitman to kill Carole? Sounded like they had all the evidence. The final episode was the spottiest. I thought we’d get more time dedicated to the trial, but there was hardly any. The timeline of events needed to be studied a little more closely. 

Thing is, by the time you get to the trial, you just know Joe needs to be in jail for something. Screwing over his business partner and his own mother with fraud. Highly likely he blew up his own studio to hide evidence and screw over the documentarian who’d been at the zoo for years. Supplying meth to his straight husbands.

I got to the end of S1 of Making A Murder positive that there’d been a miscarriage of justice. I got to the end of this and thought, I should read up on what the facts actually were, because everyone in here is an unlikeable, unreliable narrator.